230 MARCEL PROUST
but it will sound like thunder!"-until hostile journalists began
to call him not Monsieur France but Monsieur Prussia.
Mme Lemaire's salon remained neutral. At her reception on
25 May 1898 the long line of carriages waited once more outside
31 Rue de Monceau, while her flowering lilacs contemplated the
tall trees of Prince Joachim Murat's garden over the way. Com-
tesse Aimery de la Rochefoucauld, Princesse Metternich and the
Chevignes were there, only too happy to stand, in that amazing
crush, with Dreyfusards such as Porto-Riche, Mme Straus,
Reynaldo Hahn and Proust himself. Proust arrived, intentionally,
after the music was over and Mme Rejane had recited, with his
tailcoat several sizes too large, his eyes sparkling from lack of
sleep and his voice choked with hay-fever. "What's happened so
far?" he asked Albert Flament, and hurried off to Mme de
Chevigne, who explained in her raucous voice that she had just
dined with the Grand-Duchess Wladimir, "and she was hurningto
come on here with us!" They watched Mme de Chevigne talking
with Mme Lemaire, the countess with her rows of pearls, ringletted
forehead and bare nape, the hostess painted, wigged and untidy;
yet each lady, confident of her supremacy in her own line, 'watched
the other', as Flament wrote, 'with the amicahle self-assurance
which comes from a feeling of absolute equality'. "Mme Straus's
Sunday lunches are so interesting," Proust told Flament: "I can't
go to the actual lunch, because I'm never up in time, but 1 go round
afterwards and talk ahout the Affair to Reinach and Dr Pozzi-
their cigar-smoke is terribly bad for my asthma, but it's worth it."
At midsummer, as usual, Proust was ill. He had scarcely
recovered when he was vouchsafed one of those dreadful warnings
in which Providence is so generous, but which human nature,
once they turn out to be merely warnings, prefers to forget. On a
Wednesday in July Mme Proust was taken to a nursing-home
and operated upon for cancer by Dr Proust's colleague Dr Louis
Terrier. Only when the operation was under way did Dr Terrier
realise the full gravity of her condition; he wrestled for nearly
three hours with unpredictable complications, and declared after-
wards that he would never have recommended surgical treatment
if he had realised the danger it would involve. 'We can't think
how poor Mama managed to carry that enormous weight ahout
with her,' Proust wrote to Mme Catusse. For two days, to the
distraction of Dr Proust, she lingered between life and death; and