MARCEL PROUSTplay's evident failure. "The actors don't seem real enough, don't
you agree, Madame?" he murmured, and escaped to Mme
Lemaire's box to bow to the rosy and golden Boni de Castellane,
and kiss the diamonded hand of Boni's cross little wife. Gaston,
who for the last ten years had found it difficult to be polite to
Monsieur 1 rance, took offence at slighting references to his
mother and his play in an article by the anti-Dreyfusard Pierre
Veher. They fought with swords on I March at the Grande-Jatte,
an island in the Seine beyond the Bois de Boulogne, and Gaston
was slightly wounded in the arm. Proust passed on the congraru-
lations of Dr and Mme Proust, who admired a good son even
more than they deplored duelling, and took the opportunity to add:
'Please give your wife the respectful homage of her old admirer.'
He had already discovered a new social environment whose
pleasures, a few years later, would come for him to surpass the
splendours of the drawing-room. In a great restaurant he could
observe, sit on plush in a corner free from draughts, be treated
as a prince, be fantastically generous to young waiters, and talk
endlessly in the small hours in a company almost exclusively male.
On 4 March at Larue's in the Place de la Madeleine, while the
gipsy orchestra played the waltz Monte-Cristo at I a.m. in a decor
of blue, red and gold, he sat with Albert Flament and Robert de
Flers in his favourite place at the far right corner, talking theatre:
he had solved the problem of how, when an evening in society
had ended and the guests departed, not to go straight home.
On 16 April Flament dined at one ofMme Arman's Sundays.
When the inevitable discussion of the Affair became too heated-
for M. Arman was 'Anti', and was apt to remark to Anatole
France: "My dear anarchist, may I press you to a slice of this
excellent ham?"-Mme Annan silenced the whole table with a
formidable glare, while France changed the subject with a set-
piece about Perugino and his pot oflapis-lazuli. At eleven o'clock,. when the guests were beginning to leave, Proust arrived and
fastened, with an air of affectionate absent-mindedness, on M.
France. Mme Arman watched them. "What a pity Marcel won't
work," she lamented to Flament, "he could write such a
marvellous novel! But he fritters himself away. Don't you think
he's a bit too fond of society?" And she added, in a tone at once
vulgar and tyrannical, the very voice of Mme Verdurin, "but
perhaps we could find a way of making him work?" Neither of