DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 187tion-'that astonishing windmill of words which was his only
feat of creation' -that Andre Germain, who married his sister
Edmee, thought he had a preponderant influence on the prose-
style of Proust; but it is much more probable that the influence
was in the opposite direction.
In the autumn of 1895 Lucien, now seventeen, and attending
art-school with Albert Flament at the famous studio of M.
Jullian, became sufficiently grown up to be interesting. He was
invited to tea in Proust's bedroom, where Felicie Fitau, an old
servant in a white bonnet, one of the originals of Fran~oise,
brought a dish of cakes, and Proust offered for his entertainment
an album of photographs of actresses, writers and society ladies,
and the treasured copy of Gladys Harvey bound in Mme Hay-
man's petticoat. "Photographs bore me, I'd rather we talked,"
declared Lucien disconcertingly; they discussed Jullian's studio,
their favourite authors, and Proust's health ("I hardly ever
manage to get to the Mazarine Library"); and their friendship
began. Soon they met every day. They went to the Louvre, where
Proust revelled in F ra Angelico ("His yellows and pinks are
creamy and comestible") or, as was Swann's habit, found like-
nesses to people they knew in portraits by old masters. "Do you
see this Ghirlandaio of the little boy and the old man with a polyp
on his nose-it's the very image of the Marquis du Lau"I; and
with a characteristic dilation of the nostrils Proust would add,
"Ah, dear boy, it's so amusing to look at pictures 1" For a New
Year's present, on 31 December 1895, he sent Lucien an
eighteenth-century ivory casket, carved with a young lady
leaning on an urn and the words 'A l' amide'.
Lucien became aware of his brilliant friend's extraordinary
simplicity of heart. Sometimes his kindness was absurd but
touching: he invited the Daudets' aged maid-servant to an
evening at the theatre; and when Lucien prevented him from
carrying a heavy parcel for Alphonse Daudet's Italian valet
Pietro (Proust always shook hands with the old man, and talked
about Dante), he was hurt and angry-"Y ou're violent and
heartless," he cried. But sometimes his moral nobility took a
dreadfully moving form. Lucien told, as a callous joke, an anec-
dote of a schoolfriend who was ashamed of a dowdy mother and
1 Swann is struck by the resemblance between this picture and M. de
Palancy (1, 22J).