THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 217
his wife's grandfather, 'who had made that enormous fortune out
of cereals and meat-pastes'.!
Later that month Proust was ill with asthma, his most serious
attack as yet. It was at the time of this illness, on 15 July, that
Reynaldo lost his father, Carlos Hahn. On one blazing afternoon
Marie N ordlinger rode on her bicycle to the Habns' villa at Saint-
Cloud to enquire, and met Marcel just getting out of his closed
cab on the same errand. He was grotesquely mumed in overcoat
and scarves and writhing in the throes of an appalling attack of
hay-fever. She begged him to come inside out of the sun; but
"No, I'll wait here," he panted; "you go in and find out how he
is, only for heaven's sake don't tell them I've come." As soon
as possible she emerged with her report and Proust, gasping,
choking and unannounced, drove straight back to Paris. As early
as the winter before he had already begun his habit, from which
he was never to succeed in curing himself, of working all night
and sleeping by day. Henceforth he slept as a rule from eight in
the morning till three in the afternoon; and at the time of his duel,
as he told Montesquiou in 1905, his only anxiety had been lest he
should have to fight in the morning, when he ought to be asleep.
'When they told me it was arranged for the afternoon, all my
fears vanished.'
During the same summer, introduced by Reynaldo and
accompanied by Marie Nordlinger, Proust frequented the salon
of a cocotte who contributed a little to Odette. Mery Laurent, nee
Louviot, was born in 1849, married at the age of fifteen to Claude
Laurent, an insolvent grocer, and separated from him seven
months later. During the next twelve years or so she first posed in
tights and spangles at the Theatre du Chatelet, then put on more
clothes to become an actress, and lastly took everything off to be
an artist's model. Towards the end of the 1870S she became the
mistress of the famous Dr Thomas Evans, Napoleon Ill's
American dentist. Evans was wealthy, generous and free from
jealousy; he installed Mery in an apartment near his own
consulting-room in the Rue de Rome, but had no objection to her
indulging her passion for painters and poets, so long as they were
out of the way when he called, as he did every day, for lunch.
She became a model and mistress of Manet, who introduced her
to his friend Mallarme. Manet painted several of his models in
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