Marcel Proust: A Biography

20G MARCEL PROUST
Henri's parents present a similar paradox. From the benevolent
but rapacious Mme-Verdurin-like hospitality of Mme Lemaire
Proust created the Duchesse de Reveillon, with her "I've asked
them to make a souffle, my dears, the least I can do is to see you
eat well"; and since the Widow had no husband, he presented her
with a consort whose Olympian bonhomie and snobism are
drawn from Comte Greffulhe. The Due and Duehesse de
Reveillon are a homely, dowdy couple; yet with their dukedom
dating from the year 887, incredibly senior, by many centuries,
even to that of the La Tremoilles, their social prestige, their in-
explicable, almost parental regard for the hero, they foreshadow
the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes. But here fate was less
kind to Proust, or rather, his desire to provide himself with noble
parent-substitutes was less practical than his desire for a noble
Reynaldo-substitute. He was never to take the trouble to become
the darling of a ducal chateau.
And so, through the second half of the 1890s, he worked upon
a novel which he hoped would reveal the inner, universal meaning
of his childhood and early manhood, a novel, that is, that tells
the same story and has the same intention as A fa Recherche itself.
He hoped; but the meaning eluded him, buried deep and in-
accessible beneath the vague excitement with which he wrote. He
was still living in the illusory world of Time, floating on the dead
sea of the phenomenal world and trying in vain to drown: he
could not regain Time because he had not yet lost it. Between all
the lines of Jean Santeuif is his effort to believe he is writing a
great no"e1, his unwilling admission that his work is doomed from
the beginning to sterility. There is something heroic in his pre-
mature endeavour, his four years' persistence, his ultimate
abandonment of this marvellous failure. But as early as September
1896 he wrote to his mother: 'I can't see anything in it, and I feel
sure the result will be detestable'; and Jean Santeuil, providentially,
was not to be Proust's masterpiece, any more than it was to be
delivered complete to Calmann-Levy on 1 February 1897.
In December 1896 he met, without recognising her, the
Ariadne whose thread was to lead him near to the heart of the
labyrinth. The beautiful Marie Nordlinger, a young English
cousin of Reynaldo Hahn, had arrived from darkest Manchester
to study painting and sculpture in Paris; and one evening, when
Proust called for his friend on the way to some soiree. he found