[80 MARCEL PROUSTCertainly the duties of an honorary unpaid assistant would be
unlikely to interfere with his writing: the working day was of five
hours, and attendance was required on a minimum of two and a
maximum of five days in the week. Proust was interviewed in a
competition for three vacancies on 28 May, and on 29 June was
chosen third and last. Every now and then during the next four
months, when he felt in the mood, and his health seemed equal
to the strain, and (though this was seldom indeed) he was not
away on holiday, he actually turned up for a chat with his busy
but amiable colleagues and a browse among the Cardinal's books.
The books, however, were dusty; and when he emerged on the
Quai Conti to meet his new young friend Lucien Daudet, he
would produce a throat-spray and counteract the ravages of the
day with a cloud of vaporised eucalyptus. His colleagues, Paul
Marais the incunahulist and Alfred Franklin the Chief Librarian,
thought him nice but quite useless.
Early in July, however, Proust was already on holiday with
his mother at Kreuznach, a German spa on the River Nahe, which
flows into the Rhine at Bingen ten miles farther east. Robert de
Billy came to stay a night with his young wife Jeanne, the
daughter of Paul Mirahaud, governor of the Bank of France;
they had married a month before, on 4 June, and were still on
honeymoon. Mme Proust exerted all her charm, Billy talked about
his experiences as a budding diplomat in Germany throughout
lunch, and Proust said he must write them down immediately-
"and your wife can go upstairs to rest". Billy wrote all afternoon:
"It's very good, but you oughtn't to use so many adjectives,"
declared his friend, who was to make a practice, with such superb
effect, of using wee or four in a row. Then he produced his short
story, La Mort de Baldassare Silvande, written at Trouville the
previous September, to which Billy in turn made certain objec-
tions; they corrected it together in the lamplight, and ever after-
wards Proust would say to Billy with a plaintive smile: "You
never did like anything I write!" Billy remembered the visit to
Kreuznach as the occasion of their first conversations on gothic
architecture, which a little later was to become Proust's ruling
passion for several years.
After Kreuznach Proust spent a fortnight with Reynaldo and
his sister Maria in the forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye at the
PavilIon Louis XIV, a villa belonging to Reynaldo's married