SAINT-LOUPmight give undivided attention to his friends, to dine before their
arrival; he sat with one guest during the soup-course, with
another for the fish, and completed the round of the table during
the nuts and fruit. Another guest was impressed by a still more
remarkable feature of the dinner. Leon Daudet, now a violent
nationalist and anti-Semite, realised with horror that Marcel
had resolved to emulate Gege Primoli by inviting the deadliest
enemies to eat together. Most of his fellow-guests, except the
Eyragues's and Mme de Brantes, were notorious Dreyfusards: 'I
found myself sitting next to a ravishing young person whom I
found on enquiry to be the daughter of a prominent Israelite
banker; and I expected the crockery to begin flying at any
moment. But rays of goodwill and sweet sympathy emanated
from Marcel and darted in vertiginous spirals round the dining-
room; and for two hours the utmost cordiality reigned over this
banquet of the Atridae.' Daudet seized on his audacious friend
in the drawing-room: "no one else in Paris could have performed
such a miracle, Marcel," he cried. "Monsieur, the fact is,
Monsieur," Proust modestly replied, "it all depends on the way
in which, the moment they come into the room, people's
characters interlock!"
Throughout this year Proust saw a good deal of Leon Daudet
at the Cafe Weber, which (or Larue's) no doubt was the
restaurant visited by the Narrator and Saint-Loup on a foggy
night, where the Dreyfusards and nationalists sat at opposite sides
of the room. At the Cafe Weber, however, the nationalists were
not young noblemen, but Daudet himself, with the deadly
F orain, laughing with a sound like broken glass, and his friend
Caran d'Ache, the caricaturist, wearing one of his dazzling pink
or buttercup-yellow suits, drawing faces on the tablecloth, and
murmuring "That's vewwy dwoll, y'know." Louis de la Salle
was there, now a convert to nationalism, obsessed with the idea,
which he never carried out, of kicking Paul Hervieu's backside;
and the critic Paul Souday, 'sullen as a neglected gumboil', sat
alone and glowering. Proust entered, muffled summer and winter
in an enormous greatcoat. He ordered two pears for himself, or
half a dozen grapes, and whatever happened to be most expensive
and out of season for his friends; he complained expiringly of
insomnia and asthma; and he crossed to Daudet's table to begin a
round of compliments: "Monsieur, oh, Monsieur, I did so enjoy