MARCEL PROUST
took on a poetic aura hardly inferior to that of the golden Venice
or Vezelay. On her way home to England Mlle Nordlinger spent
two days at Rouen with Mme Hendle, wife of the prefect of the
town and a relative of her father. She was met at the station by
the official landau with a cockaded footman, and drove straight
to the cathedral, where she talked to the stone-masons repairing
the porch, and to the near-by church of Saint-Ouen, where she met
the aged verger, Julien Edouard, who had guided Ruskin and his
friends in the autumn of 1880. A still more decisive example was
her visit, a little earlier, to Amiens: she had 'examined the
cathedral stone by stone, with Ruskin for my guide', and after-
wards, in Paris, gave the eager Marcel an impromptu verbal
rendering of passages from the 'Separate Travellers' Edition'-
which constitutes a complete guide to the sculptures of the
cathedral-of Chapter Four of The Bible of Amiens.
In the summer of 1899 Proust discussed Ruskin with F ran~ois
d'Oncieu, and lent him La Sizeranne's treatise before he went to
Evian. At first, in the lake-level society of the Brancovans and
Mlle Kiki, he felt no need of the book; but towards the end of
September, when with Clement de Maugny on the hills above
Thonon he faced the soaring Alps behind the lake, he was
conscious of the discrepancy between his own emotions and the
magnificent passage of Praeterita, quoted by La Sizeranne in his
first chapter, in which Ruskin describes his first sight of the Alps.l
He begged Mme Proust to rescue and send 'La Sizeranne's book
on Ruskin, so that I may see the mountains through the eyes of
that great man'. After a few days, before it came, he hurried back
to Paris: 'crystallisation' had occurred; his craving had turned
from the pinnacles of inaccessible ice to Ruskin himself. During
the illness which followed his return the faithful Oncieu called
every day to enquire after his health; and when he recovered they
went out together on expeditions in quest of Ruskin. 'Oncieu's
mind is free of prejudice and full of relish,' Proust wrote to
Chevilly, 'and he is so kind as to follow in my footsteps, which
lead him, however, only into perfectly respectable and high-
1 'There was no thought in any of us for a moment of their being clouds.
They were as clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already
tinged with rose by the sinking sun .... I went down that evening from the
garden-terrace of Schaffhausen widl my destiny fixed in all of it that was to
be sacred and useful: