MARCEL PROUSTHe had probably intended to go on to Venice from Evian next
October (,Constantin de Brancovan assures me it's the best
possible time of year from the point of view of health,' he had
told Mme Proust the year before). It was mere coincidence that
a sudden opportunity allowed him to go in spring, only a little
later than the season promised by the Narrator's father. In mid-
April Reynaldo Hahn was in Rome with his mother and Coco:
could he be persuaded to turn north to Venice? At first Proust
hesitated: 'Marcel isn't quite sure whether he's going to Venice
-look out, I think we're in for a shower of telegrams,' Reynaldo
told his cousin Marie; but when he heard that Marie Nordlinger
herself was in Florence (she had left Manchester on 20 April) and
would be coming to Venice with Reynaldo, the scale was turned.
'It was on a radiant May morning,'l wrote Marie Nordlinger,
'that my aunt, Reynaldo and I saw Marcel and his mother arrive
in Venice.' As the train crossed the plain of Lombardy Mme
Proust had read aloud from The Stones of Venice the cherished
passage ahout 'the coral reef in Indian seas'; and at first, 'because
we cannot see things at once through the eyes of the body and
the eyes of the mind', Proust was a little disappointed to find the
fa~ade of Saint Mark's less like pearls and rubies than Ruskin had
given him to expect. But when, after an afternoon nap, he
descended to the quays of Venice, imagination and reality had
merged. That evening he sat with Mile Nordlinger at Quadri's
cafe in the square of Saint Mark's, correcting with her help the
manuscript of his translation of The Bihle of Amien!'-; and next
morning at ten o'clock, when his shutters were opened, his eyes
were dazzled by the sunlight falling not, as usual, on the iron
chimney-cowl of the next-door house in Paris, but on the golden
angel over the campanile of Saint Mark's, 'who bore me on his
flashing wings a promise of beauty and joy greater than he ever
brought to Christian hearts, when he came to announce "glory
to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will",'
1 Perhaps 'May morning' should not be taken literally. Proust sent Mlle
Nordlinger a cutting, in which he acknowledged her help, from his article
on Ruskin and Amiens in the Mercure de France for April. He would surely
have sent it well before the end of the month; and as it reached her only the
day before his arrival in Venice, this event should perhaps be dated to the
last week in April. But she may have received the letter several days late, if
it had to be forwarded from Florence.
, Chapter Four only, no doubt.