BALBEC AND CONDORCET 59of ill fame performs a service which bears 'the same useful relation
to love as that of handbooks on mediaeval towns to travel'.lBut
the experience was horrible; the proprietress had the face of a
murderess, and when he left, he afterwards told his comrades
(who thought the remark exquisitely absurd), "I felt as if I had
left part of my moral being behind me."
In October 1888 he began his year of philosophie under Marie-
Alphonse Darlu, 'the great philosopher', as he wrote in the preface
to Les Plaisirs et les Jours, 'whose inspired words, more sure of
survival than many a book, brought thought to birth in me and
SO many others'. Darlu was a bearded and spectacled little man
with an energetic and highly coloured face; Anatole France said
condescendingly of him that he 'had a pretty brain', little knowing
that Darlu, with equal condescension, said the same of Anatole
France. He had a strong southern accent, so that philosophy to
him was 'phi-Ioh-soh-phy' and stupidity 'stoo-pi-di-ty'. On the
desk in front of him he would place his top-hat, and take it as a
concrete example for any abstruse doctrine he was expounding: as
F ernand Gregh said, 'he brought the whole of philosophy, like a
conjuror, out of that hat'. Marcel always remembered his explana-
tion of the theories ofLeibnitz: "Suppose my hat is a monad; well,
I drop my handkerchief into the hat ..• "-but what the handker-
chief represented we are not told. He would startle his pupils into
thinking for themselves by a policy of severe sarcasm. Once, a
year after Marcel's time, he announced that a certain composition
came first, and then crushed the unhappy pupil with the words,
perhaps a little too exalted for a schoolboy: "All the same, these
are the fantasies of a sick brain, aegri somnia, a philosophy fit for
Sganarelle 1" Darlu's destructive and constructive criticism did
more for Marcel than the delighted appreciation of Maxime
Gaucher; and he surprised the boy by complaining not, like M.
Cucheval,. of the incoherence or eccentricity of his essays, but of
their tendency to banality and loose metaphor-"all these bad
habits you've picked up from magazines and reviews". "How can
you write a phrase like 'the red conflagration of the sunset'? That
sort of colouring is only fit for some little newspaper in the
provinces, no, I won't say even that, in the colonies {" For when
1 I, 57!' 576. In Jean Sante"il (vol. " '30) he even gives the address of
,he brothel in the Rue Boudreau, which may well be correct, since that
street was on Ws way home from Condurcct.