MARCEL PROUSThe made a successful compromise between the obligatory
'Parisian gaiety' and his own manner, and struck a note which can
often be heard in the full orchestra of A la Recherche.
He did not have so long to wait as the Narrator for the publica-
tion of his first article in Le Figaro-'that spiritual bread, still
warm and moist from the press and the mists of morning, which
we call a newspaper'.1 Pelerinages Ruskiniens en France appeared
on 13 February. He invited his fellow-countrymen to make
pilgrimages in honour of Ruskin, not to his grave at Coniston,
not even (Proust thinks, with a savour of sour grapes, of his
abortive plan to visit Venice from Evian the October before) to
Venice, but to Rouen and Amiens, where ('as in the tomb at
Rome which contains the heart of Shelley') they will find not his
lifeless body, but his soul. He drew attention once more to his
forthcoming articles in the Garette des Beaux-Arts, appealed to
the friends with whom Ruskin had travelled to tell him what
would have been the contents of his unwritten books on Rouen
(Domrimy) and Chartres (The Springs of Eure), and alluded to
the Charity of Giotto at Padua, who reminds him at this moment,
'trampling on bags of gold and offering us wheat and flowers', not
of the kitchen-maid at Combray but of Ruskin himself.
Early in February, when he was writing his Figaro article, he
felt unsure of one of the facts he needed; and Leon Yeatman and
his wife Madeleine were roused from bed one night by Dr
Proust's man-servant with the extraordinary message: "Monsieur
Marcel has asked me to ask Monsieur: what became of Shelley's
heart?" One evening that spring the Yeatmans returned home and
found, to their astonishment, Proust sitting alone in the con-
cierge's lodge: it was he who had pulled the cord to let them in.
"Your concierge is ill," he explained, "and her husband had to
go to the chemist's for medicine, so I offered to take his place.
Don't interrupt me now, I'm busy!" It was with the Yeattnans
that, at the same time, he visited Rouen. His purpose was not so
much to see the cathedral itself, of which Ruskin, in default of
the unwritten Domremy, could tell him little, as to identify a
single small sculpture to which Ruskin had once referred in
passing. Nothing could show more clearly that at this stage his
interest in cathedrals was subsidiary to his passion for Ruskin:
if he searched Ruskin's work for all that Ruskin could tell him
1 III, 568