The Two Hundred Sixty-Seven Plants in the Writings of Marcel Proust (1871-1922): A Documentary Interpretation of the Botanical Influences on His Literature 0779906292, 9780779906291

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ICE Two HUNDRED SIXTY-SEVEN PLANTS IN THE WRITINGS OF MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922) A Documentary Interpretation of the Botanical Influences on His Literature Brian D. Morley

With a Foreword by

Stephen D. Hopper

The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston'Queenston•Lampeter

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morley, Brian D. (Brian Derek) The two hundred sixty-seven plants in the writings of Marcel Proust, 18711922 : a documentary interpretation of the botanical influences on his literature I Brian D. Morley ; with a foreword by Stephen D. Hopper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-3068-6 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 0-7734-3068-7 (hardcover) 1. Proust, Marcel; 1871-1922--Knowledge--Botany. 2. Botany in literature. L Title. II. Title: 267 plants in the writings of Marcel Proust (1871-1922). PQ2631.R63Z7855 2012 843.912--dc23 2012026118 hors serie. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2012 Brian D. Morley All rights reserved. For information contact The Edwin Mellen Press Box 450 Lewiston, New York USA 14092-0450

The Edwin Mellen Press Box 67 Queenston, Ontario CANADA LOS 1L0

The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

Dedicated to the Hon. Rose Talbot who encouraged completion of what she considered a 'most interesting and amusing' study.

Analytical Table of Contents Foreword by Professor Stephen D. Hopper Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Childhood Auteuil Illiers Neighbours The Pre-Catelan Orris root Flowering currant Snowball tree Hawthorn Lilac Strawberry Violets and pansies Some roses from childhood Peas Garden nasturtium Water plants The river and its plants Other plants from childhood Garden features Interiors Paris Champs-Elysées Bois de Boulo * e Guermantes gardens School Chapter 2 Adolescence

Les Plaisirs...

Relationships

i v ix 1 13 14 15 17 21 27 28 30 31 36 34 40 43 44 45 46 48 50 54 55 58 61 66 66 68 75

77

77

The countryside Family life in Paris The Tuileries The Louvre Versailles Bois de Boulogne The Swanns fillers Dieppe Balbec Cabourg Brittany Railways leading to the coast Rivebelle Restaurant The little band of girls Elstir Albertine

80 81 84 84 84 85 87 92 95 97 102 103 104 106 106 110 113

Chapter 3 A camellia button-hole period Les Fremonts La Raspeliere The interior of la Raspeliere Mme Verdurin, Elstir and Mme Swann Professor Brichot The garden at la Raspeliere Feterne Château de RevelHon Country walks The interior at Revelllon The garden at Reveillon The roses at Revelllon Reynaldo Hahn Beg-Meil Apple blossom Wildflowers in Brittany

117 118 119 123 125 127 133 135 137 139 143 146 148 154 156 160

Chapter 4 The demon of generosity Florists Odette de Crecy

167 170 171

Odette's oers The Guermantes family Madame de Villeparisis The Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes Princesse de Guermantes Princesse de Parme Montesquiou and Charlus

173 181 184 187 195 197 200

Chapter 5 Living a life Provins Orleans Doncieres Saint-Loup and Rachel Paris Mme Cephise Desroches New per?le, old places The arts Versailles revisited Bois de Boulogne A Florentine fantasy Domesticity Waking and sleeping The coffee habit Food Asparagus Motoring Travels Health

215 216 216 217 218 221 222 224 228 230 232 233 234 236 237 240 243 247 249 256

Chapter 6 A Ruskin interlude Marie Nordlinger La Bible d'Amiens Sesame et les Lys Tree of Jesse Flowers and painters Proust's inner self Some writers

263 264 267 279 283 285 291 292

Chapter 7 Human herbalist-moral botanist Taxonomies Boissier Sainte-Beuve The Baron's pears and roses The lone Digitalis The bonsai manchineel The historian of the Fronde Two unnamed shrubs Terminologies Technicalities Inheritance Alternation of Generations Love's lessons Philadelphus Andre Jupien Unisexuality Hermaphrodity Polymorphic flowers Plant collections

295 297 300 301 302 305 306 309 310 312 315 316 316 319 319 321 324 326 328 332 335

Chapter 8 Time...and time again Anna de Noailles Balzac Street cries Love-apples The Great War A telescope fixed on time Involuntary memory Epiphanies Déjà-vu

339 339 344 347 351 353 364 368 372 376

Postscript

379

Illustrated Appendix List of Abbreviations

389 419

Notes Notes to Preface, Introduction and Chapters Bibliography

420 421 445

Indices Index to plant names, terms and topics Index to people and places

455 455 493

Table of Figures Illustrated Appendix Fig. 1 Adiantum capillus-veneris Maidenhair Fern Fig. 2 Agrirnonia eupatoria Agrimony Fig. 3 Anemone nemorosa Wood Anemone Fig. 4 Antirrhinum majus Snapdragon Fig. 5 Arbutus unedo Strawberry Tree Fig. 6 Asparagus ofj7cinalis Asparagus Fig. 7 Buxus sempervirens Box Fig. 8 Calluna vulgaris Ling Fig. 9 Calystegia sepium Greater Bindweed Fig. 10 Centaurea cyanus Cornflower Fig. 11 Chamaemelum nobile Camomile Fig. 12 Clematis vitalba Traveller's Joy Fig. 13 Corylus avellana Hazel Fig. 14 Cuscuta europaea Dodder Fig. 15 Cyclamen hederifolium Sowbread Fig. 16 Digitalis purpurea Foxglove Fig. 17 Erica cinerea Bell Heather Fig. 18 Fagus sylvatica Beech Fig. 19 Filipendula ulmaria Meadowsweet Fig. 20 Fragaria vesca Strawberry Fig. 21 Gentiana verna Spring Gentian Fig. 22 Geranium pratense Meadow Cranesbill Fig. 23 Hedera helix Ivy Fig. 24 Hyacinthoides non-scripta Bluebell Fig. 25 Lythrum salicaria Purple Loosestrife Fig. 26 Malus sylvestris Crab Apple

389 391 391 392 392 393 393 394 394 395 395 396 396 397 397 398 398 399 399 400 400 401 401 402 402 403 403

Fig. 27 Fig. 28 Fig. 29 Fig. 30 Fig. 31 Fig. 32 Fig. 33 Fig. 34 Fig. 35 Fig. 36 Fig. 37 Fig. 38 Fig. 39 Fig. 40 Fig. 41 Fig. 42 Fig. 43 Fig. 44 Fig. 45 Fig. 46 Fig. 47 Fig. 48 Fig. 49 Fig. 50 Fig. 51 Fig. 52 Fig. 53 Fig. 54 Fig. 55 Fig. 56

Malva sylvestris Common Mallow Matthiola sinuata Sea Stock Medicago sativa Lucerne Mimulus x robertsii Monkey Flower Myosotis sylvatica Wood Forget-me-not Onobrychis viciifolia Sainfoin Papaver somniferum Opium Poppy Primula vulgaris Primrose Prunus spinosa Sloe Pteridium aquilinum Bracken Pyrus communis Pear Ranunculus acris Buttercup Ranunculus aquatilis Water Crowfoot Reseda luteola Weld Ribes sativum Red Currant Rosa canina Dog Rose Rubus fruticosus Blackberry Salix viminalis Osier Sedum acre Wallpepper Taraxacum officinale Dandelion Taxus baccata Yew Tilia x europaea Common Lime Trifolium repens White Clover Ulmus glabra Wych Elm Urtica dioica Stinging Nettle Valeriana officinalis Valerian Viburnum opulus Guelder Rose Vinca major Periwinkle Viola odorata Sweet Violet Viscum album Mistletoe

404 404 405 405 406 406 407 407 408 408 409 409 410 410 411 411 412 412 413 413 414 414 415 415 416 416 417 417 418 418

Foreword by Professor Stephen D. Hopper Brian Morley has had a long association with Kew, as an undergraduate vacation student in the Herbarium in 1962 in the care of Desmond Meikle; as a postgraduate student in the Jodrell Laboratory from 1966 until 1968 working with his supervisor Keith Jones and as a free-lance author in 1969 working with the botanical artist, the late Barbara Everard, based here at Kew and the British Museum. One of my predecessors, Sir George Taylor, wrote the Foreword to the very successful illustrated book that Brian and Mrs Everard published with Michael Joseph and the Ebury Press in 1970, entitled Wild Flowers of the World. The book remained in print for some 20 years and was translated into Dutch and German editions. Brian became Director of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium in Adelaide in 1980 and it was in Australia that I first met him in the early 1990's as a colleague in my capacity as the new Director of Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth. I had, of course, previously read with interest some of his botanical research work on gesneriads during my own PhD studies at the University of Western Australia. I moved to Kew in 2006, a little after Brian retired from the botanic garden in 2000 and wondered what he had chosen to pursue thereafter. It was a delightful surprise to be invited to contribute this Foreword to the latest contribution from Brian's creative writing. He has certainly not been idle in retirement. Whether an administrator or author, Brian has been interested in the interaction between art and science as it relates to the plant world. His other books have done much to popularise the rich diversity of flowering plants in the conventional way of combining his botanical knowledge and writing with the skills

of botanical artists, amongst whom may be included his wife, June Morley. This book on the plants associated with the writing of Marcel Proust is altogether different, because it is a literary investigation based on that author's fiction and correspondence. I am delighted to commend Brian Morley's erudite and witty text, full of unexpected twists and interest to those who enjoy links between art and science. Proust was a chronic asthmatic as well as being a great twentieth century writer, yet was also passionate about plants which caused him to suffer so and he used them as a creative tool. It is a typical Proustian paradox which Brian has spent more than 15 years researching. He is now able to demonstrate that few authors of fiction of any era have utilised plants as creatively as Proust. I think it remarkable that no-one else, other than Samuel Beckett in passing, appears to have scrutinised Proust's writing about plants before now. This is an engaging reference work with full documentation of sources of information and indices, but also being accessible and amusing at times because that is how Proust would have it. It soon becomes very clear to the reader that plants and Proust mean a great deal to Brian Morley. Proust has an undeserved notoriety for being difficult to read with some people, due to the length of his magnum opus and, in places, its even longer sentences, but Brian combines a botanical and literary scholarship to provide a new dimension of understanding to Proust's writing; about its plants for the literati; about providing an alternative introduction to Proust's work for plant-lovers. The line drawings of Kew's W.H.Fitch are entirely in keeping with the period dealt with, as are the references to William Robinson. 11

I think that Proust might have been amused that the dedicatee of this work about him, The Hon.Rose Talbot, was herself responsible with an unquestioning nobility of spirit, for the completion of the very beautiful The Endemic Flora of Tasmania, begun in Ireland by her brother, The Lord Talbot de Malahide, just before the centenary of Proust's birth. Margaret Stones, the botanical, artist at Kew, completed all of the illustrations in conjunction with a text by Winifred Curtis and Kenneth Ai -Shaw. Just as Proust celebrated a world he remembered together with its plants, so this book celebrates Proust and those plants for the first time. As we approach the centenary of his death I think that he would have approved of this tribute to his creativity. Professor Stephen D.Hopper Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

111

Preface The discovery of Proust's plants first requires that Proust be discovered as a writer and for that I have two people to thank. Gerald Challis, senior master of French and German, introduced me at school in Coventry to the literature of these worlds. At that time he owned, much to my lasting admiration, a black 1938 Hooper-bodied Rolls-Royce Sports Saloon, one of only four made, acquired from Clarence Fell of Yeldersly Hall, near Ashbourne, Derbyshire through the then well known dealer David `Bunty' Scott Moncrieff, brother of Charles, even more well known as translator into English of A la recherche... The other person was Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), himself also born in Coventry, whose many delightful articles in the Sunday Times included ones on Proust, making me resolve to read that author one day; like many another I have been much rewarded. My own interest in plants from the earliest years no doubt relates to something inherited from and encouraged by both sides of the family, including plant purchases at the streetmarket in Nuneaton very close to the birthplace of Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880) at Arbury. The little girl who was to become famous as George Eliot and whom Proust so admired as a writer, attended schools at Attleborough (1825-27), Nuneaton (1828-32) and Coventry (1832-35). With the death of her mother in 1836, she moved with her father to live at Foleshill, Coventry in 1841. At about the same time, in 1838, William Robinson' was born in Stradbally, County Leix in Ireland. He became the head gardener of the Revd. Sir Hunt Johnson-Walsh on the neighbouring estate of Ballykilcavan until one winter night in 1861. Following a violent disagreement with his employer, Robinson left for Dublin after extinguishing the fires in the

greenhouse boilers and opening all of the windows. By dawn the baronet's tropical plant collection was dead or dying. At the Botanic Garden in Glasnevin, (where over a century later I first heard this strange tale from the Curator, the late Tom Crawford), the director was David Moore who advised Robinson to go to England. There he worked under Robert Mamock at the Botanic Society's Garden at Regent's Park, assembling a collection of British native plant species which provided inspiration for his later literary career and was certainly the basis for his best known work The English Flower Garden (1883). He spent almost a year in Paris in 1865. Between 1870, when Robinson published The Wild Garden and his death in 1935, this pugnacious and opinionated horticultural writer had successfully revolutionised gardening style in Britain and elsewhere, rejecting the fussy formality of the Victorian era for an informality found in nature and in the cottage garden. He founded the influential English language periodicals The Garden (1871-1927) and Flora and Sylva (1903-05). The `Robinsonian garden' was fully realised in the years of his retirement from 1890 at his property Gravetye Manor in Sussex. The Parks and Gardens of Paris was used as a vehicle in which to propound his bombastic and often caustic views on landscape, but it is a fortunate coincidence that the second revised edition of 1878, provided descriptions and period illustrations of the planted Paris which the seven year old Proust knew and later came to immortalise. Robinson also knew John Ruskin and they shared a love of plants and an aversion to botany and botanists! In Proust's great novel the narrator, his grandmother, Odette de Crecy and Mme de Villeparisis, together with Proust's uncle Jules, all embrace the principles of Robinson. The narrator makes fun of the statues in the Tuileries on his visit there in 1896, as Robinson had done, and there are vi

several other coincidences which I point out that make one think that Proust may have read a copy of Robinson's The Parks and Gardens of Paris. It is hoped that this study will better familiarise readers with many of Proust's plants, but also provide an opportunity to view his writing from a different perspective. Just as the study of the autograph of a piece of music provides insight into a composer's creative thinking, so an awareness of Proust's plants improves our understanding of the man and his art.

vii

Acknowledgements Donna Anstey of Yale University Press is thanked for making the necessary arrangements for me to secure permission to quote passages from Marcel Proust On Reading Ruskin by Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip J.Wolfe (1987). The late Henry McIlhenny and Derek Hill introduced me to Philippe Jullian's writing on Symbolism and Montesquiou long before I first read any Proust. The late Gaye Denny, onetime Librarian of the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide and State Herbarium, South Australia, was ever helpful in the early days of the study, as were Dinah Edwards and Chris Steele-Scott. The Director, Professor S. Hopper, and staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens and Herbarium, Kew have, as always, been most courteous and helpful in responding to several possibly tiresome enquiries. Professor Jean-Yves Tadie gave me the benefit of his scholarship before drafting began. After seeing my manuscript, Ernest M. Wiltshire gave me his annotated copy of Beckett's book on Proust as confirmation of the thrust of my study. Martin Brayne has throughout been a continuing source of encouragement, scholarly information and good sense, together with my wife, June, who has always provided answers to sometimes obscure questions. Gerald Challis was kind enough to refresh my memory about his Rolls-Royce collection. Stefan Morley and his company Gecko Vision Australia provided technical and computer graphics support in preparing the manuscript and illustrations for publication.

ix

Thanks are also due to Professor H. Richardson and Mrs P. Schulz of The Edwin Mellen Press for their patience and helpful advice.

