Marcel Proust: A Biography

196 MARCEL PROUST
Another episode in the career of the Vaugouberts is taken from
the Montebellos. Mme de Vaugoubert ruins her husband's career
by insulting the French ministers' wives during a second visit
of King Theodosius, when she monopolises the attention of her
friend Queen Eudoxie.^1 Similarly, on the occasion of the reception
held at Compiegne during Nicolas II's second state visit to France
in September 1901, Mme de Montebello neglected to inform the
ministers' wives that hats were de rigueur. The ladies disgraced
themselves by appearing bareheaded; the only hats to be seen
were those of the Empress Alexandra and Mme de Montebello;
and it was rumoured that her husband's dismissal by the Combes
government in 1902 was in retaliation for this unfortunate
incident.^2
On 19 October Proust went to Fontainebleau, with visions of
sunlight on brown leaves, for a writing holiday at the Hotel de
France et d'Angleterre with Lucien's elder brother Leon. Leon
Daudet remembered that week as a halcyon period of afternoon
walks in the forest, evening drives by moonlight ('Proust, that
most enchanting, fantastic and unreal of companions, was like a
will-o'-the-wisp at my side in the victoria') and conversations by
the fire in the deserted hotel lounge; and for Proust, too, it
mellowed sufficiently to play its part in the creation of Doncieres.
But at the time it seemed a damp inferno of real and imaginary
woes. The trees were annoyingly green, it never stopped raining,
and they grimly took their daily walk, hearing the horns and
baying of a distant hunt, under a steady downpour. His bed was
a hateful four-poster, with suffocating curtains and a canopy that
seemed always about to fall and crush him; it faced the wrong
way; he had asthma and could not sleep. Lucien's longed-for visit
on the 22nd ended in a tiff. There was nothing to read but a
biography of the Du Barry, which seemed still to preserve the
odour of railway-carriages and the excruciating melancholy of
departure, for he had started it in the train. He sent urgent and
intensely complicated orders to Mme Proust for the despatch of
his umbrella, a tie-pin, watch, hat, four Balzacs, Wilhelm Meister,
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and George Eliot's Middlemarch,
more money. Thirty francs vanished through a hole in his trouser-
1 III, 246
I The true reason was the change of emphasis in relations with Russia
necessitated by the new Entente Cordiale with England.