104 MARCEL PROUSTfortunately, the same who in 1889 had opposed and destroyed the
nationalist and proto-fascist movement of General Boulanger.
Panama was the second round in the struggle between right and
left, army and anti-militarists, anti-Semites and Jews, Catholics
and anti-clericals, royalists and republicans, nobility and
bourgeois, of which the Dreyfus Case was to be the third. F ranee
was already, several years before the Dreyfus Case, in process of
division into two hostile halves, of which Proust was committed,
against the majority of his hostesses in the Faubourg Saint-
Germain, to that of the Jews and the progressive intellectuals.
But the division was not yet clear-cut at the time of Panama,
when the nationalists to the right and socialists to the left were
banded in unnatural union against the receivers of bribes. In so
far as the extreme right and left oppositions were enemies of
corruption, any decent bourgeois, including Proust himself,
could not but support them. But in so far as their motives were
impure, aiming at political revenge rather than justice, it was
possible to sympathise with the politicians exposed in 1892, as
Jean sympathises with Charles Marie, and to regard them as
victims of a hypocritical intrigue. Although the chapters on the
Dreyfus Case form a logical pendant to those on the Marie
Scandal, it is doubtful whether they would have remained juxta-
posed if Proust had completed his novel, since they are separated
historically by an interval of nearly six years. The episode of the
Affair will be noticed in its chronological place, at the beginning
of 1898.
All but three chapters of Part VI are based with little alteration
on Proust's holiday at Beg-Meil with Hahn in September-October
- But the telephone conversation with his mother in Chapter
II is imported from the week with Leon Daudet at Fontainebleau
in October 1896; Chapter VII, in which Jean finds himself with
his mother a year later 'at a health-resort in a valley surrounded
by high mountains', is a reminiscence of August 1896 at Mont-
Dore; and Chapter VIII, 'Beg-Meil in Holland', recalls a visit to
Holland in October 1898.
Most of the material for Part VII, the winter visit to Reveillon,
comes from Proust's stay with Reynaldo Hahn at Mme Lemaire's
chateau in November 1895. But the scenes of garrison life in
Chapters IV -VI and IX, which form a preliminary sketch for
Doncieres, come from other periods in Proust's life, from his own