THE GARDEN OF AUTEUIL 7
in the drawing-room, she ·asked him to show them his 'books
about the moon'. Marcel returned and proudly displayed not only
the astronomy books, but also a little illustrated grammar, in
which there was a picture of the moon with a nose and a funny
face; for it seemed to him that this too, quite as much as the
others, was 'a book about the moon'.1 He was at the age--which
he was so fortunate as never to outgrow-'when the world has
not yet become something completely known and real, when it
seems that an unfamiliar place in the real world might well give
access to the world of the unreal'. One day his mother took him
with her to the Deligny cold baths near the Pont de la Concorde;
he was left in the waiting-room while she put on her bathing-
costume, and then he was admitted to 'a vast liquid cavern', where
the other bathing ladies and their cubicles receded to a seemingly
endless distance. He felt he had come to the waters under the
earth, 'the entrance to the polar seas'; and when his mother
walked towards him, wearing a streaming rubber cap, and throw-
ing kisses, he 'would not have been surprised to hear that he was
the son of a water-goddess'.^2
But the important events of the 1870S did not belong to the
too familiar 'home' at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes. That island of
bourgeois furniture in the desert of grey houses, however beloved,
was too much the scene of a normal state of life to become a
Paradise, which is a state of exception. Proust's Edens were the
gardens of Auteuil and Illiers, which later became the gardens of
Combray. He saw them only at holiday-times, and afterwards
forfeited them eternally through the original sin of asthma; but
ifhe had never lost them, they would never have become Paradise.
Auteuil, then as now, was a residential suburb between the
western borders of Paris and the Bois de Boulogne; but then it
still retained something of the country hamlet, now lost for ever,
in which Moliere and Boileau had their villas. In the months
before Mme Proust moved there to have her baby, Auteuil had
been twice bombarded, first by the Prussians, next, far more
terribly, by the Government army from Versailles. On 24 May
1871 Edmond de Goncourt crossed Paris, still under shell-fire,
with his faithful servant Pelagie, to find his house in the Boule-
vard Montmorency riddled with bullets, the doors on the second
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. I, 196 2 Jean Santeuil, vol. I, 193-4-
The incident is also used in Albertine Disparue (Piliade, III, 653).