SALVATION THROUGH RUSKIN 283With wonder increasing every moment, I saw that they "com-
posed" themselves, by finer laws than any known of man. At
last the tree was there, and everything that I had thought about
trees, nowhere.'l This typically Proustian moment of truth
surely played its part (though the incidents may none the less
have actually occurred in Proust's own life) in the Narrator's
questioning of the three trees near Balbec, and again in his sight
from a railway-carriage of the trees striped with sunlight and
shade, which seemed for ever to forbid, though in fact they
preluded, his regaining of Time Lost.
Soon after the publication of the second half of John Ruskin
on 1 August 1900 Dr and Mme Proust were once more at the
Splendide Hotel, Evian. Taking precautions to avoid what Mme
Proust ingenuously called 'the Semitic element', they joined
forces with the family of Dr Proust's colleague Dr Simon
Duplay (whose son Maurice was to become Proust's friend a
year or two later) to form, as Mme Proust put it, 'a miniature
independent republican party of our own'. Each morning the
now corpulent lady drank three glasses of medicinal water at the
Spa; in the evening they attended the theatre at the casino, or
played dominoes with the Duplays, to which pursuit Dr Proust
brought such fiery energy, and such open joy when he won, as
to recall Dr Cottard playing ecarte at La Raspeliere. He awaited
Marcel's telegrams with ill-concealed anxiety, and when they
arrived exclaimed: "There! Didn't I tell you everything would
be all rightl" From time to time distinguished acquaintances
sought him out: the left-wing politician Jean Cruppi, a member
of the Chanilier of Deputies, a future Minister of COmn1erce, and
husband of Mme Proust's cousin Louise Cremieux, was also 'on
the lake'; and one Sunday a stout man with a red nose, Charles
Dupuy, who had been prime minister in 1899 at the height of the
Affair, popped up to slap Dr Proust jovially on the shoulder.
Armand Nisard, Marie de Benardaky's uncle by marriage and an
original ofM. de Norpois, was at Evian on'holiday from his post
as aniliassador at the Vatican. He was most affable, but since he
was so deaf as to hear nothing that was said to him, and spoke
1 Praeterita, vol. 2., ch. 4. Proust certainly knew this passage even before
he read the original, for it is quoted by La Sizeranne, 28~9. Here again,
Ruskin's prose in La Sizeranne's French is strikingly like the mature style of
Proust.