SAINT-LOUPof provoking Antoine's jealousy, he thought of transferring his
devotion to Fenelon. 'With Fenelon, I'm only at the hoping
stage; but tell him I have a great deal of affection for him, and I
should be delighted if in exchange he would give me a crumb of
his own, which he scatters abroad over so many persons: But
the attempt was fruitless: 'soon Nonelef will be no more to me
than twenty other people, and there will be no need to wrestle
with that classic Siren with the seablue eyes, that direct descendant
of Telemachus ..•. But the poor lad, of course, doesn't care a
damn for me, and would be amazed ifhe knew he was the subject
of all this heart-searching: In fact, Proust was still too engrossed
in Antoine to woo Nonelef. Nevertheless, it was in this winter of
1901-02 that Fenelon performed two memorable acts of friend-
ship. The first was to take Proust, at his own request, to a
brothel, where they arrived full of hope. But the girls, Proust
complained, were less attractive than he expected, while the
central heating left still more to be desired; and the whole
establishment had to be turned upside down to provide hot-water
bottles and extra bedclothes for this chilly client. Similarly,
though the visit never actually occurs, Saint-Loup at the
Princesse de Guermantes's soiree promises on his next leave to
take the Narrator 'to a place where the women are quite amazing',
and where he will meet the mysterious Mile d'Orgeville.^1 One
night at Larue's restaurant in the Place de la Madeleine Proust
again complained of the cold; and it was Fenelon who executed
Saint-Loup's famous run along the ledge behind the red-plush
benches, carrying a greatcoat for his shivering friend. Proust was
stirred to record the incident in a new chapter of Jean Santeuil, in
which he called Fenelon 'Bertrand de Reveillon'.2 It was the first
addition to his novel for two years, and the last he was ever to
make; but it was too soon to transfer the new power he had
gained through Ruskin to an imaginative work, and the episode. is one of the most ill-written (which is saying. a great deal) in the
whole novel.
1 II,694
, Jean Santeuil, va!. " pp .• 89-98. Here Reveillon performs his feat only
to reach his friend more quickly on entering. Perhaps this version is the
truer to fact. As we shall see, Proust's overcoat was fetched in this athletic
way by Jean Cocteau in or about 191 I, and Proust may hav!! combined the
two incidents in A la Recherche (II, 4Il).