Introduction The writing of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is some of the most influential of the 20th century. Few authors of fiction of any period have used plant themes in the way and to the extent that Proust did. The contemporary of Proust, Andre Gide (18691951), made several autobiographical allusions to plants in his Journals 1889-1949. In July 1932 he wrote of his youth that what he had most longed for was to be able to study plants, and again in August 1937 that Goethe had been a great help to him, and botany. On a visit to the Jardin des Plantes in March 1938 he had observed in his journal that perhaps the way of communing with God that most satisfied him was that of the naturalist. Gide also made similar references in his autobiographical novel Si le grain ne meurt (1924), but Proust's largely unacknowledged literary use of botanical and plant related topics is qualitatively and quantitatively of a different order of magnitude and one which deserves consideration. Not long after Proust's death, Samuel Beckett (Proust, p.68) was one of the first to observe in 1931 that it was significant that the majority of Proust's images are botanical. In choosing to write on plants, about which it is evident he knew a great deal more than the general reader, Proust was confronted with the choice of using certain botanical terms and names to articulate his thoughts with an audience having a traditional reluctance to embrace such terminology, or alternatively simplifying his plant descriptions, like Maurice Maeterlinck in his L'Intelligence des flews, but then perhaps being unable to fully express what he wanted to say. Without debating the reasons why some technical terms gain popular currency, such as those used to describe electronic equipment, the details of classical music, or astronomical advances, while 1

others are resisted, such as those in botany and some other sciences, I have little doubt that the scale of Proust's use of plant reference has been undetermined simply for want of looking. Proust was careful to avoid being pedantic in the use of his plant knowledge and in drawing attention to his plantworld it is necessarily a risk which I must run! Although plants may be considered commonplace and taken for granted, their origins and internal workings are extraordinary to anyone who gives them a few moments of serious contemplation as Proust clearly did. Anchored as they are, to prevent them from being blown, or washed away, by roots which in land plants simultaneously enable all-essential water to be drawn into the tissues of the organism, like a wick, these aerial or aquatic structures of enormous diversity of shape and size, some lasting for centuries, others for only a few days, all successfully intercept and harness a portion of the sun's energy to help materialise simple chemicals with which they sustain and are able to reproduce themselves. From the life processes of plants over a period of not less than 500 million years there have been released waste products into the environment, notably oxygen, to help create a habitable planet as well as providing a food source upon which all other living things, i.e. animals and fungi, directly or indirectly depend. That such a diversity of living things should have developed and evolved on this planet from the raw materials that we know to exist in outer space is miraculous, awe inspiring and somewhat mysterious as Proust often acknowledged in his writing. The biography of Proust by Tadiet provides a scholarly commentary on the life, work and times of Proust leading to his final great work, A la recherche du temps perdu, which was first 2

published in its entirety only after Proust's death. Painter's earlier biography 2 provides a more personal assessment, a counterpoint which has continuing value. From these sources we learn that in the spring of 1881 when still only nine years old, Proust had his first asthma attack after a walk with his family in the Bois de Boulogne' and this allergy to airborne dust, pollen and perfumes lasted for most of the rest of his life. In 1921 Proust described how he had endured many nasal cauterizations in an effort to destroy the sensitivity of his nose to pollen (4). Through his letters one can trace his deteriorating health while yet still achieving an amazing literary output. With a childlike fascination Proust never stopped asking questions and investigating, as Tadie wrote, all of those subjects that could help satisfy his aesthetic curiosity and also help compensate for the immobility imposed by chronic illness (5). Literature, history, art, music, architecture, technology and human beings were only some of the subjects which fascinated Proust and they are all woven into the tapestry of his correspondence, articles, poetry and novels. In his article for Le Figaro, 'La Mort des cathedrales' (6), Proust wrote that cathedral architecture represented a minor reflecting all science, art and history held up to the eyes and minds of mankind; the statement applies equally to his own writing. Proust often used a process of dismantling and reassembling his own experiences to help create the fictional worlds of Etreuilles in Jean Santeuil (Illiers and Auteuil), Combray in A la recherche... (Illiers and Auteuil) and Balbec in A la recherche... (Cabourg and Dieppe). To better understand such an author it is to the inherent sources of his inspiration that we might turn: his parents; the authors, poets, artists and composers he knew; the buildings he knew and the history that they represented; his humor, sexuality and illnesses; the seasons and plants he knew, 3

for all of these are less susceptible to being dissembled. Put differently, plants, like his mother and music, inspired his life and his fiction. Proust used received literature, art, music and architecture extensively in his writing and all have been the subjects of specialist analysis. For example Nattiez (7) provides a three page bibliography of studies on the use of music alone in A la recherche... Matore & Mecz (8) identified 170 writers, 80 painters and 40 composers or other musicians referred to in the same novel, Wagner having 35 references, Beethoven 25 and Debussy 13. Such studies are the more remarkable for largely ignoring the lifelong passion for plants about which Proust constantly wrote and which he declared to be the very essence of his life (9). It is easy to overlook Proust's use of plants, or plant related topics, so familiar are they in his writing, so closely integrated are they with his ideas and foiiiis of expression, but with scrutiny a pattern of categories of his literary use of plants exists. These include the use of particular species of plant as a leitmotiv for particular fictional characters; others being the basis for the creation of eccentric similes like those used by his beloved Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Eliot; some being used for sexual symbolism; others used for fashion, art historic, botanical or horticultural statement; yet others used to describe desires such as that of eating, as well as the more orthodox use of plants, like that found in Gustave Flaubert's writing (1821-1880), as inhabitants of scenery, of landscapes and gardens. Proust's correspondence provides many instances of plantrelated experience which are either later transposed into his writing as reminiscence, or fully transformed into fiction. Many 4

of the quotations that I might have chosen from A la recherche...to illustrate the use of a particular plant species have actually had, or almost seem to have had, a prior existence in reality, or in his earlier fiction, before being incorporated as part of the greater work, a result no doubt of the manner in which Proust worked. The happiness and consolation which Proust said that plants provided him throughout his life, coupled with the serious health problems these plants incurred is a classic Proustian contradiction which would not have been lost to him and is evident in his writing, if we look and listen. Unlike many people in his life, plants never disappointed or compromised the love he had for them as he had explained with resigned sadness to his close friend Robert de Flers on the eve of his marriage in April 1904 (10); he said that he hoped that Robert and his wife enjoyed the sun and the flowers which did him so much harm but which he loved so very much. Shattuck (11) made the point about Proust, plants and people that few grounds for human dignity survive Proust's touch; yet soon after this statement, perhaps by a process of serendipity, plants re-emerge in Shattuck's comment (12) that by the time Gallimard published the second volume after the war, the manuscript had grown unsuppressibly like a carnivorous vine that would finally entwine and devour its owner. Anatole France (1844-1924) had in 1896 already expressed the same notion in the Preface he wrote to Proust's early work Les Plaisirs et les Jours. France explained that this young author entices one into a tropical place among strangely beautiful orchids, perfuming the heavy air, through which the poet projects, like X-rays, the shafts of his secret thoughts and desires. 5

Paul Morand (13) was the recipient of the confession from Proust on 1 March 1917, that people disappointed him so much that he was more curious about flowers, and many other things that could not be seen from the bedroom. But he then added that when people didn't disappoint, then nothing was more marvellous! The use of plant imagery and garden topics, particularly in A la recherche..., has more than a general literary interest. It may have a fundamental importance to the structure of the entire novel if the arguments of Beckett (14) and those of Henry (15) are in any way correct. These authors considered that the ideas of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) influenced Proust, at least in the structural dynamics of A la recherche... Schopenhauer assigned an hierarchy of importance to the arts beginning with the inorganic world and raw materials: then the kingdom of plants and art of gardening: then architecture: then painting and finally according to music the role of the revelatory and transcendent art form. Henry has argued that this hierarchy is mirrored in the structure of A la recherche..., but Tadié (16) rejected the influence of Schopenhauer on Proust, pointing to the importance of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The two differing views could be reconciled by being an example of Proust's at times impish nature, using the two philosophers as and when he chose. The narrator (17) did say of Mme de Cambremer that she was a remarkable woman, who knew her Schopenhauer and at least had access to an intellectual sphere which was closed to her boorish husband! The literary use made by Proust of each of the major plant references is very deliberate in creative space and time with relatively few duplications, thus making any attempted editorial 6

act on my part necessarily one of omission. Certain plants receive more attention than others, such as apple and hawthorn, and we can surmise that this is because Proust liked them and, or, they offered more literary opportunity. It is clear to me that a plant-plan existed, coeval to when A la recherche... began its genesis as a work of art, with Proust intent on giving his personal plant-world a place in his writing. The index to Proust's use of plant related topics at the end of this book shows his almost systematic approach to each letter in the alphabet. While his plant references are usually a means to a greater creative end, they nonetheless document an aspect of his personality. The plants that his mind loved, but body rejected, were carefully sown, nurtured in his earlier writing and finally positioned in the gardens of his magnum opus which only reached the audience he sought after his death. Proust's personal delight in plants is there for us to discover as we read and, then, to understand the shocking truth that for him this was ultimately a lethal love. Despite Beckett (Proust, p. 68) drawing our attention more than seventy years ago to the way in which Proust assimilates the human to the vegetal, it is poignant that Proust's plant-world has remained largely unheeded after almost a century of critical analysis of his writing. The narrator declared (18) that he had come to understand that all of the materials for a work of literature were simply his past life; he understood that they had come to him, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, tenderness, unhappiness, and that he had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant. Like the seed, he should be able to 7

die once the plant had developed and he began to perceive that he had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it. When Proust chose to be trivial it was by conscious design. He was fastidious in his selection of words, or plants, as shown in a letter to his dear friend Lucien Daudet (1878-1946) written early in September 1913 (19); Proust had thanked him for the names of the flowers, but pansies (which he adored and about which he had written) were not quite what he wanted because they were flat, broad flowers, and scentless; he needed something more like verbena. Perhaps, he suggested, for lack of anything better, he'd settle for hyacinths, in no way resembling verbenas, but at least they weren't flat and broad. But he didn't think that they were exactly bedding flowers. Mimulus he thought enchanting but too Latin and needing explanation unless it had a vernacular name. It does, but perhaps the common name of 'monkey flower' did not appeal to him as it does not seem to have appeared in his creative writing. Proust would probably have known the yellow-flowered M luteus and Al guttatus, two of the 100 species in this all-American genus, but ones which have now become naturalised and hybridised in Europe and often found growing in damp places, see Fig. 30. He would also have probably known the musk plant of gardens, Al moschatus, once commonly cultivated for its scented foliage, but the scented form seems to have been lost in cultivation. The monkey flowers belong to the foxglove family, Scrophulariaceae. Speaking to his house keeper, Celeste Albaret (20), about a monkey, Proust once disclosed his aversion to animals. He recounted how one evening a man had gone to one of Mme Straus' dinner parties with a pet monkey in a stiff shirt and complete evening dress. He added that apart from the fact that 8

he didn't care for animals, it was in extremely bad taste! Beckett (Proust, p. 68) had noted in 1931 that there are no black cats and faithful hounds in Proust's writing. Proust loved plants just as he loved many other things. In his essay on Goethe (21) he wrote that the topics habitually recurring in books show what has fired the inspiration of an author so that it is easy to see what has made a strong impression on the mind. From his frequent references to plants Proust was clearly informed about them, many aspects of botany and the horticulture of his day. The narrator in A la recherche. . . (22) declared that it was pre-eminently as the deepest layer of his 'mental soil', as the firm ground on which he still stood, that he regarded the Méséglise and Guermantes ways. He considered them to be the only ones that, in later life, he still took seriously and that brought joy.. .the Méséglise way with its lilacs, hawthorns, cornflowers, poppies, its apple-trees, the Guermantes way with its river full of tadpoles, its waterlilies and its buttercups. They constituted for him for all time the image of the landscape in which he should have liked to live. We may be forgiven for thinking that this must also have held for Proust not least because the narrator reflected, (23), that the mind was subject to external influences, as plants are, and cells and chemical elements. And an author will have his way with his fictional characters! So there is the contradiction of this chronic asthmatic being enraptured and knowledgeable about many different sorts of plant: the same man who gave sumptuous gifts, but would rarely accept them from others: one so erudite, but not a book collector: the man who held that all desires will be granted, but only when they no longer have appeal. Plant lovers will identify with the way in which Proust confers sensibility and 9

personality onto particular species of plant. Plant lovers seem to be born and, paraphrasing Tadie (24), who was writing about something quite different, are driven by the same instinct, the same mysterious domain shared by other plant lovers. Tadie stated (25) that Proust utilised for his writing everything he experienced or thought about during his lifetime and those plants or related topics which he used, sometimes with great passion, are the basis for this account. The unearthing of 267 different plant species found in the major works of Proust may not even be complete, but is evidence for and a tribute to his declared love of these mysterious organisms with, he well knew, an alchemical ability to transmute energy into matter, sunlight into sugar, as well as largely determining the increasingly closeted life he was obliged to live. Proust's second language was German, he did not speak English, but this did not prevent him from making the first French translations of two of the works of John Ruskin (18191900) with help from his mother and one or two other sympathetic acquaintances. At the time he came to be regarded as an authority on Ruskin. Botanical and horticultural works in English were accessible to him as would those written or translated into French or German. The classical texts in Latin were also at his disposal. Amongst the well illustrated European floras available to Proust would have been those of Fiori and Paoletti (1895-1904), Iconographia Florae Italicae.., Padua; Coste, (1901-1906), Flare descriptive et illustree de la France.., Paris; Bonnier, (1912-35), Flare complete illustree de France, Suisse et Belgique, Paris, and Fitch's Illustrations of The British Flora, the companion to Bentham and Hooker's 10

Handbook of The British Flora (1865). Examples of the work of Fitch will be found in the Appendix. Despite the drawbacks of even the best translation of Proust's writing, apart from the mistranslation of a plant name, I am aware of no significant problem arising for the purpose of identifying the plant species referred to in his work: this is largely because Proust knew his plants. The correct Latin name for any plant is always in a state of potential change as new information and taxonomic interpretation arises. The Latin names I have used are sufficiently current to enable further investigation to be made in the literature by the interested reader. The derivation of many Latin plant names is explained in the useful little book by Gilbert-Carter (1955) and the scholarly work by Stearn (1983). In setting out a little information on each of the plants concerned, or topics considered to be relevant I have tried to avoid the habits of Professor Brichot not, I suspect, always with success, but then Proust comes to my rescue with a new plant image. Some of the many quotations from his writing that I might have chosen I would have allowed to run on, not only because that is how he wrote, but also to illustrate his thinking and close observation of a particular plant, as well as his literary experiments involving plant imagery. He never left Europe so that his experience of plants when his health permitted was circumscribed by that of the French, Dutch, Belgian, German and Swiss countryside, private gardens, arboreta and botanic gardens: he knew Venice and made a brief visit to Guernsey in 1904.

