BALBEC AND CONDORCETmuff which she had left behind, and shouting at the top of her
voice: "Madame! Your Royal Highness has forgotten her muff!
The Princess has forgotten her muff! Your muff, Princess!" And
the first little girl thanked her with a smile, and took the muff with
a dignified absence of surprise.^1 Perhaps these little girls may seem
too childish to represent Albertine and her friends, who were,
nevertheless, young enough to play at diabolo and ferret. But the
idea of the little band is here, as well as in the Champs-Elysees;
and we shall find Proust at play later with at least two more groups
of young girls, one in Paris in 1891, the other at Cabourg in the
late 19oos. In a conversation with Andre Gide, which we shall
meet in its place many years later, he used expressions which
have been taken to mean that the original little band was
composed of boys; but in fact his words to Gide are only a
general statement that in the heterosexual parts of his novel he
used 'the feelings of tenderness and charm supplied by his homo-
sexual memories'. We shall find that the female characters loved
or desired by the Narrator invariably began, at least, as girls or
women to whom Proust himself was attracted in real life: he never
merely transposed them from boys or men, though he sometimes
reinforced them with elements from his homosexual life.
In 1887, during the summer after his winter's love for Marie de
Benardaky, Marcel visited the health-resort of Salies-de-Bearn
with his mother. With them at the Hotel de la Paix was Mme
Proust's best friend, the beautiful wife of Anatole Catusse, later
senator for the district ofTarn-et-Garonne. The two ladies shared
a taste for music, a similar turn of wit, and that love of amiable
gossip, of discussing the actions and motives of acquaintances and
strangers, which is so valuable an example in the mother of a great
novelist. In the conversation and singing of Mme Catusse Marcel
found some consolation for 'the boredom which Salies inspires in
one who hasn't enough "double muscles" (as Tartarin would
say) to walk in the cool shade of the countryside near by, and find
there the grain of poetry which is indispensable to one's existence,
but is not to be found in the hotel terrace, with its silly chatter and
tobacco smoke, where we spend all our time'. One day Mme
Catusse promised to sing for him 'a little song if I begin her
portrait in words, a big one if I finish it, and as many songs as I
like if it is full-length'. His friends were calling him to join their
I Chroniques, 135