MARCEL PROUSTits very obviousness may not only have answered his ambition,
but have helped to create it. Two of his schoolfellows, Jacques
Baigneres and Jacques Bizet, happened to be sons of two of the
chief mistresses of salons in the layer of society immediately below
the nobility, where the upper bourgeoisie and the Faubourg
Saint-Germain met on common ground. Jacques Baigneres was
the son of the prominent hostess Mme Laure Baigneres, though
not, if rumour was correct, of her husband, A visitor unaware of
her intimate association with the Orleanist leader M. de Remusat
once asked: "Which does your son most resemble, yourself or
M. Baigneres?"; and she imperturbably replied "Jacques is just
like his father." Jacgues Bizet's widowed mother a few years
earlier had married Emile Straus, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, after
a long and ardent courtship: when asked why she had become his
wife, she answered "Because it was the only way I could get him
to leave me in peace." But Jacques Bizet remembered his mother
saying: "Listen, my child, ifI were to marry again, whom would
you like best for a step-fatherr" "Emile," he replied without
hesitation, and she kissed him, for she too preferred Emile Straus.
Already, in the December of I 888, Marcel was inviting Mme
Straus and Jacques Bizet to share his box with the other Jacques
for the first night of Edmond de Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux at
the Odeon on the 15th; and to persuade her he added a character-
istic piece of double-edged flattery: "I've found some lines in
Vigny which even you ought to like, for they seem to have been
written for your glorification-he must have foreseen you!"
When the news that Marcel was meeting acad'emicians and
showing 'an undue partiality for dukes' reached Condorcet, his
schoolfellows felt he had betrayed the high ideals of the Reyue
Lilas. They mocked him to his face, but succeeded only in
hurting, his feelings, not in changing them, or in understanding
that the power which drove him to the Guermantes Way was not
snobism but genius. The legend that Proust was a society-writer
and a snob had begun, and would be replaced by the truth of his
greatness only in the last three years of his life, thirty years later.
So his last year of school closes in umhrage and obscurity. In the
baccalaureate exam he took a first prize for French composition; he
began to choose beautiful cravats; and suddenly he was no longer a
schoolboy, but a young man of eighteen with a moustache. He was
abandoned by and tired of Bloch: it was time to find Saint-Loup.