188 MARCEL PROUSTpretended, when she visited him in the school parlour, that she
was a family servant. Proust hid his face in his hands, and Lucien
thought he was laughing; but then he saw his friend's cheeks
were streaming with tears. 'Marcel Proust was nearer to God than
certain hard-hearted and haughty persons I know who are
Christians,' he wrote long afterwards. But they shared a keen
sense of the ridiculous, and collected cliches of the kind dear to
M. de Norpois ('the Emerald Isle', 'our brave little soldiers',
'Albion' instead of England)-which they called louchonneries,
'because they make you blink, you know'-and also those of two
slightly different varieties which are respectively characteristic of
Professor Cottard ('raining cats and dogs', 'deaf as a post') and
his wife ('my Abigail' for a maid, 'making an expedition' for a
visit to Versailles). Their joint appreciation of people's absurdity
brought on a distressing affliction: sooner or later, whenever they
went out together, they lapsed into a paroxysm of hysterical
laughter. Montesquiou invited them for an evening with Dela-
fosse, and they saw fit to warn him, on the pretext that 'we might
offend De1afosse', of their propensity to 'blind, agonising,
irresistible flu rire'. They went, flu rire seized them, and
Montesquiou never forgot or forgave 'this gross breach of
decency'. He remembered the occasion when Lucien as a child (for
Count Robert was an old friend of the family) had emptied a plate
of bonbons into his top-hat-"He did it on purpose!" he had
bitterly cried; and now he told everyone: "Lucien Daudet has a
pernicious influence on Marcel Proust." And yet, for a time, just
as he had wooed Proust himself, and then Reynaldo Hahn who
by now was in disgrace, Montesquiou saw in Lucien a possibility
of the longed-for disciple. But the mirage receded, and he sent
Mme Daudet an exquisite rose with the message: 'You are a rose,
your children are the thorns.' Long afterwards he likened
Reynaldo and Lucien to the two thieves, the bad and the good,. who were crucified on Calvary: Reynaldo was the bad thief, but
Lucien, he hoped, would be with him in Paradise. Montesquiou's
involvement with Lucien, however, had one permanent result. He
introduced him to his admired Marquise de Casa-Fuerte, who in
turn made him known to her aunt the Empress Eugenie; and poor
Lucien discovered that his vocation was neither painting nor
writing, bur to attend the exiled Empress at Farnborough and Cap
Martin to the end of her very long life.