MARCEL PROUSTcan't call me "My dear Marcel", but you might at least put "My
dear friend", which commits you to nothing, not even to friend-
ship.' By April, however, their friendship had advanced far
enough for Proust already to feel disappointed. He sent Guiche
for an Easter present a copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours with a
melancholy inscription: 'To the Duc de Guiche, the true one
rather than the real one, the one who might have been rather
than the one who is .•.. I offer this portrait, now so poor a like-
ness, of a Marcel he has never known.'
Prince Leon Radziwill, nicknamed 'Lache', also aged twenty-
three, was the son of Prince Constantin Radziwill,t whose remote
cousin Prince Michel Radziwill had married Marie de Benardaky
in 1897. The other branches of his large and wealthy family were
scattered over Russia, Poland and Germany; and although the
Constantin Radziwills were by now firmly rooted in France,
Lache would complain: "It's very provoking, when I'm in
Poland people talk about 'You Frenchmen', and when I'm in
France they say 'You Poles'I" His aunt, Princesse Marie Radzi-
will, was one of the most prominent ladies in the court of the
Kaiser, and devoted her life in vain to the promotion of friend-
ship between France and Germany. She was also an aunt of Bani
de Castellane, who once delighted and astonished her by taking
her to the Ritz: "I'm particularly grateful to you for taking me
to that inn, my dear," she said, "because I have never dined at an
inn before." Lache was a young man of giant size, 'more like a
block than a statue', with 'expressively inexpressive blue eyes', as
Proust wrote one evening that autumn at Ermenonville, Prince
Constantin Radziwill's chateau. The others had gone to bed,
leaving Proust in the dining-room to write a character-sketch
of Loche, and to freeze by the dying stove; he composed a
wounded and wounding rigmarole of fifteen hundred words.
Lache's voice, 'with its amusing slowness and false affability,
seems clotted with foolishness and naivete'; 'he would do any-
thing for a friend except be his friend, in so far as that word
1 Montesquiou, who might well have claimed to be the inventor of the
clerihew, wrote:
'It is most uncivil
To mention ladies to Constantin Raqiwill,'
Lache's father, as we shall see, was the original of the Prince de Guelmantes
in his later aspect as a homosexual.