THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL :>03
stay at Mme Lemaire's Reveillon with Reynaldo Hahn in August-
September 1894. The story of the rosebush is told; Henri is an
accomplished musician for the moment, to suit his identification
here with Reynaldo; and a sister of Henri, Mile de Reveillon,
appears in place of Mme Lemaire's daughter Suzette. The visit
to the farmyard and the peacock with the Duchesse is taken from
Proust's stay with Pierre Lavallee at Segrez in April 1895.
Anatole France, who had no business at Mme Lemaire's Reveillon,
appears as the novelist Monsieur de Traves, and is severely
criticised as 'an adept of materialist and sceptic philosophy' by the
idealist Jean. But M. de Traves already prefigures Bergotte in 'the
mysterious resemblance of all his books to one another', in the
fact that 'neither his appearance, nor his conversation, nor any-
thing that Jean heard of his life were in any way a continuation
of the strange enchantment, the uuique world into which he
transported one from the very first pages of any of his books'.
One of his absurdest shortcomings, as it seems to Jean, apparently
with Proust's approval, is his habit of explaining the beauty of a
great work by some minute, material detail ("Yes, it's beautiful,
because Rome is such a very beautiful word, don't you thinkr"
or "A lance, that's pretty fine, isn't it?"). Yet in A fa Recherche
this foible, which also belonged to Anatole France, is one of the
symptoms of Bergotte's genius, and culminates in his obsession
with the patch of yellow on the wall in Vermeer's View of Delft,
which brought to the dying novelist both death and salvation.
Another visitor at ReveiIlon is Jean's former schoolmaster
Rustinlor, now more like Bloch than ever: when Jean admires
Barres, Rustinlor says, "A pretty bad egg, and the same goes for
his books"; and despite his fierce hatred of the aristocracy he calls
the ReveiIlons, after dining with them, "exquisite creatures, with
a faraway mediaeval quality which I for one find intensely poetic".
Part V, a political interlude, consists of the downfall of the. imaginary politician Charles Marie, followed by scenes from the
Dreyfus Case belonging to 1898. The episode of the Marie scandal
is no doubt based on the Panama affair of 1892, in which several
prominent statesmen, including Floquet, Clemenceau, F reycinet
and Maurice Rouvier (who, like Charles Marie, was Minister of
Finance at the time and a bitter opponent of the proposed income
tax), were accused of receiving bribes from the Panama Canal
Company. The politicians implicated in the scandal were, lm-