SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 269Their hotel was not two hundred yards from the Palace of the
Doges, the Piazza, and the golden angel. For wherever Proust
or his mother travelled, whether to Trouville, Cabourg, Versailles,
Evian or Venice, they were invariably to be found in the very
best hotel, the one at the head of Baedeker's list; and at Venice
they stayed at the Hotel Danieli, where Ruskin had been before
them, and where Alfred de Musset, delirious with typhoid, had
seen George Sand kissing his handsome physician. In front of the
hotel was the Riva degli Schiavoni, paved with marble, leading
in broad steps, the last of which the tide slowly climbed and
descended, to the lagoon and the gondolas. Over the water was
the Giudecca, and San Giorgio Maggiore, and on the near horizon
the low dunes of the Lido. 'When I went to Venice I found,'
Proust wrote some years later to Mme Straus, 'that my dream had
become-incredibly but quite simply-my address!'
In the mornings, before the greatest heat of the day, he would
set out with Reynaldo and Marie in a gondola along the Grand
Canal, disembarking at each church or palace described by Ruskin.
'Blessed days,' he wrote in a footnote of La Bible d' Amiens, 'when
with other disciples of the master I listened at the water's edge to
his gospel, alighting at every one of the temples which seemed to
rise from the sea expressly to offer us the object of his descriptions
and the very image of his thoughts: When they returned for lunch
they could see, from as far off as the Dogana and Santa Maria della
Salute, Mme Proust's shawl hung over the hotel balcony, weighed
down by her book. For she preferred to stay behind and read,
happy and astonished that her son was rising at ten in the morning
to wander in the open air, happy too, perhaps, because he was
spending the day not only with Reynaldo but with a beautiful
girl. Since the deaths of Louis and Nathe Weil she had worn
black; but now, when Marcel called up from the quay-side and
she smiled back in welcome, she had a coquettish straw hat with a
white tulle veil, as if to license his new-found joy in living.
In the afternoon the sun was already too hot for them to go
further than the shady side cf the Piazza, where they would sit
with Mme Proust and Mile Nordlinger's aunt at Florian's cafe
eating the delicious honeycombed ice known as granita, and
watching the pigeons with their iridescent breasts: "Pigeons are
the lilacs of the animal kingdom,'" declared Marcel. Soon he would
I A remark reused for the pigeons in the Champs-ElY"'es (I, 408).