MARCEL PROUSTfurious again. Reduced to more indirect means, he proposed that
all the girls of their set should exchange photographs with all the
young men; and to set an example he arrived at Mme Pouquet's
weekly dance with a packet of photographs of himself, which he
proceeded to distribute. Their mothers hurried up with loud cries
of horror, and all was to begin again. He began to scrape acquain-
tance with her most distant relatives; and a chorus of uncles,
aunts and cousins, charmed by his assiduity, began to sing his
praises. Perhaps they would invite him to their country-houses,
perhaps there would be photograph-albums there, and then-"I
shan't stick at theft," he said. He won the photograph only
twenty years later, when Jeanne had ceased to resemble it, but
even then he was still receiving New Year cards from the same
obscure aunts in Perigord. 'To obtain Gilberte's photograph I
committed acts of baseness which did not get me what I wanted,
but involved me for the rest of my life with some extremely
boring people.'l
In the summer of his army year he was given clerical work at
divisional headquarters; 'but the Chief of Staff, not without
reason, was exasperated by my handwriting, and threw me out'.
On a sunny day, against the leafy trelIis of a garden wall, he was
photographed four times: no doubt these are the photographs he
handed round at Mme Pouquet's dance. In one he is marking time
in his greatcoat and kepi, with an ingratiating smile, doing his best
to look like a soldier in the chorus of some comic opera by
Offenbach; in the second he wears a heavy sweater with collar
and carries a riding-stock; in the third, inscribed 'to the one and
only Gaston', he is pensively reading, and has slyly contrived to
make the greatcoat look like a monk's habit, the book like a
breviary.
That August Dr Proust was "nt to investigate an outhreak of
cholera in Spain, which recalls the Spanish tour of the Narrator's
father with M. de Norpois in A I'Omhre.^2 He returned, still hot
and dusty, announcing that 'travel is a delightful thing, because
you're so glad to go, and so glad to come back'. It was a month
of photographs: to compensate for one in which the photographer
had made her grimace, Mme Proust sent her son another in which
she had an air of inspiration. 'I look like Goethe,' she wittily
wrote, 'gazing up at a fourth-floor window and saying "I am in
1 I, 503 • I, 7 01