SAINT-LOUPthe mirroring windows of the gabled houses on either bank'. On
'5 October he went to Vollendam by barge, 'through flatlands
moaning in the wind, while on the banks the reedbeds bowed and
raised their heads in endless undulation'. On the '7th, unlike the
Narrator, who tells the Duchesse de Guermantes that on his visit
to Holland, 'as I didn't want to confuse my impressions, and was
short of time, I missed Haarlem', he visited Haarlem to see the
paintings of Frans Hals': 'why, even a person who saw them
from the top of a tramcar would find them a real eye-opener,' the
Duchesse shocks the Narrator by saying. Next day he rejoined
Fenelon at The Hague, saw Vermeer's View of Delft at the
Mauritshuis, and 'recognised it for the most beautiful painting
in the world'. The Duc de Guermantes's impression of the
picture was less vivid: when the Narrator enquires whether he
knows the View of Delft, he replies with self-satisfaction: "If it's
there to be seen, I certainly saw itl"2 By now ProUi't was short of
money; he explained to his parents, not for the first time in his
life, that his pocket had been picked; and on 20 October he
returned to Paris. His relations with Fenelon during these three
weeks had been unwontedly serene. He would certainly have
seized upon any new opportunity of complaining of him to Mme
Proust, but instead he wrote: 'Fenelon was the only person with
whom I could possibly have gone away .•• he couldn't have been
nicer.' His mother would have liked him to go on to Illiers; but
in view of the season, for Illiers was at its most melancholy in
autumn, and the critical situation of his private life, he refused:
'to stay at IIliers or anywhere else, especially just now, would be
absolute madness'.
He returned to find Antoine Bibesco alarmed by the serious
illness of his mother, who was in Roumania on the family estate
of Corcova. At last, too late, a telegram arrived to call him to her
side; she died on 3' October, and Antoine arrived too late to see
her alive. Proust rose to the occasion with the peculiar intensity
which he always showed when a friend was bereaved: he shared
Antoine's grief to the point of making himself ill, he showed
exquisite tact, utter unselfishness, an extraordinary insight into
the mental processes of the mourner; yet it was as if the idea of a
mother's death filled him with a strange, almost pleasurable
1 At least, he told his mother he intended to do so; but he may have
changed his mind. I II, 1')-4