16 MARCEL PROUST
well-considered disapproval in her gentle eyes would send her
husband into a rage; he would beg her ironically for her opinion,
press her with questions, lose his temper; but she would rather
have been burned at the stake than reveal her knowledge that
there wasn't quite enough sugar in the pudding. After lunch the
glass retort would be brought in, in which Jules Amiot insisted
on making the coffee himself; it was 'like an instrument in a
chemist's laboratory, except that it smelt good'; and later in the
season Uncle Jules would mix the strawberries with cream cheese,
of which Marcel was inordinately fond, stopping, 'with the
experience of a colourist and the divination of a gourmand', when
the mixture had reached exactly the right shade of pink.
It was only in the earlier years at Illiers that Aunt Elisabeth
considered herself well enough to come down to meals, or indeed
to take meals at all. She refused, step by step, to leave Illiers, her
house, her room, and finally her bed; she existed, it seemed, solely
on Vichy water, pepsin, lime-tea and the famous madeleines-a
plump but diminutive sponge-cake in the form of a scallop-shell,
which is still to be found in Illiers, partly, no doubt, because
Proustian tourists have been found to welcome it with a
mysterious enthusiasm.^1 Like her nephew after her, Aunt
Elisabeth became an imaginary invalid, a voluntary prisoner in
her bedroom, and died at last of a malady in which no one but the
sufferer had ever quite believed. In the end, too late, she was
operated upon by Dr Maunoury, the glory of the whole country-
side and brother of the general who helped to save Paris in 1914;
and everyone agreed at last that she had really been ill, for she
died. It is an ironic fact that Marcel's hereditary neurasthenia, his
tendency to an illness which was at once hypochondriac and
genuine, was transmitted to him not by his sensitive over-loving
mother, who nevertheless did so much to perpetuate his weak-
ness, but from his euphoric, extravert father's side of the family.
Gradually Aunt Elisabeth had discouraged all her friends from
calling, for they either annoyed her by believing that she was1 The scallop.shaped madeleine cake has been known in Illiers from time
immemorial. Illiers was one of the halting-places on the mediaeval pilgrimage
route from Paris to the shrine of St James the Apostle at Compostella in
Spain. The church took its name from St James, and the madeleine-cake its
shape from the shell worn by the pilgrims in their hats. Proust alludes to this
in the madeleine incident 0, 45).