THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL 201
Dieppe,l the possibility that Jean may become a poet-"you
might as well give him a rope and tell him to hang himselfl" The
year is 1866, and Jean is seven years old; but in Proust's own life
this discussion belongs rather to 1893, when he was ordered to
choose a career; and M. Santeuil's remark that 'the new Minister
of Foreign Affairs has quite a good opinion of writers' is an
allusion to Gabriel Hanotaux, who became Foreign Minister in
May 1894 and gave the judiciously qualified support to Proust's
literary career that is attributed in A I'Ombre to M. de Norpois.
After a gap of seven years Jean fulls in love with Marie Kossichef
in the Champs-Elysees, and is parted from her not by his own
decision (as was the Narrator from Gilberte) but by the cruelty
of his parents. He is sent to the Lycee Henri-Quatre, where his
schoolmaster Rustinlor speaks the Homeric language of Bloch; and
he pays his unsuccessful visit to the brothel in the Rue Boudreau.
The Easter and May-month interlude at Etreuilles,2 a half-way
stage between Illiers and Combray, belongs both in Proust's own
life and in Du COte de che{ Swann to the period before the Champs-
Elysees, but is displaced in Jean Santeuil to the middle of the
hero's schooldays. The house in which the family stays, which
in real life was the property of Uncle Jules Amiot and in Swann
was to be that of Aunt Leonie, belongs at one moment (for
Proust was undecided) to Jean's paternal grandfather, and then
to his father's brother-in-law and sister, the Sureaus. M. Sureau,
like Jules Amiot, keeps a draper's shop in the market-place. The
garden beyond the river, which later became Swann's T ansonville,
and was never entered by the Narrator or his family, is here still
owned, like the Pre Catelan at IlIiers, by the 'early-rising,
gardening uncle'. The servant, who like F ran~oise kills a chicken
and ill-treats the kitchen-maid, is given the real Christian-name
of her original, Ernestine Gallou. In many ways Etreuilles already
resembles. Comb ray: we meet, in tum, the buzzing flies and
hammering in the street by which the hero in his darkened bed-
room deduces the heat of the summer's day, the com-poppy
nodding in the plain, the strawberries and cream-cheese, the pink
1 Nathe Weil paid at least one visit to Dieppe, but in accordance with his
well-known habit left the same day, rather than spend a night away from
Paris. (Cf. Corr. Mm. Proust, 125.)
\3 The name Etrcuilles is taken from EpcautrolIes, a village five miles cast
of Illiers.