DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 179
he had gazed at the Bengal roses of Reveillon. "They look like
nymphs who've stabbed themselves for love," said Reynaldo,
"and some god has changed them into birds." At one time, in
1913, Proust thought of calling the second volume of A la
Recherche, which was later divided into A tOmbre des Jeunes Filles
en Fleurs and Le Cod de Guermantes, Les Colombes Poignardees.
He visited Lavallee at his parents' country-house at Segrez,
Seine-et-Oise, when the trees were still in bud, and wrote the
sketch 'Promenade' in Les Plauirs et les Jours in memory of the
afternoon of his arrival. They walked among wood-anemones and
cuckoo-flowers, watched eels and perch wandering in their green
meadows of water-weed under the blue water of the streams,
collected eggs in the farmyard and admired the jewelled, regal
peacock. But during the night Proust had an attack of asthma,
and in the morning, to everyone's amazement, he insisted on
returning to Paris. His malady, after exiling him from Il1iers and
troubling his early schooldays, had spared him for nearly ten
years, during which his health had been good, except for
occasional stomach-pains and vague rheumatisms, both presum-
ably of the same nervous origin. But now it was on its way back,
summoned no doubt by the double guilt of society and Sodom.
Already a year before, in the spring of 1894, as he complained in
a letter to Montesquiou, he had suffered 'a horrible attack of
choking, which lasted twenty-four hours'. Soon asthma would
arrive in full force, and stay for ever.
In June 1895 began the pathetically comic episode of Proust's
career as a librarian. He had taken his licence es leures in Maa:ch,
after a year of private lessons from M. Darlu, with the creditaltle
placing of twenty-third in his year; his family, though with
waning hope and vigour, still pressed him to choose a regular
occupation, and it was probably Dr Proust's friend Gabriel
Hanotaux, then Foreign Minister, and one of the originals of M.
de Norpois, who suggested that a post at the Mazarine Library
might suit this literary young man. The Mazarine was in the left
wing of the Institut de France, the seat of the five Academies; and
Sainte-Beuve himself had been a librarian there fifty years before.l
1 No doubt he also had in mind the example of Anatole France, assistant
at the Senate Library in the Luxembourg Palace from 1876 to 1890, when he
resigned at the urgent request of the chief librarian, Charles Edmond, who
complained: "Monsieur France hasn't catalogued a single book since 1882.1"