THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 199
VII, Chapter V (' Une Petite Ville de Province).1 The intro-
ductory chapter (in which the novelist C. is met in Brittany, and
after his death a few years later leaves the manuscript of the novel
to his young friends) was not composed until March 1896, at the
home of Leon Yeatman, to whom Proust immediately read it:
'Leon said it was typically "pony",' he told Reynaldo. This was
written in a manuscript-book, no doubt the same of which he told
his mother in August, 'I have paginated the first 90 pages.' In
September he wrote the incident of the children's book with the
r.icture of the moon with a funny face, which occurs in the
Etreuilles section (Part II, Chapter IV); and a little later he had
filled the 110 leaves of this book, 'besides the loose leaves I
worked on before'. The loose leaves are no doubt Part I, written
at Beg-Meil; so we may deduce that the exercise-book contained,
besides the introductory chapter, all or most of Part II (EtreuilIes).
At this time-mid-September 1896-he was negotiating with
Calmann-Levy for the eventual publication of his novel, and
thought that by working four hours a day he might finish it by
1 February 1897. At Fontainebleau in October 1896 he wrote,
besides the telephone scene at Beg-Meil (Part VI, Chapter II), a
part of the Charlotte Clissette episode in Part X. Part ill,
Chapter VIII (' Une Seance a la Chamore), in which the Armenian
massacres of August 1896 are mentioned, dates from shortly after
his return to Paris. Since the next chapters which can be dated by
1 It is written on the official notepaper of the yacht-dub at Etel, a little
port on the mainland opposite Belle-Isle. The place described in this chapter
is evidently Fontainebleau, and was in fact called Fontainebleau in the
original manuscript, though Proust later substituted the reading of the
published version, 'Provins', Ought we to assume that the chapter dates
from after Proust's visit to Fontainebleau in October 1896, and that he had
saved the paper from the year before? Probably not; for Jean's cheerful
bedroom in the hotel, which comforts his homesickness and is clearly the
original of the Narrator's room at Donderes, is very different from the
hated room of October 1896; and the group of young officers whom he
meets in the following pages, and who resemble so closely the Narrator"s
friends at Doncieres, is equally (oreign to the stay at' Fontainebleau with
Leon Daudet. But these features may well belong to an earlier visit to
Fontainebleau, perhaps in the autumn of 1893, when his friends Louis
de la Salle and Daniel HaIevy were conscripts there. If so, there is
no longer any need to doubt that this chapter was written at Beg-Meil;
and, what is more, the mystelY of the primary origin of Doncieres is
solvl'd.