THE DREYFUS CASEFinaly), she is jealously guarded by an aunt, as was Albertine by
Mme Bontemps, and she thwarts his attempt to kiss her in bed. by threatening to ring the bell. Possibly the fact that Jean's love
for Charlotte overlaps in time with the end of his love for
F ran~oise is a further hint that the first Albertine was Marie
Finaly; for Proust's brief passion for Marie Finaly closely followed
his wooing of Mme Hayman.
Towards the end of Jean SanteuiL appear signs that Proust had
made, without realising their full meaning, the discoveries which
were to lead to A La Recherche. In the last chapters of Part X,
written not earlier than the autumn of 1898,1 Jean shows a new
compassion and understanding for his ageing father and mother.
Proust had begun to forgive his parents, and the way was now
open for the conception in A La Recherche of the Narrator's
family as a symbol of absolute goodness, a counterbalance to the
original sin which corrupts society and sexual love. Through this
means the moral disequilibrium of Jean SanteuiL, in which the
unreal virtue of the hero is so unsatisfactory an atonement for the
heartless aridity of the other characters, was to be resolved in his
great novel.
A second discovery was still more far-reaching. In the
Etreuilles section of Jean SanteuiL, written in the summer of 1896,
Jean experiences from time to time, in what is no doubt an un-
altered reminiscence of Proust's own boyhood, a rudimentary
form of unconscious memory. The apple-blossom at Etreuilles
restores the precise sensation of seeing the blossom of the year
before, buzzing flies or a noise of hammering heard in Paris bring
back the very moment when he heard the same sounds at
Etreuilles.^2 But his explanation of the experience ('the sensation
of a past moment, in which we saw other such apple-trees, is
concealed in it') is not adequate to the delight it causes ('Jean felt
a happiness so intense, that he seemed on the point of fainting').
In the very latest parts of the novel, however, the true Proustian
concept of unconscious memory is almost complete. Jean hears
the little phrase once more, long after the end of his love for
F ran~oise, and feels, even before he recognises it, 'a sensation of
1 In chapter XI (vol. 3. 330) M. Santeui! remarks: "They say Colonel
Picquart will get five years' imprisonment," an allusion to the expected
court-martial of Picquart in October-November 1898.
:I Jean. Santeuil, vol. I, 1)8, 149, 153, 164