MARCEL PROUSTof cancer of the tongue in his father's medical books; M. de
Palancy's monocle seemed to Swann at Mme de Saint-Euverte's
a part intended to symbolise the whole, like the branch carried
by Injustice to represent the forests in which he lurks; and
Albertine playing diabolo on the promenade at Balbec resembled
Infidelity, who carries, attached by a long cord, the idol or 'devil'
which is the object of her guilty worship.1 The Virtues and Vices
of Padua, after which he once intended to call a whole section of
his novel, were only the lowest rank of four frescoes; in the third
row above was a Crucifixion, in which the suffering Christ was
attended by diminutive weeping angels, who unlike most of their
kind used their wings not as mere emblems, but for actual flying.
When he wrote Alhertine Disparue, late in the World War, and
remembered Giotto's angels looping and nose-diving, he com-
pared them to 'the young pupils of Garros'2-Roland Garros, the
aviator killed in action in 1918, whose aerodrome he had visited
with Agostinelli, who, he too, and four years sooner, was
destined to die of flying.
Leaving the chapel, and crossing the Piazza dell' Arena under
a sky which seemed scarcely brighter than the blue ceiling above
the angels, they reached the Eremitani and saw Mantegna's fresco
of the life of St James, 'one of the paintings I love best in the
world,' Proust wrote to Montesquiou seven years later. One of the
soldiers who stands aloof and brooding while St James is martyred
is recalled by Swann at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, when he sees the
gigantic footman who seemed 'as resolved to ignore the group
of his comrades thronging about Swann, although he followed
them vaguely with his cruel, grey-green eyes, as if the scene had
been a Massacre of the Innocents or a Martyrdom of St James'.3
By the third week of May Reynaldo, Mile N ordlinger and the
high-principled aunt had left, and Proust's stay in Venice was
nearly over. It is probable that a quarrel with his mother occurred
at this time: not so much because it is described in Alhertine
Disparue,4 for there the episode is aesthetically necessary, in order
that the magic of Venice, like that of all other Names and Places,
should fade at last; but because, like other incidents in Proust's
life, it appears in Contre Sainte-Beuve briefly and without apparent
purpose, and linked with another memory which is certainly real.'
1 I, 80-2, 327, 886 • III,648 • I, 324 • III, 6)1-f
i His remorse on his second visit to Venice, described below.