302 MARCEL PROUST
Loup-de-Naud, a partly romanesque and partly gothic church,
with the sculptured portal which showed, as Abbe Nappe had
pointed out, such striking analogies with Chartres, and which
Proust transferred to the imaginary church of Saint-Andre-des-
Champs near Combray. The name of Saint-Loup was already. familiar to him from the village near Illiers and the chateau on
the Loire above Orleans; but this visit to the church of Saint-
Loup-de-Naud, with the collective originals of the Marquis de
Saint-Loup-en-Bray, was no doubt decisive for Proust's choice
of his hero's name.
The other journey was the longest and best attended of all. On
Good Friday, 28 March 1902, the automobiles set out to the
north-east of Paris, bearing Proust, the two Bibescos, Fenelon,
Lauris and Robert de Billy-perhaps, also, Lucien Henraux and
Marquis Fran~ois de Paris. Proust solved the problem of getting
up early enough by not going to bed at all; and at every stop on
the way he fortified himself with a stiff cafl-au-lait, for which he
insisted on giving an enormous tip. Their first call was at Saint-
Leu-d'Esserent, a vast church on the Oise not far from Chantilly,
mostly of twelfth-century and earlier date, with one romanesque
and two gothic towers. Inside the church Antoine disgraced him-
self in Proust's eyes by singing the noisy Boulangist ditty, En
revenant de la revue, with appropriate actions. They went on to
the twelfth-century cathedral of Senlis, with its two belfries and
exquisite spire. Lauris remembered Emmanuel here 'explaining
to the attentive Marcel, but refraining from any appearance of
giving a lecture, the features which characterise the church-
towers of the Ile-de-France'. Proust already knew the spire from
a water-colour painted by Marie Nordlinger in 1898, and was to
see it two years later, far away over an endless forest, from the
Due de Gramont's chateau of Valliere: the town was to be sacked
and the cathedral damaged, much to his grief, by the German
invaders in September 1914. The friends reached their furthest
point at Laon, eighty-seven miles from Paris. Laon, ostensibly,
was the town at which Gilberte was staying, when the wind, 'the.
tutelary genius of Comb ray' , seemed to waft her distant presence
to the Narrator over the cornfields of the Meseglise Way; though
in fact, as we have seen, Proust was thinking secretly of the
village of Laons near Illiers, and perhaps of Mme Goupil's niece
there. High in the belfries of the twin towers of the cathedral