190 MARCEL PROUSTet les Jours: the whole book was now in the hands of Calmann
Levy, with the exception of Anatole France's interminably
procrastinated preface. At last, with the help of Mme Arman de
Caillavet, Monsieur France was bullied into writing it. A
distressing rumour, indeed, which has persisted to this day,
declared that Mme Arman had perpetrated the whole preface her-
self-just as Odette was supposed 'by certain gentlemen of the
highest society to have collaborated, more or less, in Bergotte's
works'.1 Only the last phrase, so the rumour went, was by France
himself. But the rumour-mongers were mistaken with regard to
this last phrase, about Mme Lemaire scattering 'roses and the
roses' dew;-' les roses avec leur rosee'-which is in fact a quota-
tion from Villiers de l'Isle Adam's well-known poem Les
Presents; and they were probably equally wrong about the whole
preface, which has the inimitable rhythm and preciosity of the
master, doing his best to praise a book he does not altogether like
or understand. His efforts did Proust little good: for nearly a
quarter of a century he was thought of as the writer of whom
Anatole France had said: 'he lures us into a hot-house atmosphere,
among intelligent orchids whose strange and unhealthy beauty
has no roots in the soil ... there is something in him of a depraved
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and an innocent Petronius'.
Les Plaisirs et les Jours was published on 13 June 1896, at what
was then the enormous price of 13 francs 50 centimes. Proust
gave away copies to most of the friends and acquaintances who
might otherwise have bought his book, and little of the remainder
of the edition was sold. There were very few reviews of this
luxury quarto. It was automatically praised in Le Figaro, Le
Gaulois and Le Temps, because the author was a diner-out, and
the illustrations were by Mme Lemaire. His former colleagues of
Le Banquet, regarding him as a talented traitor to literature,
mingled sarcasm with reluctant admiration: Leon Blum in the
Revue Blanche rebuked him for 'affectation and prettiness-his
gifts ought not to be wasted'; and Fernand Gregh in the Revue de
Paris made fun of his reliance on sponsors-'he has invited all
the fairies, without forgetting one, to the cradle of his newborn
book'. Charles Maurras, the future anti-Semitic nationalist, wrote
benevolently in the Revue Encyclopedique of his 'diversity of
1 11,745, It is true, however, that Mme Arman sometimes helped France
in his weekly articles for L' UniYers.