42 MARCEL PROUST
years to reach Class Five, in which he made his first appearance
in the Condorcet roll of honour on 31 December 1884. Thanks
to this success, he seems to have gone up after only one term into
Class Three, in which he is again found on the roll of honour on
14 February 1885; but he stuck there for two years, reaching the
roll of honour once more on 28 February 1887. As he joined the
rhetori'lue class in the following October, he must have spent only
the summer term in Class Two; or perhaps, in the expression of
French schoolboy slang, he 'jumped' it altogether. No doubt this
irregular progress was caused by his ill-health: his. school friend
Robert Dreyfus speaks of his prolonged absences, which often
prevented him from writing his end-of-term compositions. More-
over, 'he was a pupi! full of fantasy, an elusive apprentice of
meditation and daydreams, inspired more by his delight in
reading, thinking and feeling than by any ambition to shine on
prize-days'. In Jean Santeuil the father's colleagues predict a
brilliant career at school for a boy who already knows Victor
Hugo and Alfred de Musset by heart; but Jean is punished for in-
attention, is bottom for French composition, and finishes his first
year without a single prize. Instead of writing the brief, correct
essays which are expected of him, he covers page after page,
intoxicated by his own facility and by 'the i.nfinite and delicious
melancholy inspired by the burning of Joan of Arc or the speech
of the Constable de Bourbon'; and the composition he has written
with tears of enthusiasm is greeted by the laughter of the whole
class. He accuses himself of vanity and a desire to be admired,
which he considers he has inherited from his father's 'inoffensive
self-conceit'; and he cannot bear to think that the boy next to
him, who is rich, well-born and plays with real agate marbles,
might remain ignorant of his social successes. One morning, when
the class is deep in Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, he leans over
and whispers: "Do you know, I've had dinner with the head-
master!" "What's that you said?" the startled rich boy exclaims
aloud; the master calls them out, and asks what they were talking
about; and Jean feels ready to die of embarrassment and pride as
his companion mumbles: "Santeui! was saying he'd been to
dinner with the Head."l At last Jean's angry father sends him as
a boarder to the terrible Lycee Henri-Quatre; and though Dr
Proust never punished Marcel in this way, he may well have
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. I, 1I4-17