Chapter l2
THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL
T
HE appearance of Les Plaisirs et les Jours was overshadowed
in the Proust family by the sudden death, on 10 May 1896, of
Great-Uncle Louis Weil. The poor old gentleman.hardly knew
he was ill. A cold turned to pneumonia overnight; he became
unconscious, showed no signs of suffering, and at five in the
afternoon departed this life of ladies in pink in Paris and leisured
summers in the green garden of Auteuil. So the original of Unde
Adolphe lay, watched by his niece Mme Proust and his great-
nephew Marcel, in his town house at 102 Boulevard Haussmann
which was to be Proust's home ten years later; they guarded his
lifeless body in the very bedroom, then with flesh-pink walls and
gilded woodwork, where Proust would sleep by day and write
A la Recherche alI night. Meanwhile, by the terms of his will, the
house went to his nephew, Mme Proust's brother, Georges Wei!
the lawyer.
In accordance with Louis Weil's Jewish faith there was no
service for the dead, and he had even asked that his funeral should
be 'no flowers by request'. It was an embarrassing moment when,
just as the procession of hearse and cabs left 102 Boulevard
Haussmann, a cyclist rode up to deliver a magnificent wreath
from the lady in pink herself, Mme Hayman. She had shown
great tact in not coming in person-'ofcourse you wouldn't shock
anyone, everybody who knows you admires and likes you, and
my great-uncle was so fond of you,' Proust had written, 'but I'm
afraid it might tire you, and there'lI be so few other ladies there'.
For a moment, when he saw the cyclist and the flowers, and
thought of old times and the old gentleman, Proust burst into
tears; then he took the wreath into his cab and followed his
mother, who had left before the incident, to Pere La Chaise, half
hoping to fall into Mme Hayman's arms there after all. Mme
Proust, not to be outdone in tact, had the wreath buried with the
coffin; and at the year's end Proust sent Mme Hayman a valuable
tie-pin ('I thought it might do for your hat') which had belonged