10 MARCEL PROUST
liqueurs under the trees. He could not sleep; in vain he begged
their man-servant to fetch his mother; till at last in desperation
he opened the window and called to her: "Ma petite maman, I
want you for a second." Rather than risk a worse scene, she came,
urged by the good-natured Dr Proust, and tried to comfort him;
but he broke into a fit of hysterical weeping, for the irrevocable
harm was done. The servant looked in inquisitively, and his
mother explained: "Master Marcel doesn't know himself what is
the matter with him, or what he wants-it's his nerves." He felt
a fierce joy that the act which he had felt to be a deliberate crime
should be declared to be something beyond his control.
He wrote two accounts of this incident, which forms the
opening scene both of Jean Santeuil and A fa Recherche du Temps
Perdu. The version in Jean Santeuil is more matter-of-fact and
probably contains the literal truth; it has been followed above.
In Du CtJd de chef Swann the event is elaborated and joined to
other scenes from other years, for there his purpose is to give its
symbolic truth. The garden is at Comb ray, the bell in the garden-
gate at IIliers is heard, the visitor is Swann, the servant F ran~oise;
and the father, with a generosity which is all the more touching
and noble because it is ungracious, unexpected, and 'regardless of
the principles of international law', allows the mother to spend
the night in her child's room, reading aloud his day after to-
morrow's birthday present of George Sand's Franfois Ie Cham pi.
This final episode, though here it is aesthetically inseparable from
the rest, does not Occur in Jean SanteuiI, where the narrative rings
true-in the realm of literal truth, that is-without it. Yet the
Franfois Ie Champi incident i~ no less charged with the emotions
of an actual memory. It happened on another night at Auteuil,
w hen Marcel had a temperature, and the family doctor prescribed
medicine to check his fever, and ordered: "Keep the boy on a light
diet." Mme Proust said nothing and Marcel knew from her
silence that she had already determined he should take no
medicine and should eat nothing till the fever had gone. "My
children," she would say on such occasions, "that doctor may be
cleverer than I am, but I know what is right." So she gave Marcel
nothing but milk, and read to him from Franfois Ie Champi and
La Petite Fadette. A few mornings later she decided he had a cool
skin and a steady pulse; and he was allowed at last to eat a small
boiled sole. An allusion in one of Proust's letters to his mother