11

Chapter 1 Childhood The childhood of Proust, or what we know, or can speculate about it, has been described by his recent biographers Painter (1989), Hayman (1990) and Tadié (2000). Mme Proust was pregnant during the privations of the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; the collapse of the Second Empire of Napoleon III resulted in the birth of the Third Republic. Dr Adrien Proust, his father, was then head of department at La Charité hospital throughout the Commune and went on to the Chair of Hygiene at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris in 18851. Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 in the ruins of Auteuil, then a dormitory suburb between western Paris and the Bois de Boulogne, having only become part of the city on 1 January 1860. The Bois, being a relict of the once widespread ancient Gallo-Roman forests of the region, was once the realm of Druids as Proust was later to reflect in his writing. After his birth the family temporarily occupied the gate house chalet belonging to great uncle Louis Weil at 96 rue La Fontaine. The associated large garden had flower beds, lawns, overgrown trees, formal gravel paths, an orangery and a fountain into which it was said the young Marcel fell as a child. But he was not robust and even with, or because of, a devoted and loving mother developed a persistent neurosis about being deserted by her, a theme which was to permeate his earliest writing. From August 1873, a few months after the birth of his brother, Robert, the Prousts moved into a Paris apartment, finally settling in one on the second floor at 9 boulevard Malesherbes which was to be the family home for almost thirty years. This was one of the many apartment blocks built after the redesign of 13

Paris, a seven story limestone structure with ironwork window balustrades now the home of offices and retail premises on the ground floor,(see MarylinBender,http ://www.nysoclib.org/travels/proust.htm). Auteuil For a change of scenery, or short holidays, the family revisited Auteuil regularly and the memory of these visits appears in Proust's writing. The important role that the garden had for family life is made very clear in his earliest published work2 where he stated that whatever its size, it is a pleasant thing for every thinking, loving, fully occupied family member, with its bit of sky for daydreaming and, ideally, the shade and fragrance conferred by a linden, walnut or pine tree. Even so, 96 rue La Fontaine was sold in 1897, then demolished for an apartment block which itself was later demolished during the construction of the Avenue Mozart '. Like so many garden owners grieving for a lost garden, Proust knew and described this particular loss (4). He explained in his first novel how Monsieur and Madame Santeuil had greatly changed since the day when first their acquaintance had been made in the little garden at Auteuil, on the site of which three or four six-storeyed houses had been built, several of the apartments in them already let He described the heartbreak, when on their way to Paris from the Bois, as the carriage drove through Auteuil and passed the big new building under which not only their old garden, but the happy years of his life and the memory of two persons who had been so dear to him lay forever buried. Knowing that they would shortly have been coming to the houses neighbouring their former home, a few of which had kept something of their remembered look, a flower decked door, 14

palings through which gardens could still be seen, lawns and paths and overshadowing trees and a glimpse of a garden shed, houses all of them which Madame Santeuil had known, left over now unchanged as though to stress the unrecognisable upheaval which had carried away the house and garden which had been theirs...- when Monsieur Santeuil knew that they were approaching those signs and portents which would have enabled her to recognise the place where lay what for her was the saddest of all graves, he had said, "Shut your eyes". Anyone who has created and enjoyed a garden, possibly sharing it with children who themselves have grown with the garden, can identify with Proust's comments (5) that places often change less rapidly than human beings. The memory of a particular group of willows, a country lane, or water lilies eddying in the river beneath the bridge are like old photographs discovered in a house by others, for whom the significance of the images does not exist, the meaning unrecognisable; like family secrets which are not to be found in dead man's papers, which cannot be inherited and for that reason are more precious to us. Nothing that is outside of us can restore an impression we once experienced. Illiers

On the Proust side of his family, Marcel's paternal grandmother had a grocery shop on the Place du Marché opposite the late 15uh1 century church in Illiers, St-Jacques (Saint-Hilaire in his fiction) some 25 km from Chartres and 114 km from Paris, now called Illiers-Combray so famous has Proust made the town. There are several gardens which feature in Combray, Proust's powerful evocation of Illiers, yet the fictional name originates not from the Beauce, nor le Pays Perche, but from a castle just north of Lisieux in Lower Normandy according to Tadié (6). 15

Marcel's uncle, Jules Amiot, had a draper's shop and a house nearby with a little paved courtyard garden, a tiny lawn, a chestnut tree and a single path edged with brick and tiles having, in summer, pansies in the flowerbed (7 & 8). More importantly uncle Jules also owned what was called the Pre-Catelan, perhaps named after the feature in the Bois de Boulogne. The Pre-Catelan, which still exists, is the model for the Jardin des Oublis which appears in Les Plaisirs...(9) and Jean Santeuil (10), and is also the basis for many references to the Combray garden in A la recherehe...(11). Like William Robinson, naturalness was the quality which the narrator's grandmother preferred to all others in gardens, where she did not like there to be, as in the Combray garden, too formal flower-beds. It was a large garden extending from the banks of the River Loir, rising gradually across slopes with stone steps leading to a grotto, to reach a lattice gate overlooking the elevated plains of the Beauce (12). There was an arbour, hazels, asparagus and strawberry beds, a ponded and silted watercourse with rustic bridge, waterlilies, carp and swans, forget-me-nots and blue and yellow irises; everything a little boy could delight in to make him blissfully happy and remember for the rest of his life. There were lawns to run across, beds of pelargonium, crunching gravel paths, a brick dovecote and dwarf palms in the lower garden near the rue des Vierges. The left-hand boundary of the garden was a lane hedged with white and pink hawthorn which was evident only in May each year and about which Proust wrote a great deal. The Proust family went to stay with uncle Jules, often at Easter and in the summer holidays, for some fifteen years in Marcel's youth, enabling him to absorb country and village life as well as learning about local history and the names of wild flowers from 16

the parish priest, Fr Joseph Marquis (13). Neighbours were another source of information for the young narrator (14); he followed with his parents the course of the Vivonne, the Loir of reality, to a land of bubbling streams where the Duchess had taught him to fish for trout and to know the names of the flowers whose red and purple clusters adorned the walls of the neighbouring gardens. Writing of his childhood (15) Proust reflected on a river which must have had a name that he did not know and did not take long to spread itself (was it really the same as the one between the statues and beneath the swans?) amid the pastures where oxen were sleeping and where it drowned the buttercups. Jean (16) also caught carp which lay beside him among the buttercups on the grass near the rustic bridge safe from the swans. The brick summerhouse in the Pré still stood in 1989 (17), but gardens are transient creations and as the narrator observed (18), like the glow of lamps long extinguished, or fragrant arbours that can never bloom again, it is through our memory that they survive a little longer. Neighbours On the rue de la Maladrerie leading to the Jardin des Oublis (19) in Etreuilles, one passes the gardens of the lawyer, M. Savinien, Mme Leduc and the Curé, each being distinctive. Looking into that of the lawyer, on either side of the path leading to the house one saw a line of elms, in springtime with shoots sheathed in dense green, in summer turned golden by the sun each day, rustled with a gentle murmur by the breeze. The elm Ulmus glabra, see Fig. 50, is one which regularly 17

reproduces itself from seed and has springtime flowers and, later, fruits which crowd the branches, just as Proust wrote, rustling in the wind as they dry before being blown from the tree. The lawyer in Etreuilles, M. Savinien (20), when returning home, beside his gate, felt pride and admiration for his gardener on seeing his pots of superb geraniums producing their succession of new, smooth, red blossoms, high on the wall. The gardener's geranium may refer to either Geranium, of which there are 400 species, or Pelargonium with 250 species. From the context in which Proust wrote he probably had the latter in mind. Geranium species tend to flower in spring and early summer becoming reduced to a clump of tired leaves and dried up remains of fruiting stalks by autumn. Pelargonium species often continue flowering until cut down by frost. The garden pelargoniums which Proust would have been likely to know include the Zonal, P. x hor forum, often having leaves with concentric zones of variegation and being hybrids between the species P. zonale, P. scandens, P. frutetorum and P. inquinans; the Ivy-leaved which are derived from the climbing P. pelt aturn and hybrids with P.x hortorum; the Regal which are complex hybrids derived from P.x domesticum; and the Scented-leaved which comprise a number of wild species and their hybrids. Most pelargonium species are natives of southern Africa and there are more than 5000 named cultivated varieties although some are more common than others. M. Savinien's gardener perhaps grew the pelargonium cv. Paul Crampel, which has vivid vermilion flowers; he would have known that Geranium species have radially symmetrical flowers, are regular like those of a rose, see Fig. 22, while those of Pelargonium are radially asymmetrical, are irregular like those of a violet, and often borne in umbel-like heads. 18

This insolent gardener seems to have had the measure of his employer as, like the butterflies, he exploited the orange trees set in large green tubs as vegetable statues, by stripping off their flowers to make cordial, which he later sold, thanks to the trust of his employer who had allowed himself to be persuaded that the flowers harmed the growth of the orange trees! Grown in tubs so that they can be moved if necessary to avoid winter frost, the orange is Citrus aurantium, the best marmalade being made from the Seville orange, C. aurantium var. aurantiurn: the bergamot orange used in perfumery is the variety bergemia. Dessert oranges include the species C. sinensis, the sweet orange; C. nobilis, the mandarin; C. reticulata, the tangerine and the grapefruit is C. paradisi. Bees and flowering plants have co-evolved and both find an important place in Proust's writing. Still in the lawyer's garden, one might see a bee, like a strange-faced workman who comes to fix something and who is left to do the job because he knows his trade, it being a large task to undertake, thrusting deep into the scarlet throat of each blossom with the skill of a field surgeon extracting a sword point, or musician correctly closing a piano lid. Next door (21) was the garden of the Cure who, though he was less active than the bees, appeared to be aware of the release, exchange, arrival and departure of scents in his garden and seemed to enjoy it no less. Past the railings of the lawyer's garden (22), at a gate, a wall began which bounded the property and was draped in clematis. A large pink hawthorn had topped this wall and colluded with the tall lilacs in the Cure's patch next door. Their intermingled branches seemed to have made an exchange of blossoms. The pink hawthorn may be the normal single-flowered, or double-flowered; both are mostly 19

hybrids between the species Crataegus monogyna and C. laevigata. Where these two species cohabit in nature there are often natural hybrids to be found. The single-flowered pink hawthorn, C. laevigata cv. Rosea, dates back to 1796 when it was first recorded in cultivation: the double-flowered is cv. Rosea Fiore Pleno dating from about the same time. The double-flowered white hawthorn, cv. Plena dates from about 1770. In the Cure's garden (23) in spring, the clematis in the chinks decorated the walls. Clematis in the buttercup family comprises 250 largely temperate species of chiefly woody climbers. It sometimes comes as a surprise to find that the showy flowers lack petals, as it is the coloured often softly-haired sepals that are the conspicuous parts of the flower. When in fruit the climbing species can be very attractive when the masses of silky fruiting heads catch the sunlight, see Fig. 12. The style persists on the fruit, becoming hairy, and through the agency of the wind the fruits are borne away and dispersed to germinate in unexpected places such as in the crevices of walls. The garden of Mme Leduc in Etreuilles (24), was a veritable dispensary where leaves and flowers distilled their balm which emanated in waves through the railings, thanks to the breeze, like some hot infusion of lime flowers, or acacias. Proust is here writing about the flowers of the lime tree, Tilia, not Citrus aurantiifolia the lime, and the flowers of false acacia, Robinia, not Acacia. It was on hot afternoons in her garden that flying things prevailed and flowers lay open like palaces; bees disappeared in white veils of convolvulus. The scentless, white-flowered, rampant convolvulus which Proust described more than once was probably Calystegia sepium, the bindweed, see Fig. 9. The flowers are pollinated by 20

hawkmoths. The more modest smaller-flowered Convolvulus arvensis has scented, pinkish flowers; both are hardy in western Europe. The morning glories belong to the species C. tricolor which is native in south-western Europe. The cultivated varieties Royal Ensign and Royal Marine both have deep blue flowers, but others have crimson or pink. They appear elsewhere in his writing in a visit to the Tuileries gardens (25), as a tangle of morning glories overflowing the vases crowned with geraniums. In Combray gardens there was a clear line of demarcation in the rue Saint-Hilaire between the church and the houses of Mme Loiseau on one side and M. Rapin's pharmacy on the other (26). The narrator observed that Mme Loiseau had decked her window sill with fuchsias, their branches drooping down in all directions and the purple flowers leaning, perhaps impiously for the narrator, against the blackened stone wall of the church. The steeple of Saint-Hilaire in Combray inscribed an indelible signature on the horizon. The narrator described one of the longest walks he used to take from Combray and a spot where the road emerged onto an immense plain, where on the horizon a ridge of forest was broken only by the tiny steeple of SaintHilaire, a painter's fingernail scratch on the skyline; in reality a half-ruined square tower of dark red stone the colour of Virginia creeper. The Pre-Cateian At the highest point in the Jardin des Oublis (27), was a large, flat area known as the 'asparagus bed', bare as these places are, reserved for perhaps several thousand spears of asparagus, standing upright, wild and free, slim, long, some fatter, hard and 21

pink, fading into a faintish blue with a soft velvety head of green. Proust recalled the same part of the garden in a childhood recollection which appeared in the Preface to his translation of Sesame...(28) when he would escape company amongst the trimmed hazels, discovering the asparagus bed and strawberry edgings and the pond where on some days horses hitched to a wheel would pump water. Related to the lilies, the 300 species of Asparagus tend to inhabit the drier parts of the world. These plants grow from rhizomes and the aerial shoots have leaves which are much reduced in size and appear as scales; the often small flowers are arranged in condensed heads and are followed by small berry fruits. It is the young spear-like shoots of A. officinalis which are eaten either raw as salad, or steamed, the shoots being cut just above the soil, not uprooted, leaving sufficient shoots to keep the plant growing vigorously, see Fig. 6. The growing beds require careful preparation, heavy manuring and are raised up to ensure that the crowns do not rot; the beds are kept weed free and will reward the effort made for up to a decade before needing to be renewed. There was extensive commercial cultivation of asparagus around Paris, and especially Argenteuil in Proust's day (29) with a reported 3000 workers growing the varieties Hâtive rose d'Ulm, Hâtive de Hollande and Hãtive d'Argenteuil. The 'trimmed' hazel, Coiylus ave/lana, is a large shrub found wild in Europe, parts of North Africa and into western Asia, see Fig. 13. There are fifteen species which are all temperate in distribution and all having conspicuous and decorative male catkins in early spring borne before the leaves appear. The filbert, C. maxima, is a native of the Balkans and has larger nuts than the hazel; filberts are totally enclosed in a sheathing husk 22

while hazel nuts always remain exposed. A forked hazel twig is reputed to be useful for divining buried treasure, water and locating guilt. Perhaps another childhood memory of Proust was transformed into literature when Jean (30) is invited by his uncle to look at his camellia in full flower; flowers red and pink and so many that they might have been fastened in thousands by human hands. Jean had never seen a tree of any sort bearing so many blooms, all red and pink, like an unknown woman, beautiful and exquisitely dressed and introduced to him by his uncle. Is it not so, he muses, with things we later love the most, meeting them as strangers who at first only surprise us? Proust's great-uncle, Louis Well, was a close friend of Laure Hayman who was a cocotte and became his mistress. Proust first met her in the winter of 1888, promptly fell in love with her and, later, used her as one of the models for his fictional character Odette. Came/ha species occur in nature from the Indo-Malaysian region east into China and Japan, there being eighty species. Tea, C. sinensis, is one of the species, but Proust was possibly thinking of C. japonica from China and Japan in this episode. Together with C. sasan qua from Japan and C. reticulata from China these particular species and their garden hybrids have glossy evergreen foliage and all provide spectacular springtime displays of flower. Although not used in his writing there was a large Catalpa which grew in the Pré at Illiers (31), because Painter related that Marcel and his brother had together planted a poplar sapling for which Robert searched in vain among the other trees near the Catalpa more than fifty years later, a fortnight before his death in 1935. Both C. bignonioides, the Indian bean tree from North 23

