MARCEL PROUSThumouredly commenting: 'the story of a convict on his way to
Devil's Island could hardly be more despairing'. The incident
appears in Jean Santeuil, when the hero telephones to his mother
from Beg-Meil: Proust even forgot to make the transposition from
Fontainebleau to Beg-Meil complete, since Jean thinks of
returning immediately to Paris and being with his mother in
three hours' time, which would only be possible from F ontaine-
bleau. But in Jean Santeuil, as is characteristic of that novel, the
keynote is not Jean's awareness of his mother's grief, but his pity
for himself. When the Narrator telephones his grandmother from
Doncieres, yet another theme has taken first place. The Ladies of
the Telephone (the phrase is not Proust's own, but the usual
Parisian expression, which we have just seen his mother using on
this very occasion, for the girl operators at the exchange) have
become supernatural deities of the underworld, 'the Danaids of
the Invisible'. Perhaps Proust felt a hint of this at the time, for the
experience of speaking to an absent person, as if to a talking
wraith, through a little black trumpet, was still unusual enough to
be uncanny. But in Le Cote de Guermantes the episode is a pre-
paration for the death of the grandmother, and it was written
after his mother's death.
Proust had now been writing Jean Santeuil for a year. As
Professor Kolb's study of the original manuscript has shown, the
whole of Part P (from the mother's kiss to Jean's early school-
days) was written at Beg-Meil in September"October 18952: it
was for this, then, that Proust's friend the fisher-boy kept a bottle
of ink in his boat. Some, at least, of Part VI (Jean and Henri's
holiday at Beg-Meil) dates from the same time,3 as also does Part
1 It is convenient here to refer to Jean Santeuil by its 'parts~, rather than
by the volumes as published~ except that page-references must of course be
made by the volume.
S All six chapters are written mostly on the same cheap local paper Cl'm
in a place called Beg-Meil, where you can't get paper,' Proust had written
to Robert de Billy). Several pages are written on the backs of draft letters to
M. Franklin of the Mazarine Library, asking for an extension of leave from
15 October to IS December I89s-the leave Proust needed for his
November visit to Reveillon.
3 One page is written on the verso of a letter dated 10 October 1895,
extending Proust's and Hahn's return-tickets for a further ten days-
a concession for which Proust had characteristically applied direct
to Andre Benac, who was a member of the government railway com-
mission.