176 MARCEL PROUSTbelonged to the kin of Doasan and his Polish violinist, of
Montesquiou and Delafosse, Wilde and Lord Alfred. His previous
innocent friendships, from 'little HaJevy' to Willie Heath, were
retrospectively debased into sublimations of a vicious desire.
Worst of all, he must now devote his life to an interminable effort
to conceal his real nature from his mother. If he succeeded,
would he not crucify her daily with his deceit? Ifhe failed, would
he not, quite literally, kill her? He wrote a story in which he
killed first his mother, and then himself, almost as if this was the
only possible solution of his dilemma.
La Confession d'une Jeune Fille is the only certain case of 'trans-
position' in Proust's early short stories: it is abundantly clear that
the heroine is Proust himself. She spends the summers of her
childhood in the garden of Les Oublis, which is one and the same
as the Pre Catelan at IlIiers, the garden at Etreuilles in Jean
Santeuif (which is likewise called Les Oublis), and Swann's park
at Tansonville. There is the incident of the mother's good-night
kiss, 'an old habit which she had abandoned, because it gave me
too much pleasure and too much pain'. The girl is seduced at the
age of fifteen by a boy cousin-did this, too, happen to Proust,
and is such an incident alluded to when the Narrator presents the
proprietress of Bloch's brothel with Aunt Leonie's sofa, 'on which
I first tasted the pleasures of love with a little girl cousin'?1 She
is tortured by indolence, procrastination and 'lack of will-power'.
'I gave myself time, and often felt wretched when I saw time
pass, but after all, there was so much of it still before me! •.•
Wishing to have will-power was not enough. What I ought to
have done was precisely what I could not do without will-power
-to will it: She becomes addicted to 'the desiccating pleasures
of society'-'I went into society to calm myself after sinning, and
the moment I was calmed I sinned again: She acquires a brutally
sensual fiance, with her parents' consent, and is seduced once
more. Her mother, looking through the window, finds her in the
act and dies of a stroke; and the girl shoots herself, like the
Lesbian heroine of Avant fa nuit.
It is surely improbable, though several of Proust's biographers
have suggested it, that the melodramatic discovery occurred in
real life. The brutal fiance is very far from the gentle Reynaldo;
and though Proust no doubt often ran the horrifying risk of
1 1, 578