THE DREYFUS CASE 147
Proust wrote in alarm to his mother, adding 'Be very cautious if
you talk about any matrimonial desires for me.' It may be inferred
that Mme Proust had tried to find him a wife on previous occasions,
and that he had made no objection in principle, whether from
desire to please her, or to conceal his perversion, or from confi-
dence that he could always refuse any actual candidate for his
hand, or because he had not yet entirely renounced the possibility
of marriage.
Early in October Maugny left for Paris, tiresomely announcing
that he would tell Mme Proust her son would be perfectly well if
he didn't take so much medicine. Proust saw more of Chevilly,
and thought of moving on with him to Venice, where Coco de
Madrazo (whose father Raymond de Madrazo had married
Reynaldo's sister Maria in the previous June) had been staying
with his aunt Mme Fortuny, the wife of the famous dress-
designer. But he abandoned the idea when he heard that Coco had
moved to Rome. One evening he drove with Chevilly's sister
Marie on the way back from Mme Bartholoni's at Coudree, and
the movement of the carriage on the darkening road recalled
Vigny's Maison du Berger, already recited by Dr Cottet, in
which the poet rides in a shepherd's caravan with his beloved."Mais toi, ne veux-tu pas, voyageuse indolente,
Rever sur man epaule, en y posant ton front?"
he repeated daringly; for Marie was engaged to be married to the
journalist Edouard Trogan, and he felt it safe to flirt with her.
In Sodome et Gomorrlze
'
it is to Albertine that the Narrator
addresses the same lines, as he tears open her raincoat in the little
train after their meeting with Saint-Loup at Doncieres. 'I don't
know which of the two,' Proust wrote to Chevilly, 'those
exquisite verses or your sister, seemed more poetic at that
moment!' About 7 October he abandoned hope of Italy, broke a. dinner-engagement with the Brancovans, and returned precipi-
tately to Paris, where he fell ill and was visited every day by
F ran~ois d'Oncieu.
The Dreyfus Affair was over. On '9 September President
Loubet had remitted the remainder of Dreyfus's sentence and
I II, 86j