America, introduced to Europe in 1726, and C. ovata from China, introduced in 1849, are the most commonly encountered in gardens, parks and arboreta. The genus comprises eleven tree species which grow wild in North America and eastern Asia, having decorative deciduous foliage, conspicuous clusters of flowers and later, curious, pendulous French bean-like fruits. In later life, Proust may have seen another species in the arboretum of the Villa Bassaraba at Amphion, near Evian (32), because C. bungei is listed in an account of the property by M. ArdouinDumazet written in 1903. This is noteworthy, if the identification was correct, as the species from northern China is generally regarded to have been introduced into Europe only in 1905 and therefore represents an earlier record of introduction. Walks through the fields were no less memorable for the young Proust (33) jumping up and down and laughing excitedly, kissing his mother again and again, running ahead, lagging behind to pick bunches of clover, cornflowers and poppies to present her with a shout. The clovers are important pasture and hay plants belonging to the legume genus Trifolium, so named because the leaves of the species are divided into three leaflets. White clover is T repens, see Fig. 49, red clover is T pratense and both are an important source of nectar for bees. The cornflower is the daisy Centaurea cyanus, see Fig. 10, one of about 600 species in the genus. Like the poppies, Popover, and corn-cockle, Agrostemma, cornflowers were once much more common as arable weeds before the advent of selective herbicides following the Second World War. Whenever Jean (34) visited the small house in Etreuilles he always sought to cultivate the fearsome house-keeper called Ernestine, who dominated the other servants, because only she could make such beautifully smooth chocolate and cream. 24

Concluding one of his afternoon walks with his uncle (35) at Les Aigneaux Farm where Mme Laudet served nothing stronger than milk or cider to customers seeking her particular type of refreshment, Jean youthfully surmised whether people of fashion frequent one hostess rather than another because only she always provided chocolate biscuits and is the best maker of tea in town? Ernestine Gallou was in reality the tyrannical housekeeper of Proust's aunt Elisabeth Proust Amiot, aunt Leonie of fiction. While chocolate has only this marginal relevance to Proust, chocolatl was cultivated by both the Aztecs and Mayas (36), who pounded the seeds mixed with maize and with water, added capsicum peppers. Cortes encountered the plant in 1519 during his conquest of present day Mexico and it was the Spanish who replaced the peppers with sugar in the use of chocolate. Not until the end of the 16th century did chocolate drinking become better known and then only as a luxury, by the Dutch breaking the Spanish monopoly on cacao production. Early in the 19!h century C.J. van Houten was able to devise a process for removing the excess fat from chocolate to make it the palatable beverage that Proust knew. The seeds of Theobroma cacao, one of thirty tropical American species in the genus, once roasted and ground yield cocoa which can then be blended with milk and sugar to produce solid or liquid chocolate. The seeds contain the alkaloid theobromine. Proust's uncle, Jules Amiot, had lived in Algeria for a time (37) and in his den there were mementos of his travels. These included carved coconut shells and photographs of palm trees. M. Albert (38) in Jean Santeuil has a small study decorated in the oriental manner with objects brought back from Algeria. Separated from the main house, with only a ground floor and 25

windows with coloured panes overlooking the garden, there are little mats on the stone floor, carved coconut ornaments and photographs of mosques and palm trees, probably Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm, which is native in N. Africa. The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, is the only one in the genus and it seems to have originated in tropical Asia, or possibly Polynesia, but it is now circurntropical thanks to the ability of the large fruits to remain viable after floating long distances in the sea. When they geminate on a suitable shoreline they create a characteristic tropical beach vegetation. Equally remarkable is that most parts of the coconut palm can be used to provide the necessities of life for humans in the places where the palms can grow. Jean and his cousins would sometimes take a boat down the winding River Loir, nosing their way through the silent shady places of the riverside gum-trees (39). Although species in the genus Eucalyptus are usually associated with the name gum tree, the two North American genera Liquidambar and Nyssa can also be meant, the species of the latter having dark green summer foliage, preferring moist habitats and casting a deeper shade than many eucalypts. Emerging into the sunlight once more, they might rejoin the main watercourse with its banks crowded with thousands of buttercups down to the water's edge, groups of iris and stands of reed from which a hidden bird, a reed warbler?, continued to sing long after they had passed. There are three species of reed which are grasses in the genus Phragmites. They are an important part of wetland habitats and are cosmopolitan in occurrence. The common reed in western Europe is P. australis and like the species in the related genera Arundo, Spanish reed, and Cortaderia, pampas grass, they are often tall and have attractive plume-like heads of silky, grass flowers which wave with the passage of the wind. The 26

waterside iris referred to is probably the yellow flowered Iris pseudacorus. Orris root The fun of avoiding his cousins so as to be able to continue his reading, or just for the pleasure of being elusive, required Jean to remain one step ahead of any search party (40). One place to which he sometimes retired was the upstairs toilet with its window kept open permanently and which overlooked the chestnut tree. The smell of the tree mingled with that of strings of orris root hanging on the wall; Jean had learned that orris came from irises growing in the Park, near to where he fished. Orris root when dried and often ground up, has the scent of violets. It consists of the underground stem, or rhizome, of the Iris species I. germanica, I. florentina, or I. pallida. It is not clear where I. germanica originated, but it has long been cultivated and its albino sibling, I. florentina has long been grown in and around Florence. I. pallida is also closely related to I. germanica. There are 300 species of iris grown largely for their distinctive, but rather short-lived flowers; there are many more hybrids and cultivated varieties. While there are some very deep blue and violet flowered cultivars of bearded-iris, so deep as to almost appear black, a black iris has yet to be bred. This did not prevent Paul Amilet (1877-1963) from calling his second collection of poems Les Iris noirs in 1898 under his pseudonym, Paul Reboux, and sending a copy to Proust, (41). The narrator sometimes sought refuge in an upstairs toilet (42) beside the schoolroom, just beneath the roof, scented by both orris root and the flowers of a wild currant bush which thrust a branch through the half-open window. Looking out he could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin. The little room 27

with its door, which he was permitted to lock, was a perfect place in which to read, cry, daydream, or make sensual experiment. Unbeknown to the narrator at the time, in the castle keep of Roussainville (43), his childhood sweetheart, Gilberte, was to be found disporting with the village boys as she admitted to him much later in life. How strange for the narrator to then discover that his fantasy of the little girl with the golden hair and the dungeons of Roussainville, as imaginary as Pascal's gulf, had had a reality as he masturbated in his orris scented refuge. The narrator declared (44) that as he reached the point of, perhaps, self destruction it was a desire for a plant of local growth, a peasant girl from Meseglise or Roussainville, that drove him until the next moment, when a trail had smeared the drooping leaves of the flowering currant, like that left by a snail. Flowering currant

Flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum, is a native of North America from whence it was introduced to Europe in 1826 by David Douglas (1798-1834); it has since become a commonly planted and easily grown garden shrub with pink to crimson, or sometimes white, flowers borne in April in Europe and foliage which, like many currants, has a characteristically pungent smell. The genus comprises 150 species which occur in nature in the northern temperate region, but also extending along the Andes, and include R. nigrum, blackcurrant; R. sativum, red currant, see Fig. 41, and R grossularia, gooseberry. Hayman (45) stated that orris root and wild currant bush contain trimethalymine [sic] present in both semen and urine, thus validating the use of currant in the episode. However, I don't find that flowering currant has such an odour if that is what Hayman meant, nor can I find mention of the matter in the letter 28

(46) which Hayman (47) says Proust wrote to Robert de Montesquiou on 28 September 1905. It is in Contre Sainte-Beuve (48) that Proust first recounted secret pleasures, but with different plants. When twelve years old he locked himself in the water closet, with its dangling strings of orris root, on the top floor of the house at Combray seeking unknown pleasure for the first time. The window was kept open by a flowering branch of lilac and it was the scent of lilac of which he first became conscious after a climax likened to when the fountain at Saint-Cloud begins to play. The use of flowering currant in the later A la recherche..., instead of lilac, allowed Proust to retain for the latter a plant symbolic of more chaste, childhood pleasure. He had used lilac in this way in Les Plaisirs.... The fourteen year old girl having had her first sexual encounter with her fifteen year old cousin (49), rushes into the arms of her mother who happens to be sitting in the garden nearby. The girl first senses her mother's fragrance as she is comforted, only then becoming aware of that of unseen lilac blossom filling the air. Part of a letter from his mother is worth noting as it shows the nature of their relationship; it was written on 23 April 1890 (50). Mme Proust was referring to the letters of Mme de Sévigné, beloved by her own mother, when she wrote to her son about the many feelings she dare not express to him before taking her leave with the tender farewell of a kiss sustained until her next letter. She adds that his white lilac is drooping, but the Vergissmeinnicht is quite fresh. There are 50 species of Vergissmeinnicht, forget-me-not, Myosotis, see Fig. 31, the familiar little blue flowers only becoming evident after changing from pink at the flower-bud stage. On fine mornings when Jean was young (51) he would 29

go into the garden to find irises in procession along the little flower beds and myosotis too, their deep blue flowers like scraps of the sky. Snowball tree The guelder rose is Viburnum opulus, a shrub which is native to the woods and hedgerows of Europe, but also found wild into northern and western Asia and Algeria, see Fig. 53. It is one of the 200 species in the genus. Like some species of Hydrangea, to which it is unrelated, the flattened flowering heads of certain species comprise an inner assemblage of fertile flowers and an outer array of more showy but infertile white ones, as in V. opulus. The same inflorescence arrangement is found in V. plicatum which was introduced to European gardens from China and Japan in about 1865. Furthermore, both of these early summer flowering species have garden varieties with more globular inflorescences containing only showy infertile flowers, the snowballs of decorative white or cream flowers which so appealed to the young Proust. Other viburnum species have only fertile flowers, often with a heady perfume and, in some, a flowering time which extends through the European winter and into early spring, such as V. grandiflorum from the Himalaya, or V. ,farreri from northern China. The snowball tree fascinated the young Jean (52) because when the flowers were picked, they did not melt. Then (53), sometimes, Monsieur Santeuil would have them cut to decorate the church for Mary's Month, or when Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau might gather boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil lacked the courage to refuse. But when Jean's uncle had gone, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough luggage; and then Jean cried... 30

Proust reused the snowball tree as a foil to the ermine-clad Madame Swann, with whom the young narrator became infatuated. For the narrator (54), the habit of the guelder rose suggested the rectilinear trees seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings; its flowers Mme Swann's muff; the flowering time an annual miracle like the Good Friday music in Parsifal; their scent, together with the acid and heavy perfume of other sorts of flower at that season, his memories of Combray, Tansonville and Mme Swann's blossoming drawing-room. Several details in this passage suggest that Proust had in mind not V. opulus cv. Roseum, flowering in June and July with creamy-white snowballs, but V. plicatum cv. Thunberg's Original, the Japanese white snowball tree, which flowers from late May Mary's month - on arching branches which, in some forms, have an horizontal, rectilinear arrangement up the trunk just as Proust described. This Japanese species was introduced to European gardens in 1844 by Robert Fornme (1812-1880). The acid and heady perfume that Proust referred to at Lent, coming from flowers with names unknown to Proust, like the narrator, because they do not occur elsewhere in his writing could have included Daphne mezereum and D. odora, several Hamamelis species, Lonicera fragrantissima and L. standishii, Mahonia species, Sarcococca species and other Viburnum species. All of these shrubs flower during the month of February onwards in Europe and all have delightfully fragrant flowers.

Hawthorn

The Cure's garden is not the only place in which we find hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, a large shrub or small tree found wild in Europe, parts of North Africa and extending into western Asia. It is a variable species not least because it 31

hybridises with other thorns such as C. laevigata, as well as with species in other closely related genera, such as medlar, Mespilus gerrnanica. The species has a rich folk history. In Ireland (55) the destruction of ancient hawthorn trees brings bad luck or even peril to the perpetrator, and hawthorns, often associated with wells, may still be found decorated with bits of clothing or other items left there by devotees, or the superstitious. The Druidic rites are thought to have involved hawthorn and the tree has been considered sacred in Celtic cultures, certainly in Wales and Ireland as late as the 20`h century. When in full flower in May the blossom is so copious as to quite eclipse the foliage which only reappears when the petals fall; in autumn when the many red fruits, the haws, begin to again change the colour of the shrub, the leaves simultaneously turn a golden colour before being shed, the fruits persisting long into winter and affording a valuable food source for birds. Hawthorn seedlings can often be found beneath the favourite perch or roosting site of birds. Most of Proust's many references to hawthorn have a connection with childhood (56) and the hawthorn path he used to know so affectionately with its opening, revealing a sudden glimpse, sometimes, of the unpredictable and ever restive sea. This setting of an encounter made through a gap in a hawthorn hedge anticipates a more celebrated one between the narrator and Gilberte soon to be described. Jean (57) recalls his mother saying that they should hurry to Mongeland's for a tart, and then how hot and bright was the uphill hawthorn path they took with all of its midday smells, together with that of the tarts in the paper bag he clutched and that they would eat when they reached Montjouvain. Then in 32

the Jardin des Oublis (58) he recalls how in May, the white hawthorn, piled with blossom, had garlands of pink hawthorn and eglantine intermingled, like lacey chapels with a fragrance that almost made him giddy. The narrator's grandfather (59) had been a close friend of the father of Charles Swann, and at Tansonville, the Swarm estate on the outskirts of Combray, M. Swann invites his friend to look at his hawthorns and a new pond. The father of Charles Swann had had dug out an ornamental pond in the park at Tansonville which the narrator's parents and grandfather were visiting (60). The little lake had forget-me-nots and periwinkle encircling the water's edge, together with violet and yellow iris, agrimony and water crowfoot. Agrimony is Agrimonia eupatoria, one of fifteen species of herb belonging to the rose family. They grow wild in northern temperate parts of the world. Agrimony is a modest but characteristic wildflower of hedgerows or near water, blooming in summer with rod-like heads of small yellow flowers and having divided leaves, see Fig. 2. In the real world Tansonville still exists as a privately owned stone manor with outbuildings set in a cherry orchard and visible from the road through a white picket gate. On this walk with his parents in the Tansonville estate Proust has the narrator develop one of the extended and celebrated digressions on his love for and the symbolic importance of hawthorn. The path throbbed with its fragrance. The hedge, like a series of chapels, each piled high with the blossom, filtered Each little the sunlight as through stained glass. unselfconscious strawberry-white flower, no less adorned and sculpted than a piece of church architecture, and arranged with the unexpected rhythms of certain intervals in music, held an 33

impenetrable mystery for the narrator. He remembered his grandfather once pointing out to him a beautiful pink hawthorn and reflected that a childhood preference for cream cheese with crushed strawberries had made it possible, as it were, for him to eat the precise colour of that same pink hawthorn. Hawthorns through which he could now see into the park, across gravel and a coiled green sprinkler hose with a rainbow of droplets at one end.. .and suddenly, also a little girl with reddish hair, with a spade in her hand, looking at them. Although the narrator did not know at the time, this was his first meeting with Gilberte, the grand daughter of M. Swann. When the narrator's family prepare to return to Paris (61), there is an episode where the child with hair specially curled, hatted and in velvet jacket, eludes his parents for a last tearful visit to his hawthorns on the steep path near Tansonville. There the child confides to them that his parents are forcing him to leave, but that even in Paris he will always love the little hawthorns. It was on the Meseglise way that he first noticed the circular shadow cast on the ground by apple trees, and the way the setting sun made slanting rays between their boughs, rays which his father's stick never seemed to damage. This account of a tearful tantrum is shorter and, for me, less convincing and less entertaining than an earlier one (62) involving Proust's brother and a pet goat, the kid replacing the hawthorn. Of the two childhood walks around Combray, the Meseglise way and the Guermantes way (63) the narrator reflected that the scent of hawthorn and, a little later, that of dog rose, the sound of footsteps on gravel, or the trapped air bubble against a water plant in the stream, all remain treasures in his memory, while time has erased the paths and those who trod them.

