MARCEL PROUSTlike the incident of the three trees near Balbec, or the spires on the
horizon of the Meseglise Way.
Proust's stay at Reveillon lasted from 18 August to the middle
of September, and was followed by ten days with his mother at
the Hotel des Roches Noires at Trouville, where he wrote a short
story, La Mort de Baldassare Silvande, for Les Plauirs et les Jours.
He saw a great deal of Mme Straus at her villa, the Clos des
Mt1riers, but failed to persuade Reynaldo to visit him and continue
his musical education. 'You will find me a much altered Marcel,
musically speaking,' he wrote to Pierre Lavallee, 'in fact I'm
Romeo-and-Julietising rather to excess, perhaps.' A tiresome
event of this holiday was that his brother Robert, while staying
at Rueil (a village on the Seine a few miles north of Paris), fell
from his tandem-bicycle under a five-ton coal-wagon, which
passed over his thigh without causing serious injury. Mme Proust
hurried away to nurse him, and found his lower-class girl-friend
already installed at his bedside, a situation which she accepted with
supreme tact. Proust remembered the incident in La Pruonniere:
the Narrator's mother, when the captive Albertine accompanied
them on the train from Balbec to Paris, 'spoke kindly to my friend,
like a mother whose son is gravely injured, and who is grateful
to the young mistress who tends him with devoted care'.1 Never-
theless, Mme Proust had Robert packed off to Uncle Louis's house
at Auteuil as soon as he was fit to be moved. Proust returned to
Paris on 25 September.
Proust's mention of Romeo and Juliet (in which the double
meaning, if any, is certainly unconscious) no doubt refers to the
opera by Gounod, to whose lineage Reynaldo belonged via his
master Saint-Saens. The musical preferences which Hahn hoped
to inculcate in his friend were, by an odd coincidence, those
which Proust had already held at the age of fifteen, under the
influence of his mother and Mme Catusse, when he wrote in
Antoinette Faure's confession-album: 'Favourite composers,
Gounod and Mozart.' For Hahn was a Mozartian classicist, and
in the delicate, traditional refinement of his own music he showed,
by no means discreditahly, his indifference to innovators such as
Faure and Debussy, and his antipathy to Wagner. Proust, on the
other hand, was by now an ardent Wagnerian, devoted to Faure
and intrigued by Debussy, whose music, now just beginning to
1 Ill, 1)