308 MARCEL PROUST
excitement. When he saw Antoine's first letter, in which the very
handwriting was shrunk by suffering, he was reminded of his
own mother's voice on the telephone at Fontainebleau in 1896,
after the deaths of Louis and Nathe Weil, 'broken and bruised,
cracked and fissured, forever changed from the voice I had
always known'. He offered to come to Corcova from February
to June, if Antoine could assure him there were no flowers there
to give him hay-fever; or to Munich for two days, if Antoine
would meet him there half-way; but not till after 2 and 5 January,
for the anniversaries of his grandmother's death and burial
thirteen years before were still strictly kept in the family; or to
Ragusa, Constantinople, or even Egypt. In the end, when all the
inextricable web of planning and counter-planning could be spun
no further, he stayed in Paris.
Antoine was not his only preoccupation during this November
and December. Fenelon had been appointed attache in the
French embassy at Constantinople on 31 October, and was due
to leave on 8 December: Proust, knowing his own inability to
care long for the absent, did not disguise from himself that this
meant the end of their friendship. Another cause for dejection
was that his parents, exasperated by the ever-increasing expense
of his social life, had insisted on putting him-at the age of
thirty-one-on a fixed allowance. The Freudian equation of
money and love was particularly strong in Proust: all his life he
had expected and taken love and money from his parents, to
spend on his friends and give to all who served him. It was as if
his parents had decided to give him less love; and he was still
more outraged by this betrayal than by what seemed to him the
utter inadequacy of the allowance. Perhaps, however, their
motive was not mere economy, but their knowledge that they
had not long to live, and their desire to discipline the extravagant
Marcel at the eleventh hour. His mother, too, who showed
almost excessive indulgence when he was ill, was inclined to be
jealous of his health, and of the social activities, friendships and
freedom from home which it made possible. 'The truth is,' he
told her with severity, 'that the moment I'm well, as the way of
life which makes me well infuriates you, you demolish every-
thing until I'm ill again. • • It's very sad not to be able to have
affection and health both at once.' Her jealousy showed itself in
all manner of petty restrictions and complaints, which, although