THE GARDEN OF AUTEUIL II
shows that the Franfois le Champi incident occurred at Auteuil^1 ;
and the more important event of his mother's kiss also occurred
there, and not at lIIiers: not only because it is placed there in the
unelaborated version of Jean Santeuil, but because even in Du
C&ll de che{ Swann Proust has planted a characteristic clue which
leads likewise to the house of Louis Weil. 'The wall of the stair-
case,' he tells us, 'on which I saw the light of my father's candle
climbing, has long since been demolished.'2 This is untrue of the
house at Iiliers, which survives to this day, but true of 96 Rue La
Fontaine, which was pulled down late in the 189os, when the new
Avenue Mozart was driven through the middle of the garden.
To regard Marcel's loss and recovery of his mother's kiss as
being, in itself, the decisive trauma of his early life, would be to
over-simplifY. Its importance is no doubt symbolic, as typifYing,
along with innumerable similar events which are unrecorded, a
whole aspect of his childhood. Psycho-analysts might even
regard it as a 'screen-memory', partly hiding and partly revealing
some still earlier and deeper memory. Proust's own interpretation
of it is not quite adequate: he regards it remorsefully as a first
defeat in his mother's efforts to make him normal and self-reliant,
as a first stage in the decline towards his legendary and non-
existent 'lack of will-power'. We may suspect, however, that the
child's anger went deeper than his remorse, that the true crux was
not her final capitulation, but her initial refusal. Her concession
was not an act of love, but a surrender to his blackmail. Hence-
forth, however often she might bring him his good-night kiss, he
would always hate her for having denied it. In Jean Santeuil his
resentment against his mother is open and loI.nappeased; she was
still alive when he wrote, and therefore he had not yet forgiven
her, nor seen that not she but the very nature of human life was
to blame for his anguish. But in A la Recherche, after she was dead
and pardoned, he told the truth, when he said that somewhere
inside him his sobbing had never ceased, that the 'metallic, shrill,
interminable' sound of the visitors' bell in the garden gate had
never stopped ringing.^3 In order to silence these sounds he sought
everywhere for the infinite, unconditional love which he had lost;
in order to hear them again he always increased his demands to the
point at which they would be refused. Perhaps it was with the
1 Mme Proust, p. 1']6
- III, 1046
- 1,37