DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 173be known, he was to admire intensely a decade later. 'Monsieur,'
he wrote to Faure about this time, '1 not only admire and venerate
your music, 1 am in love with it. Long before you met me you
used to thank me with a smile when, at a concert or an evening-
party, the clamour of my enthusiasm obliged your disdainful in-
difference to success to bow a fifth or sixth time to your audience!'
It was probably at Comte Henri de Saussine's, in 1893, that he
met Faure, as he had also met Delafosse, for in real life Vinteuil
and Morel frequented one and the same salon. But the guest
Satissine admired even above Faure was the Wagnerian pupil of
Cesar Franck, Vincent d'lndy, whose name is echoed in the name
of Vinteuil. Under Saussine's influence Proust acquired the
enthusiasm for Wagner to which he was in any case born: it was
on 14 January 1894, at the Sunday Colonne concert, that he first
heard the Flower Maiden scene from Parsifol, which he recalled
in the episode in Le COte de Guermantes where the lady gUc.sts of
the Duchesse ('their flesh appeared on either side of a sinuous
spray of mimosa or the petals of a full-blown rose') are compared
to the Flower Maidens.'
Hahn's attempt at re-education came, very fortunately, too late
to distract Proust from the musical aesthetic which suited his
nature and was to inform his novel. Reynaldo's traditionalism
was no doubt salutary for himself, but would only have been
disastrous for Proust: it could never have led to the invention of
Vinteuil. To please Reynaldo he did his best to like Saint-Saens:
he wrote two articles in Le Gaulois of 14 January and II
December 1895, in which, however, his attempts at praise only
succeeded in displaying his reservations. 'Saint-Saens uses
archaism to legitimise modernity; he bestows upon a common-
place, step by step, through the ingenious, personal, sublime
appropriateness of his style, the value of an original creation •••
he is a musical humanist,' says Proust very truly. And yet, it was
from Reynaldo's tuition and from the charming, meritorious but
secondary music of Saint-Saens, that the 'little phrase' of the
Vinteuil Sonata took its beginning.
It was perhaps at Mme Lemaire's, and played by Y saye ('his
rendering is splendid, majestic and luminous, with admirable
form,' wrote Reynaldo in his diary), that Proust first heard the
Saint-Saens Sonata in D Minor for violin and piano. His imagina-
l II,4>}