DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 177detection in his own home, the event could not have occurred
without leaving a permanent scar-of which there is not the least
trace-in the relations of mother and son. It is still more incon-
ceivable, even granting his latent sadism towards his mother, that
he could have recorded such an incident openly in the book in
which he expected her to take pride and pleasure. His remorse,
and his fear that the story might come true, were no doubt real
enough, but the story itself shows that he succeeded in repressing
them. Like the rest of Les Plaisirs et les Jours it has the sterile
tone of a literary exercise: he had confessed to the world and to
his mother as a sop to his conscience, and with no intention of
being taken at his word. Nevertheless, Confession d'une Jeune Fille
is the first clear sign of Proust's recognition of his own inverdon.
It is also, though he could scarcely have foreseen it, a first
embryonic draft of Jean Santeuil and A la Recherche; the garden
of Combray, the mother's kiss refused and extorted, the Guer-
mantes Way and the Cities of the Plain, the obsession of Time
Lost, his own life told as an allegory, all are there, though with
suicide as the only solution. The final incident of the des::royer
taken into the parents' house, the desecration of the mother, and
the symbolic window, is a distant prefiguration both of Albertine. as captive, and of Mlle Vinteuil's profanation of her dead
father's portrait, seen by the Narrator through the window at
Montjouvain.
By the New Year of 1895, as we have seen, Proust was already
feeling 'a keener consciousness of divine grace and human
liberty': he had come to terms with his remorse and accepted his
destiny. He took Reynaldo to a careful selection of broad-
minded hostesses, including Mme Aubernon, Mme Straus and the
rich, kind, malicious, white-haired old Marquise de Brantes-
"She's worth a whole Council of Trent," her nephew Montes-
quiou would say with vague approbation. From January onwards
they visited Count Robert himself, who was most affable, and
was repaid with a shower of grateful letters for 'your kindness to
my friend'. On 28 May, at Mme Lemaire's Tuesday, Proust's
poem sequence Portraits de Peintres was recited, to a piano
accompaniment composed by Hahn, in the august presence of
Montesquiou and Anatole France. Proust's musician friend
Edouard Risler was at the piano, having come up specially for the
occasion from his m;Jitary service at Chartres. Risler is presum-