THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL :lOj
military service at Orleans, and from visits to conscript friends,
Risler at Chartres in 1895 and perhaps Louis de la Salle at
Fontainebleau in 1893. The garrison-town is called Provins, 'two
hours distant from Reveillon'-and in fact Provins was only
some forty miles by rail from Mme Lemaire's Reveillon. But in
the manuscript Proust first wrote 'Fontainebleau', and at first the
town described is indeed Fontainebleau, with its Hotel d' Angle-
terre 'in the Place d' Armes opposite the Chateau', and the cheerful
vista of three rooms which reappears at Donderes. Proust has not
yet decided precisely how the scenes of army-life are to be
introduced into his novel: at one moment Jean is visiting officer
friends with Henri de Reveillon, at another Henti himself is an
officer, and then again Jean is a volunteer private not at Provins
but at Orleans, walking from barracks, like Proust himself,
through the Faubourg Bannier to his lodgings at Mme Ren-
voyze's. Jean meets the Bonapartist Prince de Borodino, who is
based on Captain Walewski at Orleans, and reappears at
Donderes. One of the Reveillon episodes is among the last to
be written in the whole novel: the young poetess of Chapter VIII,
the Vicomtesse Gaspard de Reveillon, is Comtesse Mathieu
(Anna) de N oailles, and the verses she has just published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes are those by Mme de Noailles in the
Revue de Paris for 1 February 1899.
'I mean you to be ever-present in my novel,' Proust wrote to
Reynaldo Hahn in March 1896, 'like a god in disguise whom no
mortal can recognise.' The metamorphosis of the Jewish, middle-
class Reynaldo Hahn into the blue-blooded Henri de Reveillon,
a prefiguration of Saint-Loup, is even more astonishing than that
ofMme Lemaire-who produced in the opposite direction merges
with Mme Verdurin-into the Duchesse de Reveillon his mother.
Proust intended it, no doubt, as an apotheosis for his friend, and
a wish-fulfilment for his own longing to love a Reynaldo of noble
birth. The same desire, compounded from his twin vices of homo-
sexuality and snobbism, which had caused him at first to invent
Henri de Reveillon, led him afterwards to seek him out in real
life. But it was not until several years later, in the early 19oos, that
he made friends with the group of young aristocrats who were the
collective models for Saint-Loup; and it remains paradoxically
true of Saint-Loup that Proust created the character before he
met the original.