MARCEL PROUSTThierry at Illiers. His favourite poet is Alfred de Musset, whom
Bloch tolerated only because he had written 'one absolutely
meaningless line'.1 Among painters he mentions only the
execrable Meissonier, who became the idol of the French
bourgeoisie by painting pictures of fat red cardinals at supper,
and among musicians only Mozart (a great composer, but Proust
was by nature a Wagnerian) and Gounod, a Meissonier of music.
But the confession-album continues its inquisition, and two
entries reveal something of the cross-currents with which the boy
is striving. 'What is your idea of the depths of misery?' he is
asked, and replies 'to be separated from Mother'. 'For what fault
have you most indulgence?' it persists, and he answers: 'for the
private life of geniuses'. He was never to feel indulgence for his
own vices, never to separate sin from guilt; but here it is as if he
had some premonition that the time, thirty years ahead, when he
would descend to the lowest pits of Sodom, where love and
cruelty are imitated for hire, would coincide with-and perhaps
be indispensable to-the moment of revelation and victory.
Illiers, with its lilacs and hawthorns, was now a forbidden
country. Only the air of sea or mountains was safe for his asthma,
and he spent his holidays with his mother or grandmother on the
Normandy coast, at Dieppe, Treport, Trouville or Cabourg, or
at Salies-de-Bearn in the Pyrenees. It is regrettable that so little
information concerning these seaside holidays of his 'teens has
survived, for he seems to have distilled from the summers of the
1880s many aspects of the first visit to Balbec in A I'Ombre. With
the sole exception of Un Amour de Swann (in which it is probable
that little came from his personal experience), there is no episode
in his novel where the materials for comparison with his real life
are so scanty. Evidence is not lacking, however, for the two salient
features of the Narrator's first holiday at Balbec, his relations with
his grandmother and the presence of the little band. In a letter to
his mother from Cabourg on 9 September 1891, two summers
after the death of Mme Nathe Weil, Proust wrote of 'those sea-
side holidays when grandmother and I, lost in one another,
walked battling with th~ wind and talking'. And in an early prose
piece he described 'some little girls I once watched at play by the
sea'. One was running with shuffiing steps, pretending to be a
princess in a carriage, while another was chasing her to return a
1 1,90