THE EARLY YEARS OF JEAN SANTEUIL ZI9
showing off your knowledge in front of Proust." One evening
Reynaldo took Proust, whose interest in Ruskin was already
awakening, to Mery's to meet Whistler, Ruskin's arch-opponent
since the famous libel-suit in 1878. "Ruskin knew nothing what-
ever about painting," Whistler asserted; but Proust cajoled him
into 'saying a few nice things about Ruskin,' and when the
painter left his grey kid gloves behind he appropriated them as a
souvenir. Dr Evans died in November 1897, and Mallarme on 9
September 1898; and this late flowering of Mery Laurent's salon
had an early withering.
In August Proust stayed with his mother, as in 1895, at the
Kurhaus Hotel, Kreuznach. At first the weather was fine and dry,
but he had asthma-it was because their rooms were on the
ground floor, he decided. Then it was rainy and cold, yet the
perverse malady receded. At Kreuznach he wrote Part VIII,
Chapter V, of Jean Santeuil, 'Le Salon de la Duchesse de Reveillon',
and no doubt other episodes of his novel, for he told Leon
Yeatman: "I haven't been able to write any letters, because I've
been working so hard." All through this holiday, and even as late
as October, when he went away with Habn, Mme Lemaire was
hoping to see Marcel and Reynaldo at Reveillon again. In vain
she sent full instructions and times of trains, or deputed Suzette
to beg Maria Habn 'to press them and hustle them a bit'. But
Reveillon had already yielded all its sweetness twO years before,
and they never came.
On 16 December 1897 Alphonse Daudet died, struck down
after thirty years of respectable married life by the unforgiving
Spirochaeta pallida caught in his Bohemian youth. For Proust
Daudet's place as a writer was with Theophile Gautier and
George Sand, whose works, though he had ceased to overvalue
them, retained the irrecoverable but indestructible glamour of
the dining-room fireside and the shady recesses of the Pre Catelan
at Illiers. He continued all his life to quote Tartarin's 'double
muscles', or 'hellish dark and smells of cheese' from Jack-he did
not know that the Master had stolen the latter from Handley Cross.
But when he came to know the dying writer personally he felt a
new gratitude for his kindness, a respect for his heroic endurance
of pain and paralysis. Alphonse Daudet, in turn, was charmed and
impressed by Lucien's brilliant friend. From the first he kept
Proust's letters with the cherished correspondence of great men,