SAINT-LOUPProust wrote to his mother. His excursions, however, had taken
another trend; he was beginning to visit old churches that Ruskin
never mentioned, for their own sake, not for Ruskin's. At this
time he planned to go to Mantes and Caen with Robert de Billy,
and to Illiers alone. Perhaps, he thought, his Ruskin studies were
at last winning recognition: on 13 August an article by Andre
Michel on Amiens Cathedral appeared in the Journal des Debats,
though he looked in vain for any allusion to his own essay on the
cathedral of the year before. Hopefully, he sent Michel a copy of
the Mercure de France containing his essay; but his only reward
was that Michel, in a second article on 10 September, referred
sarcastically to 'people who visit Amiens not so much to admire
or study the cathedral, as to make a devout Ruskinian pilgrimage',
and to Ruskin himself as 'a well-meaning mystical Baedeker'.
During the years in which Proust had travelled the Guermantes
Way, from 1892 to 1897, he had made no serious attempt-unless
we except his pursuit in 1892 of Mme de Chevigne's nephews,
Jacques and Gustave de Warn, because they had their aunt's hair,
nose and eyes-to make friends among the young noblemen of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As if to avert a blow to the heart
more cruel than any he feared from titled hostesses, his affections
had led him only to intelligent bourgeois youths, Willie Heath,
Reynaldo Hahn and Lucien Daudet; and in Jean Santeuil he gave
his hero, in Henri de Reveillon, a blue-blooded companion whose
like he had never known. A new tendency is noticeable from 1898
to 1900, when he had already left the Guermantes Way, in his
comradeship with Maugny, Chevilly and Oncieu; though these
belonged only to the minor nobility, without any real footing
in the Faubourg. But after a year's interval, in 1901, a new and
momentous cycle of friendships began, coloured and partly
instigated by his enthusiasm for Ruskin. Ruskin had brought
him a new conception of art and nature; he now felt the possibility
and the need of a corresponding new life of the heart, of com-
panions whose physical and moral beauty would justify them as
fit objects of aesthetic passion, and whose race made them living
symbols of the cathedrals and castles of old France. By the
autumn of 1901 he was already intimate with the first arrivals of
the group of young noblemen who in A la Recherche merged
into the gay, golden figure of Saint-Loup.
The first of these in order of time was Comte Aimery de La