Marcel Proust: A Biography

THE GARDEN OF THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES 41
and the toy riding-cane on his lap, with exquisite poetic intelli-
gence in his face, as if he meditated on the spires of Martinville-
Ie-Sec. It is one of the most moving of all portraits of genius in
childhood, and the next two photogrnphs are something of an
anticlimax. Both were taken on the same day; he is with Robert,
arm in arm again; they are in their black school-suits, and Marcel
has a look of positively chirpy cheerfulness. He is eleven, and it is
1882, the year in which he entered the Lycee Condorcet.
For the past year or two he had attended a preparatory school,
the Cours Pape-Carpentier, where one of his schoolfellows was
Jacques Bizet, son of the composer of Carmen, who had died in
1875 soon after the disastrous failure of his opera. It was the
custom for the little boys to be escorted to school by their mothers,
so perhaps Marcel may have seen Jacques with his beautiful and
intelligent mother, daughter of the Jewish composer F romental
Halevy, and future hostess of the Guermantes's. Six years later
he would begin to frequent h~r salon, and she would become his
friend for life; but now she was a lonely widow who shunned
society.
His parents chose the Lycee Condorcet, no doubt, because it
was so near home: the school entrance in the Rue de Caumartin, a
few yards north from the Boulevard Haussmann, is hardly ten
minutes' walk from 9 Boulevard Malesherbes. But, by a fortunate
coincidence, no choice could have been happier for Marcel. Un-
like the grim schools of the Left Bank, Louis-Ie-Grand, Henri-
Quatre, Saint-Louis, or Stanislas, awful in their discipline and
learning, Condorcet was considered a haven of liberty and
culture. The beginning of lessons, the end of recreation were
marked, it is true, by the traditional drum-roll; but even the drum,
as Marcel's schoolfriend Robert Dreyfus remarks, 'seemed to
invite us rather than order us into school'. The teachers were
mostly minor literary figures, who seemed less determined to
force knowledge into their pupils than eager to co-operate with
them in the love and practice of literature; and towards the upper
reaches of the school, in the classes of rMtori9ue and philosophk,
the boys were allowed by their benevolent headmaster, Julien
Giraud, to choose their own teacher.
There is a little documentary evidence on Marcel's early school-
days, during the period of five years from his entry in October
1882 to the beginning of rMtorique in October 1887. He took two