6:0 MARCEL PROUST
things' are no longer horrible. 'I have made them sacred, and
Nature too, because I could not conquer them. I have clothed them
with my soul, with the inner splendour of images. I live in a
sanctuary surrounded by a pageant. I am the centre of things, and
each of them brings for my enjoyment sensations or sentiments
that are magnificent or melancholy. I have glorious visions before
my eyes.' This little sketch of the return of beauty and significance
to things made sterile by habit touches one of the capital themes of
Proust's art: it is already Time Regained in miniature.
His school friendships, however, gave him less satisfaction
than his writing. 'There was something about him which we
found unpleasant,' Daniel Halevy recalled many years after
Proust's death; 'his kindnesses and tender attentions seemed mere
mannerisms and poses, and we took occasion to tell him so to his
face. Poor, unhappy boy, we were beastly to him.' In a minor
episode of Jean Santeuil there are three boys whose intelligence
the hero admires: they jostle him in the playground, and when he
writes them 'such a beautiful, sincere and eloquent letter that tears
came into his eyes as he wrote', only mock him the more. 'Jean
did not understand that his craving for sympathy, his morbid and
over-refined sensibility, which made him overflow with affection
at the least show of kindness, were mistaken for hypocrisy, and
only shocked and irritated these young people, in whom the in-
difference of their colder nature was accentuated by the heartless-
ness of youth.' So he takes his vengeance, in this novel of revenges,
by making Jean meet one of them two years later, and find that he
is silly after all} But if Marcel suffered much in his schooldays
from physical bullying, there would be other hints of it. At
Condorcet, as in most French schools, violence was as unknown
as other organised games; there was no worship of the strong and
stupid, and intellectual prowess was respected and encouraged,
even by the masters. His suffering came from his need to repeat
with his fellow-creatures, in friendship as in love, the relationship
he had known with his mother, the only one that could satisfy
him, the only one that was impossible. A former schoolfellow told
Jacques Emile Blanche, long afterwards, of his terror when he
saw Marcel coming towards him, to take his hand and declare his
need of 'a tyrannical and total affection'. And the bewildered little
Halevy, two years his junior, saw him 'with his huge oriental eyes,
1 Jean Santeuil, vol. I, 3:15-7