BALBEC AND CONDORCET 15in the horse-omnibus from Auteuil to the Madeleine. He felt he
ought to make polite conversation, and thought he was succeed-
ing, until his mother's friend asked: "Are you going to talk like
this all the way?"; 'after which cold shower', as he reminded her
long afterwards, 'no further sound was heard but the rumbling
of the bus on the cobbles of the Rue La Fontaine'.
In October he began his year of rhitorique at Condorcet, the
first half of the two years' course leading to the baccalaureate-a
year which Marcel airily described as 'a circular tour from Homer
to Andre Chenier by way of Petroni us'. The class was shared by
rude M. Cucheval, polite M. Dauphine-'lt's really amusing to
let oneself be guided by two such different minds,' he reported a
year later to Robert Dreyfus-and the witty Maxime Gaucher.
M. Cucheval was forthright, uncompromising, 'a real savage of a
schoolmaster', and yet, 'however much you're Cuchevalised, it
does you no harm. Don't think him a fool, just because he makes
silly jokes, and is too much of a barbarian to enjoy exquisite
combinations of syllables or verbal contours. He's a relief from
those idiots who round off all their periods-a thing he can't and
won't do. He's absolutely delightful, the ideal of a good teacher,
and the very reverse of boring.'
Maxime Gaucher, who was literary critic on the Revue Bleue,
and whom Marcel calls 'an infinitely free and charming intelli-
gence', was the first to realise his pupil's exceptional talent. Week
after week he made Marcel read his compositions aloud to the
class, praising them, criticising them, and suddenly overcome by
helpless laughter at some audacity of style. One of these pieces
has survived, an essay on Corneille and Racine which shows
remarkable maturity of thought and language. Proust is already
writing his seamless, interwoven prose with sentences a hundred
words long and virgin of paragraphs; and when he made Gisele
write her famous letter from Sophocles among the shades to
Racine, beginning 'My dear friend', he may have been thinking
of the subject of this essay, but hardly of its matter or style, in
which there is nothing of which to be ashamed. Once he was even
asked to read his latest composition to a visiting inspector from
the Sorbonne, Eugene Manuel, a mediocre poet who put up for
the Academie Fran~aise whenever there was a vacancy, but always
in vain. The outraged inspector heard him to the end, and turning
to M. Gaucher asked, "Haven't you anyone, even at the bottom