Chapter 4
THE GARDEN OF THE CHAMPS-EL YSEESM
ARCEL'S face was changing: it moved indeed in several
directions and on several planes, as if uncertain ofits destina-
tion. Would it take after his father, or his mother, or be a new
individual-and if the last, should it be hysterical, cheerful, or
gravely melancholy? There are four surviving photographs of the
period between his tenth and twelfth years. In the first he is with
Robert, who quietly hugs his brother's arm in an attitude which
had hardly altered since the photograph in which Marcel was five
and both were in frocks; but Marcel's face has a frozen frenzy
which recalls the young Rimbaud, a timidity masked by arro-
gance and anger. It is abOllt the time of his first attack of asthma
in the Bois de Boulogne: is this the nervous face of the young
asthmatic, jealous of his brother (for a child can be both fond and
envious of his rival) and wooing his mother with fits of weeping
rage--or, since the other photographs are so very different, is it
only a normal boy trying to keep still for the photographer? Both
brothers wear wide Eton collars over their shoulders, Lavalliere
cravats, and knee-breeches which leave an expanse of thin bare
leg above their white socks and high buttoned boots. Their hair
has been meticulously curled; perhaps this is the photograph of
which he was thinking in Du elite de che{ Swann, when the
Narrator tears out his curl-papers and spoils his velvet jacket and
new hat embracing the hawthorns at Tansonville. Or perhaps it
is the next, though now his hair is straight and worn in a fringe,
for here are the new hat and the velvet jacket; and this, whether
or not it is the Combray photograph, is certainly the one Celeste
Albaret found when rummaging in the Narrator's drawer at
Balbec: "He tried to make us think they always dressed him quite
simply. And there, with his little cane, he's nothing but furs and
laces, such as no prince ever wore ,"1 She might well think of a
prince, for the morocco frame is covered with golden fleur-de-lis;
he sits on the photographer's balustrade, the new hat beside him
1 II,84 8