THE GARDEN OF AUTEUIL 3Empress Eugenie, and on 3 September, the day before the fall
of the Second Empire, he married Jeanne Wei!.
MIle Wei! was a beautiful and intelligent Jewess, aged twenty-
one, fifteen years younger than Dr Proust. Her father, Nathe
Weil, then aged fifty-four, was a wealthy stockbroker, whose
family originally came from Metz in Lorraine; he became a surly
old gentleman with a kind heart, on whom his grandson was to
model M. Sandre in Jean Santeuil. Her mother, whose maiden
name was Adele Berncastel, then aged forty-five, was as gentle
and self-sacrificing as Nathe Weil was independent and un-
gracious; next only to abnegation and her family Mme Nathe
loved music and literature, especially the literature of the grand
siecle, and above all the letters of Mme de Sevigne, in whom she
recognised a motherly love like her own for her daughter. She
handed on all her own qualities to Jeanne, including perhaps a
preference for a husband who would be her own opposite, with
whom her wifely devotion and her love of art would be safe,
precisely because he had no special need for them. So Dr Proust
was to advance towards fame in his profession, secured from the
rear by his wife's loving admiration and her perfect management
of his home: it was to be, for both, an extremely happy marriage.
Within a few weeks of her wedding Mme Proust was pregnant,
and the times were hard for a young expectant mother. The
victorious German army began the siege of Paris on 19
September, and for more than four months the city was cut off
from the outside world. Meat, bread, fruit and milk became
scarce, and though her parents were rich and her husband a
doctor, it is unlikely that Mme Proust had the food she needed
for herself and her unborn child. In the country round Illiers the
Germans were campaigning against the Army of the Loire, and
Dr Proust had no news of his widowed mother. In October they
sacked Chateaudun, fifteen miles to the south, and occupied. Chartres, fifteen miles to the north-east. Towards the end of
December he sent a letter by balloon-post to a friend at Tours, a
wholesale draper named Esnault: 'Has she left Illiers? Is she with
you? Is she well? Such· are the questions which I beg you to
answer by pigeon-post and to add all the information you may
have about any of my family.' From the address of this letter it
seems that he and his wife were living at 8 Rue Roy, a little street
running into the Boulevard Haussmann. They were never to