THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL ~13
Sargent. After the First World War, however, he declined with
the fall of the Guermantes world on which he had lived; and the
poverty and obscurity of his death in old age in 1955 were a
belated consequence of his first fatal choice sixty-one years before,
when instead of relying solely on his art he had sought the
patronage of Montesquiou and high society.
Meanwhile the delayed results of Les Plaisirs et les Jours had
caused Proust further distress, this time from his former comrades
of Le Banquet. Jacques Bizet, now in his last year as a medical
student and living in a bachelor-garret on the Quai Bourbon in
the Ile Saint-Louis, had collaborated with Robert Dreyfus in a
little revue for shadow-figures, after the manner popularised by
the famous Chat-N oir cabaret in Montmartre. The paper figures
'Yere cut by distinguished artists, among them F orain and Jacques
Emile Blanche; the lighting was provided by a fearsome cylinder
of acetylene gas ("if that tube blows up, we'll all be buried in the
ruins," Bizet warned); and the revue, which satirised the literary
successes of their friends in the previous year, was wittily entitled
'The Laurels all are Cut'. F ernand Gregh, who nobly accompanied
at the piano, was one of the chief victims, for his first volume of
poems, La Maison de l' Enfance, had just been hailed as a master-
piece. Proust, whose voice was imitated perfectly by Leon Yeat-
man behind the screen, was seen in grimacing silhouette talking
to Ernest La J eunesse: perhaps this partly accounted for his
subsequent annoyance, for La Jeunesse was a malicious, falsetto-
voiced, Jewish homosexual, unwashed, deformed, and notorious
for his physical resemblance to a body-louse. "I have nothing but
contempt for you," he had once declared to the critic Henri
Bauer, who replied: "And I have nothing but mercury-ointment
for you." So on three evenings, from 18 to 20 March 1897, an
appreciative cross-section of literary and social Paris listened to
the fonowing:
PROUST. Have you read my book, Monsieur La Jeunesse?
LA JEUNESSE. No, it was too expensive.
PROUST. Oh dear, that's what everybody says .... And yet, a
preface by M. France, 4 francs-pictures by Mme Lemaire,
4 francs-music by Reynaldo Hahn, 4 francs-prose by me,
I franc-verses by me, 50 centimes-surely that's value for
money?