TIME BEGINS TO BE LOSTtheocracy.' He ended with a warning which history was to
justify: 'at the present time the socialists commit the same error
by being anti-clerical as the clericals in 1897 by being anti-
Dreyfusard. They expiate their fault to-day; but we shall expiate
ours to-morrow.' Lauris acknowledged long afterwards that
Proust was right; and meanwhile Albufera, astonished that a
Dreyfusard could be so fair-minded as to defend the Church in
a time of persecution, asked him 'to explain the Affair to me so
that I can share your conviction'. 'Only I haven't the heart to,'
Proust told Lauris, 'and my one regret in being a Dreyfusard is
that it saddens the loyal and noble Albufera.' But the chief con-
sequence of that evening's argument was that Proust had been
inspired, in his evocation of the church of Saint-Jacques, to see
further into the meaning of Illiers than he could in Jean Santeuil.
Illiers was now on the verge of becoming Combray, which, 'seen
from the railway when we arrived there in the week before
Easter, was nothing but a church epitomising the town'.
Early in August Dr and Mme Proust left for their last holiday
together. After a few days at St Moritz, a week at Interlaken and
a short stay at Ouchy, they arrived by the lake steamer on 18
August at Evian, where Dr Proust was to take a course of treat-
ment. As in any other year the Hellbronners, Weisweillers and
Duplays, the barrister Maitre Ployel and the judge M. Gougeon
were there. But the Splendide Hotel was so appallingly noisy that
Mme Proust recommended her son to go instead to Cabourg,
'because you used to find it suited your health so well'-advice
which he only took, like a counsel from beyond the grave, four
years later.
Meanwhile Proust was ill with asthma. In an interval between
his attacks he dined with Antoine and his friends at Armenonville
in the Bois de Boulogne, where Odette, to Swann's despair,
listened with the little clan to the Vinteuil Sonata in the moon-
light, and where Proust himself nine years before had invited
Montesquiou and Delafosse in vain. The painter Vuillard was
present and made a sketch of the gathering, 'a unique point of
intersection between his admirable talent, which has so often
kindled my memory, and one of the most delightful and perfect
hours of my life,' as Proust wrote a year later when he asked to be
allowed to buy the sketch-where is it now? Fenelon, too, fell ill
in the last week of his leave, and was visited daily by Proust,