Marcel Proust: A Biography

THE GARDEN OF AUTEUIL
the ground floor was the tailor's shop ofM. Eppler; next door was
another, that of Sandt and Laborde (it was a family joke to call
them 'Sandford and Merton'); and one of these no doubt
suggested Jupien's shop in the lodger'S wing of the Duchesse de
Guermantes's mansion. The handsome double doors remain as
they were in the 1870S, surmounted by a carved stone shield,
framed in oak-leaves and bearing the number Nine. The house has
seven storeys, each with its iron balustrade running the whole
length of the fa~ade. From the second-floor balcony Marcel
was to watch the fitful appearances of the sunlight, augury of
the afternoon's weather which would release him, if all went
well, to play with the original of Gilberte Swann in the Champs-
Elysees. On the opposite corner the Morriss column still stands,
to which every morning he would run· to study the theatre-
bills, announcing 'the glittering white plume of The Queen's
Diamond Necklace or the smooth, mysterious satin of The
Black Domino'.' But these memories come from the 1880s;
the important events of the '70S took place elsewhere, and
only four incidents of this decade belong to 9 Boulevard
Malesherbes.
The first was the birth on 24 May 1873, when Marcel was not
yet two years old, of his brother Robert. Robert took after his
father: he retained all through his life Dr Proust's narrow mouth,
with the thick, pursed, kindly, Holbeinesque lips, which were to
be seen only by rare glimpses beneath Marcel's moustache. The
son who pleases and obeys is loved, no doubt, neither more nor
less than the son who rouses anxiety and admiration; Robert was
the son who obeyed. He became almost as eminent a surgeon as
his father had been a physician and hygienist; he, too, was to be a
Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and belong to the Legion
d'Honneur. But perhaps one may see in Marcel as well as in
Robert something of the surgeon who dissects in order to heal.
Robert was to write a texthook on The Surgery of the Female
Genital Organs; and it is a subject not entirely foreign to the
Marcel who described the naked Albertine asleep. The relation-
ship between the brothers was always affectionate, never intimate.
There is an early photograph of Marcel, aged six, and Robert,
aged four; Marcel, with bobbed hair in a fringe and a timid smile,
wears a grey serge frock buttoning down the front, and lays his
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