BERGOTTE AND DONCIERES 75melancholy time of year, Doncieres is a place where it is
always autumn'!
Meanwhile his mother wrote to him, and he to her, every day.
Her correspondence is full of gossip ahout home, as letters to a
soldier in exile should be, but tantalisingly void of information
ahout the addressee; and only one letter from Orleans of Trooper
Proust, and that to his father, has survived. She describes Robert
(,Proustovitch') unmercifully massaging his father's lumbago,
and Dr Proust roaring, "You're hurting me like blazes 1 God in
Heaven, how you're hurting me!" and then adding, "Why are
you stopping? Get on with it, boy 1" Or she asks the servant to
prepare a fish dinner one Friday, when Catholic friends are
coming, and remarks, 'Angelique will think I'm going to be
converted l' She sends on a message from Anatole France, 'Tell
Marcel I'm very fond of him'; and Lucie Faure, his playmate in
the Champs-Elysees, says, Tell him the same from me.' Or she
offers a little good advice; his father wishes him to cut down his
intake of cream-cheese, so-Think of a number, then halve it',
or, most practical of all (had he been punished for neglecting to
polish them?), 'Gaiters, gaiters, gaiters, gaiters!' She visited him
regularly, and so occasionally did Robert Proust, Horace Finaly,
with whom he had stayed at Ostend the previous August, and
other friends. '
His father's mother, Louis Proust's widow, had died at Illiers
on 19 March 1889; but on 2 January 1890 came a more terrible
loss, the death of his maternal grandmother, Mme Nathe Weil.
1 Does Donch'!res also contain memories of a time when Proust was no
longer a soldier himself, but the guest of a soldier? In 1893-94 his friends
Louis de la Sane and Daniel Halevy served their year at Fontainebleau, while
Pierre Lavallee was at Chartres; in 189< '95 Robert Proust was at Rhcims with
Femand Gregh, Robert Dreyfus and other old friends; and in 1895 a pianist
friend, Edouard Risler, who may perhaps have suggested the piano-playing
. MarquiS de Poi tiers in Jean Santeuil, served at Chartres. There is no direct
evidence for such a visit, but there are plenty of months unaccounted for in
the 18905 in which it might have occurred; and in Jean Santeuil, at least, the
hero experiences army life both as a soldier and as a visiting onlooker. The
name Doncic~res comes from a character in Connais-toi, a play by Paul
Hervieu, whom Proust knew well, produced at the Comedie Franl,Jaise in
1909. Doncieres is a junction on the line between Balbec and Paris, and its
first syllable recalls the junction-town of Mezidon, sixteen miles south of
Cabourg, where the branch-line from Cabourg joins the main line from Paris
to Cherbourg.