Marcel Proust: A Biography

MARCEL PROUST
she had no time to go as far as Mme Damoiseau's in the Rue de la
Place. In the hot summer afternoons, when Marcel was reading
in the darkness of his shuttered bedroom, his sense of the
brilliance of the sunlight outside would come from the din of M.
Legml's hammer, which 'seemed to scatter a distant shower of
scarlet stars', as he broke up old packing-cases in his yard. In the
novel Legue is called Camus; but there was indeed a grocer called
Camus elsewhere in IIIiers, and nowadays one of his descendants
and namesakes keeps the grocery at Mereglise. Opposite, at NO.3,
was the shop of M. Desvaux, the gunsmith, who. embarrassed
Marcel whenever he went to his bedroom window by waving
amicably from his doorstep, where he would stand smoking his
pipe and chatting with the passers-by. At No. I, on the corner
opposite Legue's, lived Mme Goupil, daughter of Dr Galopin,
after whom the former Rue de l'Oiseau Flesche, which continues
the Rue du Saint-Esprit in the direction of the railway, is now
called Rue du Docteur Galopin. She appears in the novel under
her own name, when Aunt Leonie sees her going to church,
wearing her new silk gown made in Chiiteaudun, and without an
umbrella, although a black cloud is looming behind the church
tower.l Her father is introduced as Dr Percepied, in whose
carriage Marcel has the revelation of the three spires of Martinville
Ie-Sec; but here Proust is playing one of his favourite tricks with
names, for at Illiers Percepied was reilly the name of the postman,
while at Combray Galopin is the pastrycook from whom Mme
Goupil buys a tart, and who owns the new dog, 'as clever as a
Christian', whose appearance so startles Aunt Leonie.^2 Mme
Goupil, who was on visiting terms with the Amiots, was a lady
of majestic demeanour and imperturbable dignity: "I don't think
she'd tum a hair if the church-spire fell on her head," a medical
friend of Dr Proust was heard to remark. She had married a
wealthy property-owner of IIliers, and in the novel it is at her
wedding, under the alias of Dr Percepied's daughter, that the
Narrator has his first sight of the Duchesse de Guermantes in the
chapel of Gilbert the Bad. Her waxen and hieratic face was said
to have inspired the figure of St Lucy, her patron saint, in the
stained-glass window by the pulpit in the church.
In the Rue de Ia Place, which leads from the Rue du Saint-
Esprit to the market-place, was a grocery kept by Mme
1 I, 101 • I, 58