SAINT-LOUP
Georges de Lauris, who had met Fenelon in the Bibliotheque
Nationale, where Lauris was researching for a doctoral
thesis on Benjamin Constant, and Fenelon was studying political
history for the diplomatic service. Lauris had already met
Proust several times in society, notably amid the glass cup-
boards and gilded furniture of the salon of Mme Leon F ould,
the banker's wife. Proust also made friends this winter with
Antoine's brother Emmanuel, who was nicknamed, for his tall,
lissom shape and oriental eyes, l' Aimee, that is, 'the dancing-girl'.
Emmanuel, he found, shared his passion for cathedrals, but loved
them directly, as did Robert de Billy, without the mediation of
Ruskin. Prince Emmanuel Bihesco and Billy, who in May 1899
had returned from the London embassy to work in the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Paris, helped Proust to win his independence
from Ruskin by encouraging a new series of visits to gothic
churches, to be enjoyed this time for their own sake. Proust liked
and admired Prince Emmanuel; but he did not pursue him, and
never reached the point of calling him 'tu.'.
Proust cannot be accused of introducing exalted ideas of
friendship into a circle innocent of such ways. The Bibesco
brothers and Fenelon already formed a secret society inaccessible
to the profane. They had a private language, and called one
another by anagrams and palindromes of their real names: the
Bibescos were the Ocsebibs, F "nelon was Nonelef, and Marcel,
when he arrived, could be none other than Lecram. Antoine,
from his addiction to the use of the telephone, was also known
as 'T elephas'; and he in turn, when he dared, would call Proust
'the Flatterer'. One of the chief duties of friendship, in their view,
lay in a constant exchange of deadly and inviolable confidences:
such a secret, therefore, was called a 'tomb'-tamheau.-and
anyone who violated a tamheau. was, obviously, a 'hyena'.
Friendship, however, was not a changeless phenomenon, but
subject to the mysterious vicissitudes of the stock-market: when
a friend was in a state of mounting prestige, he 'rose' like a share,
and when he seemed increasingly tiresome, he 'slumped'. One
Antoine Bibesco (whose memory, however, is often at fault) remembered
Proust as making friends with Emmanuel during his (Antoine's) absence on
military service in 1900-01. But it is quite clear from Proust's letters to
Antoine Bibesco between November 1901 and early March 1902 that at this
time Proust was as yet intimate with neither Emmanuel nor Fenelon.