336 MARCEL PROUST
Mme de Noailles, 'and I can't help being afraid.' He had recently
abandoned La Bible d'Amiens, perhaps from momentary bore-
dom, or pique at Vallette's impatience, but more probably, as in
the December before, to spite his parents. But his mother briskly
intervened: "It was your father's one desire," she declared, "he
waited from day to day to see it published"; and he wrote once
more to Vallette, and resumed the endless task of imposing
perfection on his proofs. For the last year or two Mme Proust
had slept in a separate room; but she now moved to Dr Proust's
bedroom, with its little cabinet from Indo-China and marquetry
card-table and bureau, to spend every night with her dead
husband for ever. Her time was short; she could not wait to keep,
as she did for her parents according to Jewish custom, the 'year's
end' of her loss. Every month, at first even every week, the three
days of her husband's attack, death and burial were made sacred;
and Marcel humoured her by observing them too, partly because
it was a useful excuse when Montesquiou or others were pressing
and he did not wish to go out.
'Life is beginning again,' he wrote to Mme de N oailles; but the
life of every day had somehow become less real. The craving of
his childhood, to enjoy his mother's love and be rid of his father,
was ironically fulfilled when it was long outgrown. Her mourning
presence was an embarrassment: she, not his father, was an un-
wanted ghost in the house.
The old man was gone; the blowing of his nose, the rustle of
his Journal des Debats would be heard no more; and it seemed
that an indispensable condition of life in the present had been
removed. Dr Proust returned, not as a benign, grey-bearded old
man, but as a black, ascending shadow on the now demolished
staircase at Auteuil. "You can see for yourself the child's un-
happy," he declared; "after all, we're not gaolers! You'd better
stay with him for the rest of the night." Proust realised with
vertigo that only his stricken, weakening mother remained to
keep him from falling into the past. He stood at last on the edge
of the abyss of Time Lost.
END OF VOLUME ONE