MARCEL PROUSTso quietly as to be inaudible, conversation was difficult. The
family thought he had shown far too little zeal a few years before,
when Dr Proust had been an unsuccessful candidate for the
Academie des Sciences Morales; and in this again he resembled
M. de Norpois, who at Mme de Villeparisis's matinee sancti-
moniously refuses to vote for the Narrator's father.l Marcel was
to join them later: Mme Proust advised him to wait, because the
hotel was brim-full and noisy; besides, as she would soon have
to return to Paris on important business, they would risk crossing
one another. Meanwhile he continued his Ruskin pilgrimages:
'when you don't write to me,' she remarked, 'I hope it's because
you're off on some interesting, amusing or hygienic excursion'.
He arrived at Evian some time in September, while Dr Proust
apparently moved on to Vichy; and in October, presumably
about the 7th, when the Splendide Hotel closed, he fulfilled his
plan of the previous autumn and went to Venice from Evian, 'at
the best possible time of year'. Of this mysterious second visit to
Venice only a single fact is known: on 19 October 1900 Proust
signed the visitors' register of the Armenian monastery on the
Island of San Lazaro in the Lagoon.^2 But he mentioned it twice
in Contre Sainte-Beuve': 'the moment I saw Venice for the second
time I remembered the evening when, after a quarrel with
Mamma, I cruelly told her I was going away'; and: 'if I wept on
the day when I again saw the window of her room, it was because
it said to me "I remember your mother'''. Perhaps there was
some other reason for his return to Venice and for his remorse
when he arrived. The palaces, paintings and mosaics of Venice,
the blazing sunlight reflected everywhere from cool green water,
offered him novel aspects of art and nature which he may well
have wished to experience again. But Venice also held less avow-
able though hardly less tempting charms, which the presence of
his mother, Mile Nordlinger, the strait-laced aunt and the
quizzical Reynaldo had prevented him from exploring five
months before. For the Narrator the very topography of Venice
1 II,225- 6
2 Except for a pleasant trip by vaporetto on the Lagoon, and a view of
Venice from across the water, no particular motive can be guessed for his
visit to San Lazaro. The Monastery was not one of the usual sights of Venice;
Ruskin does not mention it; and although Byron spent some time with the
Armenian monks there, Proust was not interested in Byron.
- p. 12)