MARCEL PROUSTRochefoucauld's son Gabriel. Shortly before his attendance at
the Noailles dinner of 20 June Comte Gabriel had met Proust at
a society soiree; and his curiosity was sufficiently aroused to make
him ask the friend with whom he left: "What sort of a person is
this Prousrr" "In my opinion his is the most remarkable literary
potentiality that has ever existed," declared the sententious
friend. 'I took the remark with friendly scepticism,' wrote Comte
Gabriel long afterwards; 'but I was reminded of it the next time
I met Proust, and in time I came to regard it as a prophecy.'
Proust, he found, seemed to have read everything; his conversa-
tion was full of the most piercing psychological observations,
and anecdotes of gentle but penetrating irony. Among those
treasured by Comte Gabriel was one of a society lady who, when
sitting next to Proust at dinner, had asked: "Have you ever heard
of a book called Salammho?" Proust stared with childlike
astonishment in his eyes, but made no reply. "Come now, you're
interested in literature," she prodded, "so you must have heard
of it." "I believe it's by Flaubert," he murmured; but the lady,
mishearing, and feeling vaguely that she ought to be offended,
retorted: "It's beside the point whether it's by Paul Bert or any-
one else, all that matters is that I quite liked itl"l
Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld was now twenty-six-a few
years too old, that is, for Proust to feel more than an ordinary
attraction towards him. As a boy he had played, a few years after
Proust and Marie de Benardaky, with Duc Agenor de Gramont's
daughter Elisabeth in the Tuileries gardens and the Champs-
Elysees. He and she had attended the same class for first com-
munion, and exchanged sacred medallions; but when he wrote
love-letters to his little playmate she conscientiously showed
them to her mother. He resembled Saint-Loup in many ways: he
was a would-be intellectual, a Dreyfusard, and a scorner of the. aristocracy from which he sprang, particularly of his own father,
the overweening Com te Aimery; yet in speaking of persons of
birth below his own he was not entirely free from an instinctive
sense of his inalienable superiority, and the 'spirit of the Guer-
mantes's seemed to pass over at a great height'.2 He was tall, and
'bore in his forehead,' Proust wrote of him in 1904, 'like two
1 Paul Bert (1833-86), a physiologist and Minister of Education in 1886,
was far from being a prominent literary figure. Proust used the anecdote for
Mme d' Arpajon at the Guermantes dinner (II, 489). • II, 694