34

The interplay of emotions of a child embarking on adolescence is the theme where the narrator is playing 'ferret' with the little band of girls (64) and he is chided by Albertine, to whom he is already attracted, for day-dreaming and not concentrating on the game. Andree, one of the little band, accompanies him on a short walk away where he beholds a hawthorn and, left alone, discourses with the shrub in the same child-like spirit as those continuing the game. He tells the leaves, for the flowers have gone, that to cheer him up his mother once brought him hawthorn flowers while he was ill in bed. They respond that the young ladies, the flowers, will return without fail next May and that they are displayed in the nearby church of Saint-Denis du Desert; the flowers and their fragrance are like no other. The passing comment (65) of a miracle like a red hawthorn flowering in winter in a description of the climber Ampelopsis in an autumnal Bois de Boulogne, nonetheless touches on the miraculous winter flowering hawthorn, the Glastonbury thorn, C. monogyna cv. Biflora. This shrub would have been known to Ruskin, for whom Proust at one stage had high regard. The shrub produces its leaves earlier than normal, occasionally bearing a small flush of flowers in winter. As Graves explained (66), the Glastonbury thorn, which was cut down by the Puritans during the Revolution, was a sport, or mutant, of the common hawthorn. The monks of Glastonbury had propagated it and sanctified it with a tale about Joseph of Arimathea's staff and the Crown of Thorns as a means of discouraging an orgiastic use of hawthorn blossom, which normally did not appear until May Day. As a concluding and ironical juxtaposition between the hawthorns of childhood and the events encroaching on the narrator's world (67), Gilberte wrote to him much later in life 35

from Tansonville where she lived during the German occupation in the Great War. She points out that their childhood Roussainville and Meseglise are now as famous as Austerlitz or Valmy on account of the eight month battle for Meseglise. The hawthorn path, where they first met and fell in love with each other, led up to the huge field of corn and what became the famous Hill 307, the Germans holding one half of Combray for eighteen months, the French the other half. The historian and geographer Martin Brayne, points out that this passage places Combray well to the north of the Seine, which the Germans never crossed, rather than at Illiers in the Eure-etLoir. Whilst Combray is Illiers it is not exactly the Illiers which is today called Illiers-Combray! Lilac

The genus Syringa, in the olive family, Oleaceae, comprises thirty species of shrub or small tree which occur wild in an area from south eastern Europe into eastern Asia. In older gardening books one finds reference to mock orange blossom, Philadelphus species, listed under the common name `syringa' which is both incorrect and confusing. The reason for this mixup is that although we now accept the two genera which Carl Linnaeus published (1707-1778), Syringa L. and Philadelphus L., as nomenclaturally valid according to the international rules which govern plant naming, Philip Miller (1691-1771) also published a name, Syringa Mill. based on mock orange blossom, and some early authors used Miller's now synonymous generic name in error, as did Proust. The common lilac is S. vulgaris and it is native to eastern Europe. It was introduced west as a garden plant in the 16th 36

century and subsequently became naturalised as a garden escape. At about the time that Proust was born, Victor Lemoine and his son Emile were very active in raising many beautiful cultivars of lilac at their nursery in Nancy. These include the single-flowered white cv. Vestale (raised in 1910), the doubleflowered dark purple-red cv. Charles Joly (1896), creamyyellow cv. Madame Lemoine (1890) and in the year of Proust's death the purple-lavender cv. Katherine Havemeyer (1922). The Lemoine Nursery was also instrumental in hybridising the European species with newly discovered and introduced ones from China such as S. villosa, introduced 1882, and S. sweginzowii, introduced 1894, to produce attractive shrubs such as S. x nanceiana cv. Floréal (c.1925) and cv. Prairial (c.1933). There were times when Jean was young (68) when he could run at speed around the garden pretending to be a skimming gull or galloping prairie horse, violently shaking the wet branches of flowering lilac as he passed: so far removed from the constraints which asthma and rheumatism would so soon impose upon him. In the Jardin des Oublis (69) Jean was careful to make sure that no gardener was about before standing on the soil to embrace a lilac bush to better enjoy the secrets of its scented colour, its coloured scent. He noticed (70) how soon the spent blossoms, like little languid creatures, fell and dried up, their remains with a smell reminding him of a pastrycook's shop. He saw the same pale mauve in a part of the rainbow, but lilacs, with their Persian heritage, like slim Scheherazades, mauve or anise-white, could be approached, gathered and taken home. Proust's allusion to Persian lilac relates to the hybrid, S. x persica, thought to have been introduced to Europe from 37

Turkey in the 17th century. Its parents are S. vulgaris and S. x laciniata, the latter being derived from a cross between S. vulgaris and S. protolaciniata which is a native of western China. Persian lilac is thought to have arisen in cultivation somewhere in south western Asia, perhaps Afghanistan, as an indirect result of trade with the east; it has a more slender branching habit, narrower lance-shaped leaves and more sparse flowering heads than the common lilac. The description 'anisewhite' relates to the Chinese woody plant IIlicium verum, star anise, used for flavouring. The species belongs to a family distantly related to the magnolias. The small garden at the rear of his aunt's house in Combray (71) is where the narrator would sometimes sit on a bench in the shade of a lilac tree, beside the water pump, together with a salamander looking like a Gothic stone ornament on the trough. From this corner of the garden near the service door, he could see the tiled floor of his aunt's kitchen in which Francoise officiated as in a little temple of Venus overflowing with the offerings of the fruiterer, greengrocer and dairyman. There are two photographs of the very similar garden at the rear of the Amiot house in Illiers in Sansom (72). In Etreuilles (73) there were few gardens that did not contain a lilac of some description. For Jean (74) the flowering lilacs came to represent strange visitors from far away, their scent recapturing the peaceful times of his youth. Much later, in a parallel world (75), the narrator waits in the street while his friend, Saint-Loup, calls for his mistress, Rachel. He sees girls sitting at the windows of the apartments but outside, below, there are groups of tall flowering lilacs in, as it were, their mauve frocks, heedless of the stares of passers-by 38

and reminding him of the platoons of purple lilac guarding the entrance of M. Swann's park. In the real world (76) Celeste Albaret was latterly the housekeeper of Proust. When he recited to her the words of the ballad 'Lilac Time' she once burst into tears, after which he wrote the words out for her on a piece of paper which she treasured for the rest of her life. There is a picture of that manuscript in her memoir. Strawberry Fragaria, a genus with fifteen species which occur in the wild through Eurasia as far as southern India and in North America, then south into Chile, is a group of herbs belonging to the rose family, Rosaceae. They all have a curious 'fruit' which consists of a large swollen receptacle on which the many true little piplike fruits, the achenes, are embedded. In Europe the wild strawberry, F. vesca, see Fig. 20, has been cultivated since at least the 14th century, but the alpine strawberry, F. vesca var. semperflorens, did not become popular until the 18th century. Both have small fruit. The familiar large-fruited garden strawberry arose from hybrids between the North American species, F. virginiana, introduced to France in 1624, and the Chilean F. chiloensis, also introduced to France in 1714 through the enterprising French naval officer Amedee Francois Frezier (1682-1773). Writing about F. chiloensis (77) Stearn explained that all seem to have been females and though they flowered freely they gave no fruit until interplanted among other species, notably F. virginiana; cross-pollination then enabled them to set seed, from which fertile plants were raised. The most celebrated selection was the `Fraisier-ananas', the Pine-apple Strawberry, which the French botanist Antoine Nicolas 39

Duchesne (1747-1827) named F. Ananassa in his Histoire naturelle des Fraisiers (1766). Published when the author was only nineteen years, this book on the strawberry remains a classic of horticultural literature. Even before Jean could speak properly (78) his uncle ordered `stlawbellies' for dessert, pronouncing them like his nephew who had picked them with him while in the Park. Jean loved strawberries in cream cheese as a child (79), but only when he had carefully determined the precise quantity of each ingredient to produce the desired colour and taste. When seeking for the origin of his preference of pink hawthorn over white (80) Jean reflects that it may have been the association of colour of the treasured taste of crushed strawberries and cream cheese. Proust's Preface to his translation of Sesame...(81) has his uncle preparing the cream and strawberries in always identical proportions stopping only when the required shade of pink was achieved. Depicting M. and Mme Santeuil in old age (82), Proust wrote that Madame Santeuil went out of her way to make her husband happy; this included strawberry mousse being made just as Dester, his friend, liked it. Celeste Albaret recalled that when she was his housekeeper Proust would only eat ice cream if it was strawberry or raspberry flavoured. Violets and pansies Violets happen to be some of the most promiscuous plants, the species hybridising readily when grown together in gardens. Several violet species habitually have flowers which never open properly and in the cramped floral confines of this cleistogamous condition, as botanists put it, become self40

pollinated. The genus Viola has about 500 species which are largely northern temperate in distribution, but there are also many species in the Andes and other suitable temperate parts of the world. The perennial sweet violet of Europe is V. odorata, see Fig. 55, the European dog violet is V. caning, but heart's ease, V. tricolor, is an annual. In addition to setting copious seed, many violets also have a capacity to increase vegetatively by the development of sucker-like side shoots which root as they grow. Accordingly, some species and hybrids can become persistent weeds in gardens. Certain species have a pronounced stem, even woody ones, which make them shrubs rather than herbs. The garden pansy is a hybrid, V. x wittrockiana, with a parentage involving V. tricolor, V. lutea and V. altaica; it dates back to about 1810. By 1835 artificial hybridisation and selection of seedling progeny by enthusiastic growers had resulted in more than 400 named garden varieties of pansy. Among these were bedding sorts with a bushy compact habit, the giant-flowered sort with a wider range of flower colour and then those better able to cope with cold weather in Europe for use in winter and early spring bedding displays. The garden `viola', V. x williarnsii, is yet another hybrid of the pansy crossed with the species V. cornuta and dates from about 1863. The distinctions between these two groups of garden plants, pansies and violas, have slowly been lost as further crosses and selections have been made by plant breeders; these are sometimes called V.x hybrida. In Les Plaisirs...(83) Proust wrote that he often thought of the little garden where he used to breakfast with his mother surrounded by myriads of pansies with their sad, velvety, mauve, violet, sometimes almost black, sometimes white 41

flowers, all with mysterious yellow images inscribed on their faces. Celebrating the joys of a garden on a fine morning (84) Jean points out violets and pansies dozing happily in the warm garden bed, making the gardener's lot a happy one indeed. On a different day in high summer (85) Jean likens the building storm clouds to the flowers of pansies which seem to have borrowed all of the colours of these gigantic passing Gods. Proust wrote of the little garden in Illiers (86) and its beds of pansies edged with bricks and half-moon shaped clay tiles, with multicoloured flowers the colour of reflections from the stainedglass windows of the church, or the sky seen before a storm, or at day's end. At Eastertime Proust recalled (87) his childhood holidays, the sound of church bells, the first violets as winter departs, the fires needing to be lit indoors before midday. Describing the Guermantes way (88) the narrator recalls that each year when the family arrived at Combray on Easter Sunday, he would run to the River Vivonne to see on its banks the early daffodils and primroses and, perhaps, the blue flame of a violet. There was a garden gate leading into the narrow rue des Perchamps which, in summer, had clumps of grass amongst which wasps botanised; this led after about ten minutes to a footbridge, the Pont-Vieux, which crossed the river. Proust was aware of Ruskin's writing on plants; as he could love certain of them, so Ruskin could hate others (89), such as V. cornuta which seeded and spread in his garden at Brantwood, north of Coniston Water, where he lived from 1872 until his death in 1900. Ruskin considered that this disorderly flower on its lanky, awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk was like a pillar out of an iron foundry made for a cheap railway station, attached to a hollow angular, dog's eared gaspipe of a 42

stalk with a quantity of ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves as if some ill-natured cow had chewed them a little.

Some roses from childhood Declaring a love of apple blossom (90), Jean describes how the white and pink clusters have almost a spiritual quality with which neither the white flowered pear-tree nor the pink flowered Pennsylvania rose can compare. The Pennsylvania rose is indeed from North America, being Rosa carolina cv. Plena, and double-flowered as its fancy-name indicates. During holidays with uncle Jules (91), when lunchtime was at last announced Jean, like many another little boy, had already begun to think of his appetite instead of the velvet heads of purple irises and fragrant scent of Syrian roses at the corners of the path. There is no rose known as the Syrian rose, but 'damascena' means 'of Damascus'. The native roses now found in Syria are unlikely candidates to be found growing in the garden of uncle Jules with one cultivated exception. The damask rose, R. damascena, was grown on a large scale for perfume by the Greeks and Egyptians at about 500 BC and was grown in what is now Syria at the time of the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries. The traffic arising from the Crusades was the means by which most of the old garden roses were introduced to western Europe, i.e. R. gallica, R.x alba and R. darnascena. It is thought that the damask rose originated in what was then Persia and was taken to Syria as early as 1200BC. He continues that during the first of these holidays in Etreuilles. . . (92), before he had learned to observe and his untrained mind was lazy, he had no clear impression of the 43

unfolding of nature in springtime. From the many flowers which he neither properly saw nor loved, he chose as his own the pink hawthorn and for which he developed a particular affection. Having seen the common white hawthorn; the sight of the red gave him a reinforced sense of difference, though, he had already seen the eglantine before and had never felt much love for either. The single-flowered red hawthorn is C. laevigata cv. Punicea first recorded in cultivation in 1828. The eglantine is Rosa eglanteria having bright green, apple-scented foliage and deeper pink flowers than the dog rose, R. canina, see Fig. 42, the flowers of the former being borne at little later in the year. Both are natives of Europe although the dog rose extends into western Asia. Peas There are six species in the pea genus, Pisum, all being natives of the Mediterranean region and east into western Asia. The garden pea is P. sativum, its immature pods or unripe seeds usually being eaten as a salad or boiled. The Augustinian abbott, Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) experimented on the inherited characters of edible pea, amongst other plants, and the fortuitously simple heritability mechanism of the pea enabled him to formulate what became his laws of genetics which enable the prediction of segregation and independent assortment Mendel's concepts of factorial of inherited characters. inheritance and the quantitative investigation of single characters provided the basis for the science of genetics, but these concepts were only rediscovered by other scientists long after Mendel's death and when Proust was almost thirty. Proust used peas in a different way. 44

On Sunday mornings (93) Jean would go down into the kitchen where Ernestine, resembling 'Vulcan at his forge with the coals crackling like the mutterings of Hell, had arranged on the table a pile of peas already shelled, looking like little green marbles. The narrator relates a similar scene in Combray (94) with Francoise putting the potatoes to steam as he stood by the table where the kitchen-maid had shelled platoons of peas, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like small green marbles, ready for a game. The sweet pea of gardens is derived from Lathyrus odoratus, belonging to a related genus of legume. They were grown in the garden at Etreuilles (95), these twining flowers as from Heaven, draped over the trellis of the garden wall; painted Angels, pink and blue and vivid orange. In a reflective mood by the kitchen fire (96) Jean thinks of visits to the country, the fragrance of fresh linen, mother putting you to bed in a room where the window, when morning came, would display the garden with its gathering of pansies, and all along its wall, close to the pump, a vision of sweet-peas. Garden nasturtium The nasturtium has been developed from Tropaeolum majus crossed with other species in the genus; there are about ninety species all confined to an area south of Mexico and on into temperate parts of South America. The leaves and flowers of T. majus can be used in salads and the fruits are sometimes pickled and used as false-caper. Tropaeolums are facultative climbers in nature so that while dwarf garden varieties may be no more than 30 cm tall, climbing ones may be 3 m tall or more given support. They have scented yellow, orange or scarlet flowers and double-flowered garden varieties have also been bred. 45

Tropaeolum should be distinguished from the genus to which watercress, Nasturtium officinale, belongs in the Cruciferae family, but this is a species about which Proust did not write.

