MARCEL PROUSTdiscovered ten years later. It is true that for a year or two France,
along with Loti, was his favourite contemporary novelist. He
never ceased to respect him, and he never replaced him with
another, for when he outgrew France he turned to the masters
of the past, to Balzac, Stendhal or Flaubert, or to the Russians,
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or to English novelists, George Eliot and
Hardy; and last of all to himself, for ~ince Bergotte did not exist
he was compelled, as a last resort, to become him. France was the
only living novelist (except Barres, who also contributed a little
to Bergotte) whom he met and enthusiastically admired in early
youth, and in gratitude he built the character of Bergotte, an
apotheosis of France, around him. But he had to invent the great-
ness of Bergotte, in whose work, the magic of which is so subtly
conveyed but so rarely demonstrated by quotation, there is some-
thing higher than France or any other French novelist of his
time.
'On entering the drawing-room ofMme Arman,' wrote one of
her guests, 'one had the impression of being in a railway-station,
of which Anatole France was the stationmaster.' Mme Arman sat
to the right of the fireplace, while France leaned against the
mantelpiece, gesturing, stammering, hunting for the right word,
but always holding forth. 'His conversation was that of a superior
but crashing bore,' thought Henri de Regnier, who was however
fond of talking himself; but to F ernand Gregh it seemed 'literally
enchanting with its mixture of irony and kindness, wit and grace,
naturalness and erudition, fantasy and good sense'. Towards
Proust he adopted the paternal tone of Bergotte. "How do you
manage to know so many thmgs, Monsieur Franc.;?" asked
Proust, and France replied: "!t's quite simple, my dear Marcel.
When I was your age I wasn't good-looking and popular like
you. So instead of going into society I stayed at home and did
nothing but read," No doubt he also uttered Bergotte's famous
remark, that the pleasures of the mind would compensate for
Marcel's ill-health. 'I would not exchange the painful pleasures of
the intelligence for all the gay frivolities and empty experiences
of the ordinary man,' he wrote in Le Temps of 9 November 1891.
But when he said to Proust at Mme Arman's "You, Marcel, who
love so much the things of the intelligence," his young friend
interrupted: "I don't love the things of the intelligence at all; I
only love life and movement."