MARCEL PROUSTmeet you"; to which the astonished Prince, fully aware that
genius takes precedence of noble birth, had gamely replied:
"Believe me, I'm the more honoured of the two!"! During his
last illness he had taken a dislike to his English night-nurse-"1
don't want to talk to the Princess of Wales at three in the
morning," he would complain; and when the Princesse described
how she had sat up reading Mark Twain to her husband (she
had retained her love for her native literature and was about to
translate Thoreau's Walden) Proust thought with nostalgia of
the nights of Franfois Ie Champi with his mother at Auteuil.
By this time Mme and Dr Proust were at Zermatt. Proust had
taken the opportunity, as he often did when his parents were
away, to attempt to reform his lamentable hours: he went to bed
at midnight and rose in time for an enormous lunch, 'every day
a huge beef-steak without a morsel of waste, whole plates of fried
potatoes, cream-cheese, gruyere, peaches and beer'. But as usual
asthma intervened. 'I had to walk bent double, and light an anti-
asthma cigarette at every tobacconist's I passed.' He consulted
his father's colleague Dr Brissaud's Hygi£ne for Asthmatics: Dr
Brissaud considered that asthma, in children at least, was often
caused by worms; might he not have worms, like M. Homais in
Madame Bovary? Ought he not to take enemas of mercury, as
Dr Brissaud advised? or if that was too drastic, of something
milder, such as calomel or glycerine? He had put on weight, but
now, dreaming every night that he was holding his corpulence
in, 'like a ball', to show his mother on her return, he lost it again.
He was well enough, however, to resume his Ruskin pilgrimages.
On 7 September he revisited Amiens, and went on to Abbeville
to meet Leon Yeatman and see St Wulfram's Church, of which
Ruskin had written: 'For cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying
pleasure, the getting in sight of Abbeville on a fine summer
afternoon, and rushing down the street to see St Wulfram again
before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past
for-to the end.'2 This was just such an afternoon: 'I was delight-
ed to see the mines of summer's gold still virgin around me,'
1 Swinburne had a fixed idea that his great-grandmother had been a
Polignac, though this was contradicted by the poet's family. Cf. Gosse, Life
of Swinburne, p. 3·
2 Praelerita, vol. I, ch. 9, section lSI, quoted by Proust in his introduction
to La Bible J' Amiens (cf. Pastiches et Melanges, p. 107).