74 MARCEL PROUST
Mayrargues seemed smart enough, he thought, but the other
guest had a greatcoat several times too large; 'his deportment and
manner of speaking did not conform with the military ideal; he
had enormous questioning eyes, and his flow of conversation was
amiable and easy.' At first Proust's Condorcet ways did not
please a youth who had recently left the formidable Lycee Saint
Louis: the fellow talked of nothing but the delights of meta-
physics, and the genius of a schoolmaster named Darlu. But soon
they became fast friends, and compared this first encounter to the
meeting of Bouvard and Pecuchet in FIaubert. Billy had had a
strict French Protestant education: 'lowe it in great part to
Marcel,' he says, 'if I knew the joy of thinking otherwise than in
accordance with fixed principles.'
Incredible as it may seem, in view of his later ill-health and
physical inactivity, Proust enjoyed his life in the army. 'It's
curious,' he wrote to a friend fifteen years later, 'that you should
have regarded the army as a prison, I as a paradise.' He swam,
rode, fenced and marched, and rejoiced to be called 'man vieux' by
the common soldiers his companions: he experienced, for one
whole year, the delightful illusion of being normal and accepted.
There was a new poetry in the grey autumnal landscape, in the
daily scenes of life in the barrack-room, which he likened to the
genre paintings of the Dutch School. 'The rural character of the
places,' he wrote in Les Plaisirs et les Jours, 'the simplicity of
some of my peasant-comrades, whose bodies were more beautiful
and agile, their minds more original, their character more natural
than those of the young men I had known before or knew later,
the calm of a life in which occupations are more regulated and
the imagination less trammellecl than in any other, in which
pleasure is the more constantly with us because we have no time
to run about looking for it and so miss it altogether, all these
things concur to make this period of my life a series of little
pictures full of happy reality and a charm on which time has since
shed its delicious sadness and its poetry.'l Orleans, with its
cobbled streets, warm inns and misty views of the nearby
countryside, became Doncieres; and because he first came
there in autumn, and overlaid Saint-Loup's garrison-town
with later visits to Fontainebleau (1896), Versailles (1906
and 1908) and Lisienx (1907) which happened at the same
1 Le,)' Plaisirs et les Jours, 2.16