SAINT-LOUP 313New Year's Day '903, but intends to unscrew and return the
plaque so ironically engraved with 'Sweetest of blessings is a
genuine friend'; he is 'giving several little dinners soon, but if
anyone asks why you aren't there I'll explain that you're taken
up with your family, your mistress, your country-house and the
army' (for M., we are told, was at this time a sub-lieutenant in an
infantry regiment); and he signs the letter: 'I was, Your very
sincere friend, Marcel Proust.' In a letter to a common friend
about M. he quotes Barres-'yet another lemon squeezed dry'.
'I hope you haven't passed on my kind regards to M., as they
would risk resembling those rays from a star which reach us only
after the star itself has ceased to shine.'
Spurred on by his mother (,You're quite impossible--instead
of admiril\g my positive resurrection and acquiescing in what
made it practicable, you have to insist on my setting to work
again'), he entered in December '902 on a new cycle of literary
work. He added still further to his footnotes for La Bible
d' Amienos: one of his innumerable excuses for not going to
Roumania was the necessity of 'bringing thirty volumes of
Ruskin with me'. Constantin de Brancovan ('the latest person
to call me tu') had launched a new literary magazine, La
Renaissance Latine, and had accepted, as a substitute for the
articles he had originally requested, an abridgement of La Bible
d' Amienos which appeared in the issues for '5 February and 15
March 1903. But Proust had also been commissioned by Gaston
Calmette to write a series of articles on prominent hostesses and
their salons for Le Figaro. This was probably a delayed con-
sequence of a curious incident in the previous August. He had
then tried in vain to arrange for Fenelon to write paragraphs for
the society gossip-columns of Le Figaro, and to persuade
Emmanuel Bibesco to supply information on his fellow-guests at
dinners and soirees ('of course, if you put in any made-up names
or other jokes it would make things so awkward for me that I
hope you'll refrain'); but Fenelon had been half-unwilling,
Emmanuel had refused outright, and the project fell through. The
first article in the series was on Princesse Mathilde (Un Salon
histori'lue: Ie salon de S.A.I. la Princesse Mathilde), and appeared
on 25 February over the signature 'Dominique', a name Proust
had already given himself as the hero of the sketch 'L'Etranger'
in Les Plais;rs et les Jours.