THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 207
her added to the group of Reynaldo and his sisters which he used
to call 'Apollo surrounded by the Muses'. The visitor from the
land of George Eliot and Willie Heath was short and slender,
with delicate Pre-Raphaelite hands, dark eyes, full lips, and a look
of warm sincerity and intelligence. For the eighteen months of her
stay, although at this time they never ceased to call one another
'Monsieur' and 'Mademoiselle', she belonged to Proust's circle;
and often, when he called on Mme Hahn, he came not to take
Reynaldo away but to stay the evening. They talked endlessly
about vers libre, metaphor, symbolism and gothic cathedrals
(which Reynaldo, a classicist in everything, could not abide); they
chose for one another the artists most fitted to paint their portraits,
Titian for Marie, EI Greco for Coco de Madrazo, Pisanello or
Whistler for Proust; or they played paper-games. One evening
each was asked to confess his worst faults. Coco freely admitted
that his was laziness, and "Quite right, Coco!" everyone
approved. Reynaldo's was jealousy, "jealousy and pride"; and
Proust, following his friend on to this dangerous ground,
declared with much insight: "I'm inordinately jealous, but if any-
thing I'm too humble." They visited the Italian primitives and the
Chardins at the Louvre, and the Monets at Durand-Ruel's gallery.
One afternoon in July 1897 they went to tea, like the Narrator
and Albertine with Elstir,l at Alexander Harrison's studio in the
Rue Campagne-Premiere in Montparnasse, and inspected in-
numerable seascapes of Beg-Meil at dawn, noon and night. 'I little
thought I was having tea with Elstir,' Marie Nordlinger wrote
long afterwards. But at this early period in their friendship the
true function· of Miss Nordlinger as the Muse of England and
harbinger of Ruskin remained unrecognised: indeed, Proust
started on the wrong foot by asking whether she had seen Verlaine
on his last visit to London. She had not, and received a reproachful
gaze and a murmur of"Oh dear, what a pity!"
It was an unkind stroke of fate that, when he had already
begun to forget the failure of his short stories, and thought only
of the future glory of Jean Santeuil, he should be subjected to
two distressing attacks on Les Plaisirs et les Jours. The first was
an article in Le Journal on 3 February 1897, signed Raitif de la
Bretonne, which everyone knew to be a pseudonym of the
decadent novelist and infamous columnist Jean Lorrain. The real
1 I, 870-6