DESCENT INTO THE cn IES OF THE PLAIN 18\
name of M. Hanotaux, then Foreign Minister; and just in time for
his second visit to Reveillon, leave came.
Whether because she believed Les Plaisirs et les Jours would
float her drawings to still wider fame, or because she liked people
who liked Reveillon, Mme Lemaire had taken a temporary fancy
to Proust. The invitation in October came because in August, at
Dieppe, she could hardly bear to let him leave for Brittany. But
on principle she preferred not to give invitations in the 'bad
season', when the garden was past its best. Her daughter Suzette
was detailed to speed the coming guests. 'It's fine, though cold,
now,' she wrote to Maria Hahn on 19 October, 'but if they dawdle
much longer winter will be here, this huge house will be full of
draughts and gloom, and I'm afraid Mama won't want them to
come-do tell Reynaldo to bring lots of warm clothes, just as if
he were spending the winter at the North Pole.' The great chest-
nuts had turned colour, but still kept their leaves; and the
branches, as Proust wrote in one of the last sketches for his
coming book,! 'seemed like a magnificent comb clasping the
flowing golden locks of the leaves'. The autumn visit to Reveillon
was ahnost the last of the events in Proust's life which form the
fundamental plot of Jean Santeuil. It may be assumed that most
of the incidents in the 'Second Visit to Reveillon' of Jean Santeuil
-the moonlight walks in the hills, the bedroom fires, the
delicious food provided by the Duchesse ("I've got them to make
you a souffle, my dears, the least I can do is to see you eat well"),
the storm that makes Jean long to set off immediately for Pen-
march-really occurred. But it will no doubt never be known
whether a fellow guest, a 'tall young woman of twenty-two, so
kind, cheerful and healthy' really shared Proust's bed, or whether
she, too, was a case of 'transposition'. On his return he applied
to the Ministry for a whole year's leave, which was granted on 2.4
December. 1895, for nothing could be refused to a protege of
M. Hanotaux.
Another event of the closing year was a dinner on 12. December
at Alphonse Daudet's, with Edmond de Goncourt, who hardly
spoke, the right-wing journalist Henri Rochefort, Montesquiou,
who made the most peculiar serpentine gestures with his hands
and chattered infuriatingly about ladies' fashions in the Second
Empire, and Albert Flament, who tells the story. When they rose
1 'Les Marroniers', P. el J., 2.J4~S