BERGOTTE AND DONCIERES 77clock was always fast, and they were plunged into despair. At the
Gare d'Orleans Gaston hurried after his friend as far as the plat-
form, chased by the angry cabman-they had promised him
double, and now he was afraid of being bilked altogether. Then
Gaston returned alone, having missed dinner in the cause of
friendship.
One afternoon at Mme Arman's Proust was introduced to
Gaston's fiancee, Mlle Jeanne Pouquet, and immediately began to
compliment her effusively on her beauty. Blushing and frightened,
the young girl walked away, only to be asked: "Are you turning
your back on me because you're afraid I won't notice your lovely
hair?" She complained to Gaston-"I think your friend Proust is
horrid." "Not at all, he's delightful. Besides, even before he spoke
to you, he told me you were simply charming!" Meanwhile
Proust had been busy with Jeanne's mother, who now came up
and said: "Young Monsieur Proust has quite made a conquest of
me, and I've asked him to come and see us on his next leave."
"Then I shall arrange to be out," replied the infuriated girl. But
Proust, fascinated equally by her magnificent plaits of dark hair
and by the fact that she already belonged to his friend, had fallen
in love. 'Gilberte's plaits seemed to me a matchless work of art,'
he wrote long afterwards; 'for a section of them, however in-
finitely small, what celestial herbal would I not have chosen as a
reliquary !'1
Soon it was Gaston's turn to be angry. Proust had invited
Jeanne and her mother ('or if she can't come, your governess or a
maid will do just as well for a chaperone') to stay at Orleans, 'to
visit the churches and museums and go hunting'. He would book
rooms at the best hotel, and knew a tapestry-man and an antique-
dealer who would make their apartment really comfortable:
'there's nothing extraordinary .mout that, is there?' He had
discovered that she had cousins near Orleans, whose father, Louis
Darblay, was an enthusiastic huntsman. Suddenly Proust
developed a longing to ride to hounds, and intrigued for an
introduction to M. Merle, llleir kennel-master. He found a
chateau to let near Orleans, 'quite a small one': they must come
and stay with him there, Gaston too, and all their friends. "But
if the chateau is so small, how can we all come?"-and they never
came. Next he tried to obtain her photograph, and Gaston was
1 I, \03