THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 195
anti-asthma cigarettes, fumigating with Legras powders, and
drugging himself to sleep with amyl, valerian and triona!. He
dreamed he was at a charity fete at Mme Hochon's (another
original of Mme Verdurin), with Mme Lemaire on his arm and the
actress Mme Pierson somewhere in the room, and awoke tortured
with guilt for having gone into society when still in mourning.
Old Felicie came to say the gas-man had called and she was alone
in the house; but "I think I'll go down," she concluded, F ran<;oise-
like, "the man has such an honest face."
Early in October, when the family was united again, came a
state occasion which in A fa Recherche, where it is relegated to a
period ten years earlier in the Narrator's life, became the visit of
King Theodosius II. The Emperor Nicolas II of Russia came to
Paris as the guest of Felix Faure, the father of Antoinette and
Lucie, Proust's playmates in the time of Marie de Benardaky, and
now President of the Republic. The trees in the Champs-Elysees
were hung with coloured globes of celluloid, paper flowers, and
garlands of the new electric lights-most of which, it was dis-
covered when dusk fell, refused to work; and the pale, frigid,
twenty-eight-year-old Tzar rode in the presidential landau
through frenzied crowds, visibly alarmed at the violence of their
cheering. The royalist Duc Honore de Luynes said hopefully:
"The Government has dropped a brick, you can see how the
French people love monarchy"; but what the people loved was
to have their republic treated as an equal by an emperor. The visit
was engineered by the French ambassador at St Petersburg,
Marquis Gustave de Montebello, the original of M. de Vaugoll-
bert who arranged the visit of King Theodosius; and the noun
'affinities' which so enraptured M. de N orpois was suggested by
the Tzar's equally vague reference (for the word 'alliance' was
still taboo) to the 'precious links that unite our two nations'. Two
originals ofM. de Norpois, Armand Nisard, Marie de Benardaky's
uncle by marriage, then director of political affairs at the Quai
d'Orsay, and the Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, both friends
of Dr Proust, were present at the state banquet at the Elysee
Palace on 6 October when these momentous words were spoken;
and it is more than likely that one or the other visited 9 Boulevard
Malesherbes soon after, like M. de Norpois when he 'came to
dinner for the first time', to dine on Felicie's spiced beef jelly and
recount his emotions on hearing the Tzar say 'precious links'.