Jean (97) would sometimes run to say good morning to the gardener who, with his straw hat, was perched on a ladder set against the trellised wall pruning nasturtium leaves. This pleasing image is repeated (98) one morning after the narrator has spent an unhappy night alone and longing for his mother, when the rays of the morning sun appear, like the rungs of the gardener's ladder against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which clamber up as far as his window-sill. Water plants

Proust wrote about a number of water plants. Describing a feature in the Jardin des Oublis (99) he recounts a stonerimmed pond from which the pumps drew water, and tangled pipes beneath the surface matted so thickly by invisible strands of water-moss which seemed almost to have bent the pipes. The submerged plant referred to here could simply be Spirogyra, a fresh-water alga, but it might equally be water milfoil, Myriophyllum, single shoots of which are insubstantial, yet collectively form billowing masses under the surface of the water. Often spread by water-birds the forty five species are flowering plants, not mosses, and thrust their flowers into the air from the submerged shoots to permit pollination to occur. Weeds are simply plants which grow where they shouldn't, usually because they are fecund and, or, persistent for one reason or another. Proust uses the word only a couple of times and then in relation to water plants (100), when he recalls gudgeon and the water-weeds in the River Loir. To Proust any 46

plant was a precious thing, a mystery which generated sufficient importance for him to find and delight in using its correct name: we find buttercups, cornflowers, dandelions, nettles and poppies, but few weeds which in French, mauvaise herbe, has a negative, diminished connotation as in English. The large genus Ranunculus, the buttercups, contain a number of species which inhabit only ponds, ditches and streams; they have become aquatic plants. The water crowfoot, R. aquatilis, so named because the submerged leaves are divided into linear segments like the foot of a crow, is often annual or sometimes a perennial plant, see Fig. 39. Its floating stems also bear unsubmerged floating leaves and these look more like normal buttercup leaves. The flowers appear in May or June, are the palest yellow, and float, or are held just above the water surface, so that insects can pollinate them. This species grew in the artificial pond which was created by the father of Charles Swann at Tansonville (101). In western Europe there are two genera commonly encountered belonging to the waterlily family, Nymphaeaceae. These are Nuphar, the species having brandy-bottle shaped fruits and flowers with thick, rounded petals often incurved over the ovary, and Nymphaea, having larger flowers often more than 10 cm across with elongated petals which open out to resemble certain double-flowered roses or camellias. Both have perennial rhizomes and leaves which are almost circular in outline, float and die down each winter. Nuphar comprises 25 northern temperate species, while there are 50 species of Nymphaea with a temperate and tropical distribution, certain of the species being very beautiful when in flower. Observant as ever the narrator describes (102) the River Vivonne and how it became choked with water plants. He 47

meditates on how a waterlily leaf caught by the current repeats the same helpless movement through the water, endlessly, just like his grandfather might have attributed to the odd habits of his aunt Leonie, or the peculiar torments, repeated throughout eternity, documented by Dante. Proust made other unspecific references to water plants on at least four occasions, such as in Jean Santeuil (103). The river and its plants

The River Loir is the fictional River Vivonne and it had a fascination for Proust. In Combray (104) the tow-path of the Vivonne, just beyond the Pont-Vieux was overhung by the bluish foliage of a hazel tree, beneath which a fisherman in a straw hat seemed to be always present. An earlier version of this scene (105) employs sloe bushes instead of hazel, but with the same fisherman in a straw hat among the sloe bushes nodding respectfully to his uncle. One might speculate whether the fisherman was old David who supplied gudgeon in Jean Santeuil (106). Prunus spinosa is the sloe, a dense spiny shrub or tree which is native in Europe, parts of North Africa and on into western Asia. It is a familiar hedgerow plant, its small white flowers of March and April being followed by small damson-like fruits which lose their striking grey bloom on becoming ripe, when they turn black, see Fig. 35. The tart fruits make excellent jam, wine, or soaked in good gin, sloe gin. The branches of the tree are the source of blackthorn walking sticks and the tree is associated with witches and is regarded as unlucky. While it is popularly believed that the Irish shillelagh is fashioned from sloe, or blackthorn, it is oak that is the authentic timber (107).

48

The days spent in Etreuilles left a lasting impression on Jean (108). The sunlit irises glistening in full flower beside the canal, suddenly plunged in shadow by a passing cloud, somehow gave him a sense of living in days long since passed. Proust identifies (109) the sense of something which flowers lose when planted in gardens, or gathered in bunches, but which they retain when seen in a field, or in a wood; as when we surprise periwinkles crowding to drink the freshness of the water's edge. The periwinkles, Vinca minor and V. major, see Fig. 54, are creeping evergreens with pretty blue flowers, the latter being a robust garden plant which can become weedy. The genus comprises seven species with a distribution from Europe into western Asia. Sometimes getting out of bed late and arriving in the Park (110), Jean had the feeling that when one is happy, even the simplest events like the reflections of the leaves of the tall poplars, the osier twigs, the little bridge and his walking stick could all be seen there in the canal, only faintly disturbed by a light breeze, or the passage of a swan. The osier is Salix viminalis, see Fig. 44, long cultivated for basket making, but the shoots of other species are also used such as S. purpurea and S. triandra. These are all willows, the genus Salix comprising about 500 species. They are mainly northern temperate trees and shrubs, some species being large riverside trees, others creeping Arctic-alpine shrubs. The species hybridise readily in nature and in cultivation which at times makes them difficult to identify. Most willows have the male and female flowers borne on separate plants, the male catkins often being showy but short-lived. Despite having catkins the willows are both insect and wind-pollinated. Like the poplars, Populus, to which they are related, the wood of many willows is prone to splitting and 49

their roots can be invasive as they are fast growing. Amongst the many lovely willows are the commonly planted weeping willow, S. babylonica; the woolly willow, S. lanata; S. fargesii from central China and S. magnJIca from western China. Other plants from childhood

Painter (111) noted that the hazel copse in the Pre-Catelan was called the Bois Pilou and was where in the silence of these shrubs Proust and his brother used to play hide and seek as children ( 112). Proust continued (113) that as well as in the dining room, or the armchair in his bedroom, he read in the afternoons under the hazels and hawthorns of the park with the smell of clover and sainfoin in his nostrils drifting to him from distant fields. The book he had been reading was Le Capitaine Fracasse by Theophile Gautier. The hazel is the ninth consonant in the Druidic Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet, (coil), according to Graves (114) and the nut is the token of concentrated wisdom. Sainfoin, Onobrychis viciifolia, is another fodder plant and legume like clover; it is one of the 120 species in the genus extending from Europe into central Asia, see Fig. 32. Proust mentioned sainfoin fields and apple orchards in his article on cathedrals in Le Figaro on 16 August 1904. Jean comments on another fodder plant (115). At one end of the asparagus bed there was a bolted door which opened onto a vista of field after field of lucerne, as far as the eye could see, with an occasional poppy nodding in the wind. The purpleviolet blossom of a field of lucerne is very striking, but the plants are generally grazed, or mown for lucerne hay or silage before this stage is reached. Lucerne, Medicago sativa, see Fig. 50

29, probably originated in the area near the Caspian Sea and is one of the hundred species in the genus which is characterised by having its legume fruit spirally coiled into a disk, or even a ball, and being variously armed with hooks so that animals might disperse them. Some of the species are weedy. The hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, is native in Europe and western Asia and Painter (116) refers to one at the top of the Prd Catelan, a tree in which the young Proust would escape to continue his love of reading, or to be alone. There is a brief allusion made to hyacinths (117), piled in heaps upon the altar during the Festival of Mary's Month at the church in Etreuilles, and Jean also watered groups of hyacinths between low growing chestnuts (118), exhibiting a child's superfluous attention to a spring bulb which is well able to look after itself. Hyacinthus orientalis is one of about thirty species having a Mediterranean and African distribution in nature, and many cultivated forms have been derived from this species with fragrant blue, pink, or white flowers emerging from a stout bulb before the leaves appear. The hyacinths belong to the lily family. In Jean Santeuil (119), the minor character of M. Marie is an important and influential politician who is liked by Jean's parents, but who becomes involved with shady business deals and whose reputation thereby suffers. We find Marie and old Duclin sitting in a lilac-shaded arbour happily smoking cigarettes under the motionless laburnums untormented by any sense of guilt, with wasps flying round them. Perhaps pointing to M. Marie's tendencies, all parts of the very attractive Laburnum species are poisonous and wasps of course can sting. There are only two tree species in this genus of legume from 51

central and southern Europe, both having drooping racemes of fragrant yellow pea-flowers. On some of his walks Jean encountered (120), meadow-sweet which at the time described beside the reaped hay would be starting to set its fruit, although a late spray of blossom might still have been found. Meadow-sweet is Filipendula ulmaria, one of a genus of ten species of herb in the rose family. It grows in damp places and its heads of creamy-white flower are fragrant, see Fig. 19. Even in later life when he ate little, Proust always enjoyed fried potatoes and they feature in Jean Santeuil (121). Uncle Jules asks Jean, whether he would like for lunch baked eggs, filet of beef with béarnaise sauce and fried potatoes together with gudgeon if old David had brought any. In another reference, Jean's great-aunt, Mme Sureau, was old and no longer inclined to leave the house, spending her days in an armchair by the window where she took her part in the communal life of Etreuilles (122). Curious and concerned at the absence of neighbour Monsieur Servan, Ernestine explains to her that this was the day they were lifting the potato crop. The potato, Solanum tuberosum, is a native of South America and is one of 1700 species in a genus which occurs throughout the world in different temperate and tropical habitats. The vegetable known as the potato, although growing underground, is not part of the root system, but arises at the tips of horizontal branches emerging from the lower stem of the plant. The potato represents a vegetative propagule supplementing that provided by the seed. Robinson (123) listed the varieties Marjolin (earliest), Saucisse, Reine blanche and Vitelotte (salad) as being grown in the Paris district at the time of Proust's birth. 52

When first seeing Gilberte (124) the narrator, looking through a gap in a hawthorn hedge, is afforded a glimpse inside the park of an alley bordered with jasmine, pansies and verbenas, among which the stocks had pink flowers like that of old Spanish leather. The garden stock with its copious and fragrant flowers has arisen from two species in the genus Matihiola, a genus related to the cabbages. The gardener's Ten Week and the biennial Brompton stock have both been selected from M. incana which is a species from southern Europe. The East Lothian and Intermediate stocks have in contrast been selected from M sinuata, a native of western Europe, see Fig. 28. The different sorts vary in height, habit, and the time taken to flower from seed; they all develop a rather woody branched stem as they get older and so, although perennial, are treated as biennials. The genus comprises fifty five species which occur wild in the Atlantic Islands, western Europe, the Mediterranean, central Asia and parts of southern Africa. The Virginian stock, Malcolmia maritima, has smaller flowers and is not the stock about which Proust wrote: it is one of thirty five species in the genus with a natural distribution similar to that of Matihiola. The sunflower, Helianthus annuus, is one of 110 species in this daisy genus which is found naturally only in the Americas. The seeds yield an oil which makes this species the only economic crop that has originated in what is now the United States of America. It always seems remarkable that these plants, which can grow more than 2 m tall with their large, sun-like terminal inflorescence, do so in the space of only one season from a seed. As garden plants Jean was aware of them (125) downhill from the amphitheatre and adjoining the park.

53

Describing the altar in the church at Etreuilles (126) during the Festival of Mary's Month, there were, tulips in pots wrapped round with white paper. The term vine is applicable to any climbing plant, but is usually given another qualifying word, as in grape-vine, Vitis vinifera; trumpet vine, Campsis radicans; kangaroo vine, Cissus antarctica, or kudzu vine, Pueraria lobata. The unspecific use occurs (127) when a young girl flees her cousin's fondling hands in panic, running past a vine-covered arbor, in search of her mother and finally finds her sitting on a bench, smiling and holding out her arms. Proust used both of the names Virginia creeper and Ampelopsis in his writing, but the correct name for Virginia creeper is Parthenocissus quinquefolia, as will be explained later. Madame Sureau, Jean's elderly great-aunt, had not travelled as far as Les Bearceaux for the last twenty five years (128) and her face had assumed the red tint of a Virginia creeper and showed a network of veins. She hardly ever moved anywhere. Spending each Easter with Jean's great-uncle and aunt (129), when the weather became hot the little house was prone to get stuffy. Even in the yard under the walnut the temperature could reach 104° F. The walnut is Juglans regia, a species from western Asia. Its seeds and timber are both valued and it makes a handsome ornamental tree, although it can be susceptible to late frosts in Europe and should be planted where this is less likely to happen. There are fifteen species in the genus.

Garden features Although not plants, garden features and ornaments play an important part in determining the character of certain gardens 54

and landscape designs as Proust was well aware; he used them in Les Plaisirs.., Jean Santeuil and A la recherche. Reflecting on the passage of time (130), the green patina staining the marble pedestal produced by dripping from the bronze statue of Pan in the Park is valued no less than some treasured piece of old needlework, or the soft green stuff concealing the pipes of the fountain basin. The tightly packed pebbles of the garden path (131) provoke thoughts of the unknown creators of gardens and their features, the silent statues with flowers scattered about their heads by hands now vanished. On another path, a rising path (132), arriving at a bower as silent as a statue one may seat oneself and rest, but dare not break the silence, or disturb the brooding thoughts that fill the place. Proust wrote about, but cannot have experienced, just such a garden space created many years later by Henry Mcllhenny at Glenveagh Castle, Co.Donegal in Ireland. In the Park lay a treeless waste with, at its centre, a post to which tethered horses slowly moving in a circle sometimes pumped water. When they were not there, the post's shadow turned more slowly than even the horses and Jean's uncle explained that it then operated like a sort of sundial.

