4 MARCEL PROUST
move more than a few hundred yards from this point, and when
nearly fifty years later their son Marcel was at last uprooted from
the district sacred to his parents, it was the death of him.
After the hungry winter of the siege came the German entry
into Paris and the troubled spring of the Commune. In May the
Government forces of Citizen Thiers returned to the city, the
'Bloody Week' of street-fighting followed, and one morning as
Dr Proust was walking to his work at the Charite he was
narrowly missed by a stray bullet. His young wife was so over-
come by the shock that it was thought advisable for them tei
move to the house of her uncle Louis Weil at 96 Rue La Fontaine,
Auteuil, and here on 10 July 1871 Marcel Proust was born.
At first he was thought too weak to live, and long afterwards
he liked to attribute his lifelong ill-health to his mother's priva-
tions and anxiety during the siege and the Commune. Perhaps,
from the beginning, she agreed with him, and felt responsible for
history's injury to her unborn child; for she tried to redeem her
guilt with exaggerated care. He grew to believe, resentfully, that
she loved him best when he was ill and he tried to win her love
by being ill. Meanwhile, however, he was ,oon well enough to
enter the Catholic Church of his father. Mme Proust kept her
Jewish faith out of devotion to her parents; but Marcel was duly
christened at Saint-Louis d'Antin, the local church of their home
in Paris. In after-life he would point with some pride to the
certificate of his christening, and to the later certificate of confirm-
ation, signed by the Archbishop of Paris himself. Yet he was
always conscious of belonging, thanks to his mother, to two great
proscribed nations, who once lived in neighbouring regions, till
the wrath of God scattered them over the face of the earth; for
her blood made him a tribesman of Abraham, her over-anxious
love a native of the Cities of the Plain.
Their Paris home for nearly thirty years was a large apartment
at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes. The boulevard is lined with chestnut-
trees and commands a pleasant vista from the rear of the Madeleine
to the domed church of Saint-Augustin, built the year before
Proust's birth. 'One of the ugliest districts in Paris,' he called it
in Du Cote de chef. SwaM; but even so, the 'violet belfry' of Saint-
Augustin seen over the rooftops seemed to him 'to give this view
of Paris the character of certain views of Rome by Piranesi'.l On
1 PUiaJe, I, 66.