Marcel Proust: A Biography

186 MARCEL PROUST
from table Montesquiou made a beeline for Flament and asked:
"Do you like poetry, and have you read miner" At one a.m. in
the cloakroom Proust gave an imitation of Count Robert's
piercing screams to the Daudets' cousins, Adeline and Marthe
Allard, muflling the noise against the hanging masses of over-
coats. 'Before that evening 1'd heard nothing but blame of
Proust's idleness, his slavish devotion to Mme Lemaire, his un-
controllable passion for high society, his total lack of personality,'
wrote Flament in his diary; but as Proust continued his imitations
in the cab going home, Flament was impressed by 'the surprising
profundity 0 f his adjectives'.
After eigh teen months of complete absorption in Reynaldo
Habn, Proust's interest was now turning to another young man.
It was a year before, in the winter of 1894, at a dinner given·
by Charlotte Baigneres, that Proust had first met the great
Alphonse Daudet, in whose house Reynaldo was already a
regular visitor. "Monsieur de Montesquiou was there," Mme
Daudet told her sixteen-year-old son Lucien, "and a charming
young man called Marcel Proust, extraordinarily well-read and
with beautiful manners-and now go to sleep, dear boy, it's
terribly late." Soon Proust was asked to one of the Daudets'
Thursday at-homes, and Lucien, who was allowed to serve the
coffee before being packed off to bed, remembered his moonlike
paleness and jet-black hair, his over-large head drooping on his
narrow shoulders, and his enormous eyes, which seemed to take
in everything at once without actually looking at anything.
"Never in all my days," declared Lucien's grandmother next
morning, "have I met a young man so well brought up as that
little Monsieur Ptoust." Lucien was a slim, frail youth, with a
classic nose of which he was inordinately proud, and a tiny
Chaplinesque moustache: 'a handsome boy,' Jules Renard had
written in his journal for 2 March 189), 'curled and pomaded,
painted and powdered, with a little squeaky voice which he takes
out of his waistcoat pocket'. He was intelligent, capricious and
highly-strung, given to hysterical laughter and weeping, and, a
little later, to unhappy relationships with young men of the
working classes. His talent for painting and writing came to
nothing, crushed by the superiority of his celebrated father and
his kind but truculent elder brother, the anti-Semitic, proto-
fascist Leon Daudet. Such was the brilliance of Lucien's conversa-