Interiors

Throughout his writing Proust was fond of describing interiors with loving care, sometimes domestic, sometimes religious (133). When it rained in Combray the narrator might be obliged on occasions to shelter in the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs together with a stone saint, her firm breasts filling her gown like clusters of ripe grapes, the appearance of the statue not unlike 55

that of some local country girls he had seen. No less did the sculpted foliage of a climbing plant resemble real leaves straying under the porch, making it possible to judge the excellence of the sculptor. Perhaps significantly, the comparative exercise between saint and field-girl is that which is still used to identify an unknown plant specimen using the dried specimens of known identity in an herbarium: it is the basis of any taxonomic system. Proust described the bedroom he used when he visited Illiers as a child (134). It had a chest of drawers with two vases decorating the top together with a picture of the Saviour and a twig of boxwood. William Robinson quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes on box, ..breathing the fragrance of eternity.' The box, Buxus sempervirens, is a native shrub or small tree which occurs in southern Europe, parts of North Africa and western Asia, see Fig. 7. The genus is largely confined to the northern hemisphere and comprises seventy species. The wood is hard and finely grained, being slow growing and it is excellent material for wood turning or engraving. Several other box species make good hedging plants and their longevity and small leaves on compact shoot systems have led to them being used for topiary for several centuries in Europe. Jean was sometimes asked in the morning by his uncle how he had slept (135) and if he had dreamt. While the little boy could not remember, it made him happy to think that his uncle also did so when in bed surrounded by curtains smelling of lavender. Oil of lavender is distilled from the flowers of Lavandula angustifolia, English, and L. stoechas, French lavender, both having been cultivated since the mid-16th century in Europe. Belonging to the Salvia family, the thirty nine species of

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lavender grow wild in habitats extending from the Atlantic Islands, the Mediterranean area, into Somalia and on into India. Retiring to his bedroom on hot summer Etreuilles days (136), Jean would relish the cool, darkened interior expressing a silent life of its own; the linen-covered bed, the flowers monotonously repeating themselves in the pattern of the wallpaper, the mahogany chest of drawers and water that never flowed over cushions of moss, but filled a noisy jug. Both mahogany and linen are plant products with marginal relevance to Proust's writing. Mahogany, Swietenia mahagoni, is one of seven species in this genus found wild only in tropical America and the West Indies. The durable timber is easily worked, takes a deep and rich lustrous colour when polished and was much used for furniture in the 19th century when natural stands were still being actively logged. Linen is woven from the longer fibres of flax which remain when the soft tissues of Linum usitatissimum are retted off the stalks by soaking in water. Being a soft but durable material, linen was once extensively used for clothing and bedding. The seeds of the same species, linseed, can be crushed to yield an oil and the remaining cake can be used for cattle feed. Linum has more than 200 species, many of which are blue flowered, some white, but L. grandiflorum has glorious red flowers and is sometimes seen in gardens as an annual bedding plant. In an essay on bedrooms (137) where, as a child, he often found himself unwell, the night light on the yellow marble mantlepiece is remembered, as are the herb teas and infusions of flowers learned and handed down by sixty generations of old women. Proust wrote, tongue in cheek, (138), that Mme Santeuil like those peasant farmers finding that a corner of their land is 57

unsuitable for the growing of crops, vegetables, or apples and turn it in to a garden, failed to awaken in her young son any interest in reading. Jean was instead, like many young people, in happy communion with sun and breeze, all redolent of woodland scents. Closer to the truth (139), Proust recalled his childhood delight of discovery through reading; how he repeated a sentence from Le Capitaine Fracasse to the irises and periwinkles by the river's edge, and how it would be better still if he could find the charm anywhere in his own work that he once found in a single sentence by Gautier. The narrator (140) recalled an occasion when his reading was interrupted one afternoon by the gardener's daughter rushing in, overturning an orange-tree in its tub, thereby cutting her finger and breaking a tooth, while crying out that the cavalry was approaching Combray on manoeuvres, and that Francoise and himself should run too and not miss anything. Paris

The Paris of Proust's childhood was already the spacious treelined capital we know (141), Baron George Eugene Haussmann (1809-1891) having been responsible for widening its streets, creating parks and boulevards and building bridges in his role as Prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III from 1853. William Robinson visited Paris in 1865 and described the new plantings before the damage inflicted by the Franco-Prussian war. Edmund de Waal has beautifully resurrected the `Monceau' neighbourhood of Proust's childhood. The Eiffel Tower was still being built as Proust completed his schooling; it opened in 1889 and was a modern marvel to all who saw it. France was at 58

the forefront of many areas of human endeavour, not least the natural sciences. The little boy was regularly taken to play and walk in the Parc Monceau and Jardin des Champs-Elysées like other children with his family background. He was angelic to look at as photographs show, but his precociousness and eccentricities at different times amused, surprised and sometimes irritated those he met. He was very generous, gentle, kind and sophisticated for his age, yet exceedingly strong-willed behind an apparently frail and timid exterior. There is little to suggest that Proust ever tried to actually grow plants as a child, although Jean Santeuil watered hyacinth bulbs when he was young. Gardening often begins as an emulated activity passed from one generation to another, to one's grandchildren, or children as the gardening year unfolds, year in, year out. Proust's family lived in an apartment and had servants. His mother was ftilly occupied with domestic matters and had an artistic temperament, being well read. Proust's father was an important and busy medical administrator and writer. Proust's maternal grandfather, Nathe Weil, was a man of private means who later served as an intimate and financial adviser to his grandson, but gardening was not his forte. Only uncle Jules (142) had the land, the garden, the gardener Menard and the practical disposition to show the boy the vegetables growing in the garden beside rue des Lavoirs and the delights of the Pre-Catelan, but the visits to Illiers were only at holiday time. It is likely that Proust simply derived aesthetic and intellectual plant-pleasures, even from a young age, much as an armchair gardener might through a collection of books on the subject and there are many of both. Jean Santeuil was to observe (143) that in Paris there was not a single clematis shoot thrusting through the chinks between the paving-stones to remind him that summer could come even there. 59

We have an impression, then, of a somewhat Levantine looking youth being happy to be affectionate and sociable on his own terms, having darted perplexed glances at a little girl seen through the gap in a hawthorn hedge in the country, not realising that he playfully, knowingly, wrestled with the same little girl in the laurels near the Alcazar d'Etd in Paris. Playing prisoner's base on one occasion on 1 May 1880, he slipped, fell and broke his nose (144). But we also have an impression of someone happy to embrace solitude, to avoid those he did not wish to meet, or when intent on reading (145). After lunch, reading resumed immediately in the room with white curtains which hid from sight the bed which had counterpanes with flowers, embroidered bedspreads, linen pillowcases, reminding him of an altar in the month of May. By the bed was a trinity of glass with blue patterns, the matching sugar bowl and decanter, almost as sacred as the orange-blossom liqueur placed near them which he never touched, but would closely examine at length before undressing. There were crocheted openwork stoles on the backs of the armchairs like swags of white roses that seemed to have thorns, since he always seemed to get caught in them. He never seemed able to take out a handkerchief from the chest of drawers without knocking down the picture of the Saviour, the sacred vases, the sprig of blessed boxwood. The little boltingcloth and larger dimity curtains had a hawthorn whiteness, but irritated him by entangling themselves with the window whenever he wanted to open or close it as perfectly as they would have by a real hawthorn bush. Clearly the plant-world existed for Proust both indoors and in the open air. To have read Balzac was to speak the Proust family language, certainly that between Marcel and his mother, and this 60

permeated his childhood (146). Other favourite books at this time were Histoire de la con quête de 1 'Angleterre by Augustin Thierry, Récits des temps mérovingiens also by Thierry, Histoire d'un merle blanc by Alfred de Musset, Le Capitaine Fracasse by Théophile Gautier and Picciola by Xavier Saintine. This last novel has the love of a prisoner for a flower and young woman as its theme, elements of which can be detected in some of Proust's work. Other than in books, the young Proust would have learned about different plants in the public and private parks and gardens he visited with his parents or school friends. Gardens are mentioned by name quite frequently in his writing and he used both real and fictional places, the latter sometimes being an assemblage of several real places, much like the way he sometimes composed his fictional characters.

Champs-Eysées Tadié wrote (147) that the families living in the eighth arrondissement of Paris in Proust's time would send their children to play in the Parc Monceau or in the Champs-Elysées, accompanied by their nannies. Robinson described the plantings of both areas. From mid-1873 when Proust would have been two years old, the family lived in a Paris apartment, latterly not very far from the Lycèe Condorcet where he was to later go to school. The narrator remarks (148) that he was sent every day to the Champs-Elysées with Francoise, who had entered the service of the family after the death of aunt Léonie. Going there he found unendurable. He first notices Gilberte while waiting for Françoise who is minding him. He recalled that as he was 61

pacing the close-cropped, sun-baked grass with, at its far end, a statue rising from a fountain, this little girl with reddish hair was in front playing battledore and shuttlecock. In Jean Santeuil the meeting place is the same, but Jean meets a little Russian girl with black hair and bright mocking eyes (149). His delight in seeing her was a function of the magnitude of his desire to do so and the anguish he felt when he saw her leave. From her presence he seemed to derive little pleasure! Soon the narrator sees and meets Gilberte there so often as a playmate that even the snow won't keep him indoors to prevent a meeting (150). The roundabout, the barley-sugar women, the goat-carriage rides, the laurel shrubbery, the fountain with its statue, the chair-keeper who hires iron chairs to patrons, the Punch and Judy Show, the pigeons are all faithfully recorded (151). As they played together they would scatter the pigeons whose iridescent bodies, like so many lilacs of the feathered kingdom, would take refuge on the stone basin of the fountain, or on the head of the statue. The goat carriage rides have now disappeared, but Marylin Bender writes Le Théâtre du Vrai Guignolet continues every Wednesday and weekends as the oldest Punch and Judy Show in Paris. The weather occasionally prevented the narrator from being allowed to go out (152), but watching for the return of the sun on the balcony in front of the apartment windows, he would see the sunbeams reach the wrought-iron of the balustrade, casting a fugitive flora of shadows of the climbing ivy , depressing to many minds, but for him on his balcony like the presence of Gilberte. The use of ivy, Hedera helix, see Fig. 23, on apartment balconies in Paris is illustrated with period engravings by Robinson (153). 62

Proust's reminiscence 'The sunbeam on the balcony' (154), his childhood view of the world from the window of the family apartment, is a precursor of the passage from A la recherche... In this earlier writing it is the insubstantial fronds of shadows of the balcony railings that inform and delight Proust and that he compares to the more substantial sorts of vegetation often found on balconies. The Swanns become increasingly concerned with the narrator's precocious attention to their daughter, Gilberte, but she agrees to hand a sixteen page letter from him to her father, explaining the narrator's honorable intentions and deep love (155). Gilberte tells him next day, behind some laurels, that his letter only confirmed her father's dim view of his behaviour. The narrator is mortified and furious, but momentarily called away by Françoise who is nominally minding him. On returning to Gilberte shortly after (156) he catches sight of her on a chair, again behind the laurels, and she reminds him not to forget to take away his letter. Gilberte, leaning back in her chair, tells him to take the letter, but withholds it and they playfully wrestle. After a little while Gilberte suggests brightly that they might wrestle a little longer if he would like to. Many fictional years later (157) when Dr du Boulbon visits the narrator's ailing grandmother, his mother suggests, if the doctor permits, that she go to sit beside some quiet path in the Champs-Elysées, near that clump of laurels where her son used to play. The doctor thinks it a splendid idea as he considers the shrub to have medicinal benefit but also, for he is a man of letters, pointing out that it is the plant which Apollo bore in his hand (to ward off infection after killing the deadly serpent Python) on entering Delphi.

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The classical laurel here is the bay laurel, Laurus nobilis, one of only two species in the genus found in the Mediterranean region. With evergreen, aromatic leaves when crushed, it is used in cooking, but is also the token of victory in battle, or in sport, or to honour a poet with immortality. In his essay on Montesquiou (158) Proust wrote that in looking at a handsome photograph of Montesquiou it only lacked a laurel wreath to match the locks like those seen on Greek statues. Painter wrote (159) that the laurels were still in existence in 1989 when the last edition of his biography of Proust was published, but neither he nor Tadie were more specific about the identity of the shrubs as there are two different evergreen laurels grown in gardens. The second species is Prunus laurocerasus, cherry laurel, a more frost-hardy plant than bay laurel and growing to 6m tall; it is a native of eastern Europe and Asia Minor, but was introduced to western Europe in 1576. It is often used for large hedges, or screening; the cv. Zabeliana is an effective prostrate form used for ground cover. They grow well on all but chalky soil, when the related Portuguese laurel is grown instead, P. lusitanica; Robinson had a low opinion of both. The leaves of cherry laurel are poisonous, producing prussic acid when crushed; they are used to line the bottom of killing-jars by aspiring young entomologists. But from what Proust wrote these do not seem to be the laurels that he had in mind. One cold winter day, hoping to meet Gilberte at their rendezvous (160), the young narrator looked miserably across the white lawn and deserted roundabout to the statue in the fountain with a pendent icicle seeming to be held in one hand. Painter observed (161) that in reality the statue in the fountain

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arranges her long tresses and is childless, but in the novel holds a baby with one hand. When looking forward to his meetings with Gilberte (162), there was often an elderly lady wearing a boa seated in their part of the park reading the Débats. She secreted the yellow chair-hire ticket inside one of her gloves so that it stuck out over her bare wrist, placing it with a sort of simpering action as though it had been a posy of flowers. Should an inspector request to see the ticket she would show the edge of the ticket against her wrist with a gesture and coy smile that a sweetheart might give when pointing to a gift of roses pinned near her bosom. Marie Kossichef is the little girl that Jean Santeuil meets in the park playground, close to the wooden horses, behind the lemonade stall( 163). There he marvels at the sight of blue and yellow, the agate marbles, one of which Marie later gives him as a token of high esteem. Almost certainly based on a real event, one so matter-of-fact and incidental (164), in a dense city fog in the Champs-Elysées a cab driving down the Avenue wandered into a clump of shrubs and could not get out again. With his father accompanying the Minister of Foreign Affairs on a trip to Belgium (165), and spending time with his mother, Jean returns home for lunch with her. With Jean seated in his father's chair and his mother opposite, they had between them a bunch of snowdrops which they had arranged in a tumbler to decorate the sunny table setting. Snowdrops, the twenty species of Galanthus, occur wild through Europe as far east as northern Turkey. They are early flowering members of the daffodil family, the Amaryllidaceae. G. nivalis is the snowdrop of western Europe. Like most of the species the single flower bud 65

is held erect, but the opened flower is pendulous and it may or may not accompany the leaves, depending on the species concerned. The flowers of all species are white, but with various green markings, again, depending on the species. Proust told Celeste Albaret (166) that his mother always seemed to think of everything. On winter walks in the Champs-Elysées, she would tell Felicie to bake some big potatoes in their jackets and put them in their fur-muffs to warm their hands. According to Painter (167), the Comtesse de Martel (whose nom-de-plume was Gyp, the novelist), often saw the young Proust in the Parc Monceau apparently shivering with cold, holding a hot roast potato in each frozen hand. He would give the potatoes to the chair-woman when he departed and she grew to expect them! Such is the way that different people hold different perceptions of the same event. The path bordering the Jardin des ChampsElysées adjacent to Avenue Gabriel has now been named All& Marcel Proust. Bois de Boulogne

Proust often visited the Bois and there is a long and obviously fond description in A la recherche...(168). Like Robinson, Proust preferred its planted informality. Painter said that Proust's first asthma attack occurred after a walk in the Bois with his parents (169), but Celeste Albaret (170) remembered that Proust told her that it occurred in the Champs-Elysées. Guermantes gardens

The young narrator (171) notices a neighbour to the new family apartment in Paris, apparently a 'Countess' who, when she drove out, waving with affable disdain to anyone passing, wore 66

on her hat a few nasturtiums the same as from the plot by the lodge. The precursor of this passage occurred in Contre SainteBeuve (172); the lady here driving out in her barouche and pair, smiling from under a hat trimmed with irises like those in the window-box of the cobbler-tailor-concierge. The small, bulbous Iris reticulata could have provided a suitable flower. Becoming more and more intoxicated by the notion and poetry of the Guermantes name, the family history and its position in society, the narrator is puzzled to learn from Françoise, the family cook (173) that the Guermantes occupied their house not by virtue of immemorial right, but of a quite recent tenancy and was quite small, just like the neighbouring ones. Undeterred he continues (174) that the strip of garden between high walls, where Mme de Guermantes had liqueurs and orangeade brought out after dinner in summer, sitting on iron chairs between the hours of nine and eleven still had, for him, the magic of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, just as a siesta in the oasis of Figuig necessarily suggested being in Africa! The garden of the Princesse de Guermantes was altogether more splendid as the Duchesse de Guermantes explains to the narrator and Charles Swann some years later (175), especially with lilacs in flower and then with its fountain; just like Versailles in Paris. At the garden party held by the Princesse, there is a close description of the Hubert Robert fountain (176) and its beauty, but which accidentally drenches Mme d'Arpajon much to the amusement of certain of the guests. There is a reference in Contre Sainte-Beuve (177) to the Hubert Robert painting 'Jet d'eau' which is the inspiration for the fountain in the garden of the Princesse.

