Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [35]
According to Henri Bonnet’s Marcel Proust de 1907 à 1914, it was this band of boys, met casually on the beach and observed with feverish fascination, who directly inspired Proust’s novelistic description of the undifferentiated group of girls in bloom. The transpositions Proust made are obvious in his journals. For instance, in Within a Budding Grove a young woman, Andrée, impresses the Narrator initially when she leaps over an old man on the beach, although later he loses interest in her after she explains that she is in reality as neurasthenic as the Narrator and has become athletic only under doctor’s orders. But in his notebooks Proust writes, “I linked myself with an eminent sportsman who seemed my polar opposite and whose company would provide a calming cure for my exhausted nerves—and he told me that if he played so many sports it was only to cure his neurasthenia.”
His special favorite was nineteen-year-old Marcel Plantevignes, who visited Proust in his room nearly every day for hours, listening to Proust’s novel-in-progress, until one afternoon a mocking young lady warned Plantevignes against Proust’s “special morals.” When Proust learned that Plantevignes had made no protest against the accusation, he went into a rage against the boy and even challenged Plantevignes’s father to a duel, by now a familiar reflex when Proust imagined his honor had been compromised. Since Proust was entirely silent about the nature of the offense, Plantevignes could not begin to imagine what he had done wrong. Even Proust’s “seconds” (one of whom was the viscount d’Alton) could not stop laughing at the absurdity of the challenge, especially since Proust had intimated he would fire in the air above Monsieur Plantevignes’s head. They kept calling it a “duel from an operetta by Offenbach.”
At last Proust dropped a hint about what had so offended him. As Plantevignes, at last enlightened, later recalled:
Suddenly I saw that brief scene again. The encounter on the promenade had been so quick and fortuitous that I had never thought about it. She was a young woman very fond of teasing, who often teased Proust about homosexuality and who, when she had met me on the promenade, had stopped me again to warn me and cast her terrible aspersions. “I know, I know, Madame, what you’re going to tell me,” I had answered quickly, “but it has no importance as far as I’m concerned. Excuse me, Madame, goodbye, I’m in a big hurry.” And I had fled as quickly as possible.
The young lady had told Proust soon afterwards that Plantevignes had agreed with her by replying to her charges, “Yes, I know all about it, but it’s all the same to me.” When Proust confronted the boy directly, asking him, “How did you know what she was going to say?” the exasperated Plantevignes replied, “Because that’s what everyone’s whispering on the promenade.” A stunned, pale Proust absorbed the news, then finally stated sarcastically, “How charming to arrive somewhere preceded by one’s reputation.”
When Plantevignes assured Proust that he did not believe the gossip, nor did his parents, the writer was at last mollified, although he warned Plantevignes not to talk about their friendship to strangers. Then both men exchanged a mocking, merry glance. “And our mutual enthusiasm,” Plantevignes recalled, “suddenly released from all constraint, became so boyish and comical that we burst out laughing simultaneously, drowning our recent estrangement in a resolution sumptuous with joy.”
Soon Proust was again tranquilly admiring this young man, a spirit “still in flower,” as he put it in a letter written at the time—a reference that is a flash-forward to the French