68 MARCEL PROUST
Arman's. They made love every morning at his bachelor home,
and then walked to Avenue Hoche for lunch. At tea-time he
would enter the drawing-room and say, "I happened to be passing
your house, and couldn't resist the pleasure oflaying my delighted
homage at your feet"; but everybody knew he had been writing
in the library all afternoon. In Proust's novel this anecdote is told
ofM. de Norpois and Mme de VilJeparisis.^1
Anatole France was timid, lazy and unambitious; but Mme
Arman, seized with the desire to create a great writer, made him
self-confident, industrious and famous. Did she make him great?
At least there is something in the faded prose of France, a joy, an
irony', a craftsmanship, which has enabled him, alone of the
secondary novelists of the French 1890S, to survive a little to-day.
In his novel Proust gave the guardianship of Bergotte, so like
Mme Arman's of France, not to Mme Verdurin but to Odette,
Swann's wife. Bergotte spends every day at Mme Swann's, 'on
exhibition', and her salon is built round him. She whispers to an
influential guest: "I'll speak to him, and he'll write an article for
you"; it is rumoured that she collaborates in his works; and the
Narrator tells us that 'between the elegance ofMme Swann's salon
and one whole aspect of the work of Bergotte there are relation-
ships so close that each, for the old men of to-day, can become
alternately a commentary on the other.'2 In all this Proust is
thinking of Mme Arman and France. He took the name of
Bergotte from M. Bergeret, the hero of France's tetralogy
L' Histoir. Contemporaine; but it is also a near-anagram of
Bourget, a novelist whom he m_t, as we shall see, in association
with yet another original of Odette Swann. To people of Proust's
generation the name could not fail to suggest also the philosopher
Bergson, particularly to Proust himself, who was Bergson's
cousin by marriage; but although the influence of Bergson's
philosophy upon Proust's novel was considerable, there is little
more of Bergson in Bergotte. There is, however, something of
Renan, whom Proust visited on 17 January 1889, taking with him
the old Grecian's Vie de Jesus; and after a long conversation, of
which afterwards he had little to relate, he returned with the
volume signed by the author.3 The snail-shell nose is Renan's,
1 II, 221 • II, 743-5
8 'For Marcel Proust,' wrote Renan, who died in 1892., 'whom I ask to
keep an affectionate memory of me when I am no longer in this world.'