THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 197
pocket-an accident which happened with such distressing
regularity whenever he went on holiday without his parents, that
one suspects him of prevarication to conceal extravagance which
he dared not confess. 'The thought pursues me like a crime, a
crime against you almost. I can quite understand people who
commit suicide for nothing at aI\.' Mme Proust sent reassuring
letters with '100 francs and 100,000 kisses', and offered to take a
house for him at Versailles, or to send him to Illiers, 'where you
were as miraculously well in the cold weather as you were ill in
the hot'. And the weather that year, she pointed out, was quite
as dreadful everywhere else as at Fontainebleau: indeed, Dr
Proust (who shared the Narrator's father's passion for meteoro-
logy) had just made her read him a long article in the Journal des
Deoats, 'which sets out to prove that whenever the weather's bad
there's always a reason for it!' But a few days later he returned
home, defeated. There had been a real cause behind the misery
for which he made so many absurd excuses; he had come suddenly,
in another person, upon the abyss of irrevocability, of suffering
greater than any of his own. He had experienced a first terrible
glimpse of Time Lost.
On 20 October, the day after his departure, Mme Proust had
crossed the Boulevard Malesherbes to Cerisier's bakery at No.8
to telephone her son. 'But Cerisier's subscription didn't include
calls outside Paris, and despite all my offers to the Ladies of the
Telephone to pay extra, they banished me to the public cabin.'
When the call at last reached Proust in the hotel at Fontainebleau
he was already anxious and hypersensitised by a long wait. In the
disembodied voice of his mother he detected for the first time the
note of incurable grief for her dead parents, which at home in
Paris the familiar sight of her cheerful, self-sacrificing face had
made inaudible. 'When her poor voice reached me,' he wrote to. Antoine Bibesco six years later, 'it was broken and bruised, fOf
ever changed from the voice I had known, full of cracks and
crevices; and it was only when I reconstituted in the telephone-
receiver those shattered and bleeding fragments of words, that I
had for the first time the horrible feeling of all that was broken
inside her.' He had the thrift and presence of mind, however, to
write down his experience immediately and send the manuscript,
to his mother: 'please keep it, and remember where you put it
because it will come in my novel'; and Mme Proust kept it, good-