MARCEL PROUSTde Chevilly and Vicomte Clement de Maugny. Maugny was
staying in his father's ancient and gloomy Chateau de Lausenette
-which reminded Proust of the ruinous castle in Gautier's Le
Capitailze Fracasse-high on the hills above Thonon. Evening
after evening they watched the summit of Mont Blanc turning
pink and crimson in the light of the vanished sun, and descended
to the lake to take the little train back into Thonon. A curious
letter of the previous 13 July, which Proust sent to Maugny with
a copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, shows that they had already
been ffiends and confidants for two years. Maugny has seen 'the
beginning and end of sorrows not so very different trom those 1
have tried to define in this book', has been 'intimately associated
with the very sources of my joys and griefs during these years',
and shows 'unfailing compassion for suffering he can scarcely
have understood'. There is an echo here of the emotions Proust
mentions in a letter to Reynaldo Hahn, apparently of this same
summer. '1 know all the more certainly that my affection for you
is a fixed star, when 1 see it shining still the same after so many
other fires have burned away.' Maugny, Chevilly and their friend
Fran~ois d'Oncieu^1 are no doubt the young men whom Proust
remembered, in a letter twenty years later to Maugny's wife, as
'my three best friends, long before you knew Clement'.
The weeks at Evian made an important contribution to the
Narrator's two visits to Balbec. Mme de Cambremer's country-
house at F eteme is based on the Villa Bassaraba and is named
after the village of Fetemes a few miles inland from Thonon; and
the name of Rivebelle, where the Narrator dines with Saint-Loup,
is a conflation of Riva-Bella, on the Normandy coast eight miles
west of Cabourg, and Belle-Rive, a group of villas on the lake
shore a mile east of Geneva. These borrowings are neither
accidental nor mechanical: the names are talismans to symbolise
the affinities Proust divined in sea-coast and lake-side. Mme
Proust and her son made the same mock-serious show as the
Narrator and his grandmother of shunning the dangers of un-
wanted society, whether noble (the Carnbremers or Hausson-
villes), bourgeois (there are unwelcome barristers at both Balbec
and Evian) or, one regrets to notice, Jewish. Mme Proust even
thought ofleaving the district for Marcel's sake when they heard
1 The original link between these three young men was, no doubt, that
each had a father who owned a chateau in Savoy.