2.52 MARCEL PROUSTM. Boissard of M. de Norpois, the Vicomte de Lomperolles of
both Charlus (modelled solely on Baron Doasan without, as yet,
a trace of Montesquiou) and M. de Vaugoubert. An officer
returns Jean's salute in the street, like Saint-Loup, or Lieutenant
de Cholet at Orleans, with a hypocritical pretence of not recog-
nising him. And the Duchesse de Reveillon, when Jean is
disgraced at Mme Marmet's, offers him her arm precisely as the
Queen of Naples was to give hers to the stricken Baron de
Charlus at Mme Verdurin's in La Prisonniere.^1 Bergotte in lean
Santeuil is a painter who talks like Elstir; but a primitive form of
the novelist himself appears in Part X, chapter IX as Silvain
Bastelle. M. Bastelle is beset by the problem which obsesses the
dying Bergotte in Le Temps Retrouve-the difficulty of redeem-
ing his moral evil by the creation of aesthetic good; but his vices
turn out, absurdly, to be nothing worse than drink and gluttony.
Jean's love for Mme Fran~oise S. in Part IX is based, as has
already been seen, on several different incidents in Proust's own
life: on Mme Hayman, Reynaldo Habn, and the unidentifiable
love-affairs which produced, before he met Reynaldo, the scenes
of jealous cross-examination in the earlier stories of Les Plaisirs
et les lours. The same material was used in A la Recherche for
both Odette and Albertine. Jean, like Swann, is tempted to open
his mistress's letter to an alleged uncle, knocks on the wrong
window and is confronted by two old gentlemen, associates his
love with the 'little phrase', and has a dream which marks the
end of his jealousy, and therefore of his love. Fran~oise, Odette
and Albertine alike are given to Lesbian love. But other incidents,
such as Jean's gift to Fran~oise of the agate marble, a present from
Marie Kossichef in the Champs-Elysees, belong in A la Recherche
not to Odette but to Albertine. It has been suggested that
F ran~oise, because her Christian name is the same with a feminine. ending, is intended for Fran~ois d'Oncieu; but the identification
is quite impossible, for she is already called F ran~oise in Les
Plaisirs et les lours, in stories written several years before Proust
met Oncieu.^2 In Part X Charlotte Clissette is another early
version of Albertine. Jean plays with her the game of ferret, not
at the seaside but in Paris (as he may have done with Marie
I Jean Santeuil, vol. 3, 93; Pteiade, III, 322.
- Cf. 'La Fin de la lalousie' and 'Mclancolique VilUgiature de Mme d.
Oreyves'.