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School

From the time that Proust first went to school in the PapeCarpentier class in 1880 he had known Jacques Bizet (18721922), the son of the composer and Genevieve (nee Halevy). Bizet was cousin to another school-mate of Proust, Daniel Halevy (1872-1962), and both Jacques and Daniel were intelligent, good looking boys to whom Proust was attracted. Proust has Jean Santeuil expose his childish vanity, and naïveté, (178), when seeking to impress a classmate by whispering in class, blushing like a cherry, that he had been to dinner with the headmaster. At this point the teacher asks and proceeds to find out in front of the entire class what Jean is whispering about. Jean is a normal school boy. He likes to suck cherry stones (179), an activity which his mother solemnly forbade. He also loves the changing season in the countryside (180), when the fruit trees lose their lovely flowers to be replaced by a darker show of jewels. The wild cherries in the hedgerow which he found near Etreuilles ( 181) would probably have been those of the gean, Prunus avium, which is found in woodland throughout Europe. The Lycee Condorcet in rue du Havre, Proust's school, was also attended by his cousin the Nobel Laureate philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) who refused a Nobel Prize and Marcel Dassault (1892-1986), the aviation pioneer. In his first year at school, 1882-3, Proust excelled in French and Greek and received second prize in Biology. In his second year, 1883-4, he was placed third in Biology, but had had much absence from school. Recalling childhood memories of school (182), the smoking of cigarettes had seemed to Jean to be so corrupt, so repulsive, that 68

in telling his mother something of the order of his new school life his teacher, who was very nice, did things that could not be discussed and that although he had not witnessed it, was said to smoke: all of his friends talked about it. Being lectured to by his new tutor, M. Beulier (183) spoke without any break so that Jean felt exhausted at the end of five minutes and ceased to follow what was being said. He longed for some sort of pause to rest, as at a flower-decked shrine. In what may represent a reminiscence of Proust's own school experience (184), M. Beulier criticises Jean's essay aloud to the class, pointing out, amongst other issues, that the smell of lilac is strongest after rain while that of heliotrope is released most when the sun shines on it. This lesson Proust seems to have taken to heart because the theme recurs in Les Plaisirs...(185), where the passionate tenderness of Honoré and Mine Seaune almost seemed to uncontrollably perfume the room like heliotrope in the sun, or flowering lilacs in the rain. The 250 species of Heliotropiuin, belonging to the borage family, are temperate and tropical herbs and subshrubs. Most often seen in European gardens is cherry pie, H. arborescens, introduced in 1757, and H. coiymbosum having larger flowers, introduced in 1808, both from Peru. Hybrids between these species have also been made and can be found in gardens. Their lilac or violet coloured flowers are very fragrant, but heliotropes are frost tender and would have been seen outdoors in 19th century Paris only as summer bedding plants. Thanks to his tutor (186) Jean develops an early appreciation, one Christmas Eve, that Christmas Day is something more than just a childish ritual; he reads a story by Anatole France in the Echo de Paris with a celebratory sprig of mistletoe in a glass on the table as he greets his mother. 69

Paris and Geneva had at that time become centres of excellence in the development and teaching of plant classification and some of this would have been reflected in Proust's schooling. It is certainly reflected as a favourite topic in his later writing quite apart from his instinctive preoccupation with names and all that they suggest. Bernard de Jussieu (c.1699-1777) was an eminent French botanist, born in Lyon, who in 1764 created the garden of the Little Trianon at Versailles for Louis XV, and the fine trees in which later delighted William Robinson. The botanist planted out the garden in a living systematic arrangement, one which he considered to be an improvement on the then current Linnaean system based on the number of flower parts which any particular species possessed. Bernard's elder brother, Antoine (1686-1758), was a physician and professor at the Jardin des Plantes, like his nephew, Antoine Laurent (1748-1836), who further developed his uncle's still unpublished plant classification system and then published it himself as the Genera Plantarum (1778-89). The stimulus and catalyst for an improved plant classification system was as much practical as intellectual and was driven by the wealth of newly discovered plant species being found in Asia, the Americas and Australasia, (187). Dried specimens, seeds and sometimes living specimens of these plants were shipped back to Europe for identification in botanical institutions in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain, the colonial powers, because the plant resources of a colony then represented an important economic asset, as much as oil, uranium and water might today. Many of the newly discovered plant species had suites of characters which simply did not fit into Linnaeus' system, which was based more on the plants of Europe and the classical world. Plant exploration was undertaken by institutional and private collectors, often military officers posted 70

overseas, or missionaries, and the richness of exotic plantings in European gardens is almost entirely due to this period of expanding botanical knowledge which only began to slow down in the late 20th century. The acquisition of this knowledge also resulted, indirectly, in the spread of many troublesome exotic weeds and in the extinction of rare species at the hands of avid plant collectors, a Proustian paradox indeed. Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778-1841) was born in Geneva but trained in Paris and, together with his son, Alphonse (1806-1893), further improved and expanded on the good work of the Jussieus, with the publication of the seventeen volume Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis begun in 1824. By 1840 the de Candolle system had superceded the Sexual System of Linnaeus (188) and would have been the basis on which Proust was taught his plant classification in his biology lessons. Particular plant specimens can be identified by means of books, descriptive manuals, which are confusingly called 'floras', and which contain written descriptions, often illustrated, of all the species known from a particular region. Most countries or regions now have a flora describing the plant inhabitants. The pioneering Flora Orientalis by Pierre Edmond Boissier (18101885), published between 1867 and 1884, described the wild plants of the Near and Middle East and reference to it was incorporated into A la recherche... by Proust, as will be described. The name Boissier also had for Proust the advantage of being a well known maker of confectionery. Closer to home the standard French flora in Proust's day, and my early ones, was La Fiore complete de la France et de la Suisse (1887), written by Gaston Bonnier (1853-1922), also used as a reference for A la recherche... When Proust was 71

twelve he was taught biology by M. Colomb (189), who had himself been instructed by Bonnier. Colomb became an assistant to Bonnier in the Sorbonne, but on field-trips Bonnier complained that his assistant's continual joking with the students was a distraction from serious botany, which might have delighted Proust who had a robust sense of the ridiculous and talent for mimicry. As well as there being advances in plant classification, biological thinking had also changed rapidly. The theory of the origin of species by natural selection had been published by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in 1859 and the repercussions were still being felt in academic and religious circles when Proust was born. Darwin had also published other influential books, material which was later elaborated by Proust, in places, almost pastiche-like. They included The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), and The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877). It does not seem that Proust discovered Darwin's diverting Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia (1851-54), barnacles, in which the females of certain species have one, or more, microscopic males, immobile, parasitic, but functional, embedded permanently in the flesh of their wife (190). The Baron de Charlus would perhaps have had something to say about these arrangements. Back at school Proust maintained progress in French, Greek, Latin and History in his third year, but German, Mathematics and Geography had suffered. Ill health made it necessary for him to repeat his fourth year. Tadie (191) describes a letter from a fifteen year old Proust to his maternal grandmother, Adele Weil (née Berncastel, 1824-1890), playfully reproaching 72

her for not sharing his enthusiasm for Gautier's Le Capitaine Fracasse yet at the same time being a subscriber to La Revue des deux mondes and lover of apricots and cooked cherries. By the time he had entered the lower sixth form his literary abilities had become apparent. Robert Dreyfus (1873-1937) was two years younger than Proust, but had been a playmate in the Jardin des ChampsElysées. Together with Bizet and Halevy, these four idealistic young men at this time shared many aesthetic and literary interests, all becoming sixth formers in 1888 (192). However, in the autumn of 1887 Proust had not only realised his attraction to literature, but also to younger boys in a declared infatuation for Jacques Bizet, of which both Dreyfus and Halevy knew. Writing to Bizet during class sometime in the spring of 1888 (193), the rejected Proust told him how sad it seemed not to pick the flowers of youth before they became forbidden fruit. For a time Bizet and Halevy stopped talking to Proust and his parents forbad him access to Bizet. Proust may have felt solicitous towards Jacques whose biological father had died on 2 June 1875, and whose depressive mother had remarried to Emile Straus in 1886 after a period of widowhood surrounded by admirers such as Henri Meilhac, Georges de Porto-Riche, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Paul Ernest Hervieu, Joseph Reinach and her cousin Ludovic Halevy (194). Jacques Bizet had had a turbulent childhood and despite his sensitivity and gifts, later took to drugs and committed suicide on 7 November 1922, just 11 days before the death of Proust.

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Chapter 2 Adolescence It may be that from about 1888 and the experience of the debacle over Jacques Bizet, Proust began to internalise his emotions and feelings in writing. Perhaps becoming more circumspect, he developed a veil of dissimulation which, in his fiction, became a creative force allowing him freedom of expression without unduly outraging or causing misunderstanding with his reader. Proust distanced himself from being identified with either Jean Santeuil, or the narrator in A la recherche..., yet so much of his writing was based, more or less, on personal experience because he admitted to being unable to invent fiction. Only in Jean Santeuil' is there a selfportrait telling us a little of how Jean looked: somewhat badly dressed, with black, shining, unruly hair, his manner sometimes excited, sometimes dejected, always pale with brooding, tired eyes, like fresh almonds, circled in dark shadow from sleeplessness, or fever. Perhaps wearing a rose in the lapel of a green tweed jacket, he might wear a tie, perhaps Indian silk, patterned with peacock's eyes like that designed by Arthur Silver for Liberty's and first exhibited in 1887 in Manchester. The triangular relationship with his school friends became a recurring element in his personal life, as it did in his fiction. Furthermore, he also repeatedly metamorphosed his increasingly complex affections to the mothers of the young men to whom he was initially attracted, or to older women. In A la recherche... the narrator's passion for Gilberte transforms into one for her mother, Odette Swann. Madame Straus, the mother of Jacques Bizet, was to become a lifelong intimate friend of Proust. The spiritual bond he developed with women such as Mme Straus, Mme de Chevigné, Louisa de Mornand, or the Comtesse de Noailles at various stages in his life 75

corresponded with co-existing carnal relationships with men such as Reynaldo Hahn, Lucien Daudet, Bertrand de Fenelon, or Alfred Agostinelli. Not long before his death, Proust told Andre Gide in 1921 that he had never loved women except spiritually and that he had only ever known the love of other men. Tadie2 conjectured about the contradictions of Proust's psyche, the tensions of indulging in pleasures later to be regretted, between celebrity and notoriety, the sacrifice of things timeless for those of transience; the adolescent inviting seduction while knowing that his advances will be rejected; confessions made to solicit foregiveness and the continuation of being loved. In 1916 Proust' wrote to Emmanuel Berl (1892-1976), an author and journalist he knew, that he was only ever himself when alone. Other people, while helping him to understand human nature, only made him suffer, often through love, or by their absurd behaviour which, in a friend, pained him. That many people seemed so unsatisfactory for Proust makes it easier to grasp his affection for plants which remained true to his devotion, plants that his mind loved, but body rejected. Proust virtually acknowledged this in relation to the hawthorn in the Preface to his translation of The Bible of Amiens (4). He wrote of an infinite love and the annual proof that he endured through suffering from hawthorn induced hay fever each spring. Ruskin also wrote admiringly of hawthorn blossom. The masochism of a love of plants by an asthmatic allergic to their pollen and scents is a touching perspective on an aspect of Proust's psyche (5). The shutters of his bedroom are no protection on fine sunny days when, in the silence of the room, stifling, speechless, only his gasping for breath might be heard as tears of pain course down his face. Yet, it is a fine day and 76

he would sing if he had the breath. Increasingly he lives by night and sleeps by day to help avoid the curse of pollen in the air. It matters little, he knows that office workers are returning home to lunch beneath the lime-trees outside as he tries to sleep. The threatening unfamiliarity of a new hotel bedroom at Baibec (6) prevents sleep; but then the more terrible scent of flowering grasses conspires against him, a fever develops and in this lonely place he would die if he knew how. Les Plaisirs... While these adult personality traits of Proust gradually developed throughout his adolescence we may, perhaps, gain another insight into his thinking and attitudes from the character and colour of the writing in his first collection of work Les Plaisirs..., which was not a great success when published in 1896, about a decade after he left school. Plants feature in many of the sketches. Relationships

There is a most agreeable young Duchess described in 'A Dinner in Society' (7), yet the clarity and vivacity of her mind contrasted with her beautiful melancholy eyes and the pessimism of her lips which she had the habit of gently biting like despised flowers as they curved into a smile. The sketch entitled 'A Dream' (8) is about an unremarkable female acquaintance of the writer assuming a passionate dreamtime importance by giving him, from between her breasts, a yellow and faintly pink rose to put it in his buttonhole where it exhaled the scent of loving.

77

The paradox of being unable to live with the beloved is the subject of `Pearls'(9), the smell of rose-scented cigarettes providing the tenderness and accessibility to his beloved that the physical presence prevents, yet reawakening his need. The recurring Proustian theme of the unattainability of those most desired appears in Les Plaisirs...(10), where he unpins the flowers, showers kisses like the sea on the sand, but still seems remote from his beloved and true happiness. Somewhat ungenerously, a waspish writer states (11) that for many women there is an unwillingness to judge or classify anything; they enjoy a book, or life itself, as they might an orange, or a sunny day. The parable which asserts that the disdainful lover is assured a faithful beloved (12) has Honore's Good Fairy insist that when offered breasts like a bunch of roses, he must turn away to build a lasting love for eternity. Honore has understandable difficulty with this notion. As the time approaches to meet his lover in a room decorated with flowers, the roses' scent is concerned, the orchids are troubled. When his lover arrives, Honore rushes up, tries to kiss her, only to find that pretending to be shocked, she flees. In the same sketch, called 'Scenario', the roses, orchids, hortensias, maiden-hair ferns, and columbines decorating the room are in dialogue with Honore saying that never before had he used so many of them at one time to charm him with their poses, gestures and perfume. The columbine is the common name given to garden hybrids and other species in the genus Aquilegia. There are perhaps 100 species of these northern temperate, perennial herbs which are related to the buttercups, but have flowers which look very different. The common name derives from columba, dove, in reference to the fanciful 78

resemblance of the nodding flower to a group of roosting doves. The garden columbines, A. x hybrida, are crosses between a number of different species which include A. chrysantha, A. longissima, A. vulgaris, A. canadensis and A. formosa. Guy de Maupassant's short story A Divorce Case' contains passages about flowers which resembles this rather awkward literary plant experiment which Proust used in Les Plaisirs..., so very far removed from the sustained and sophisticated later writing which permeates A la recherche... The loss of innocence is described in 'A Young Girl's Confession' (13) when things which formerly had made her happy, sunlight illuminating the grass, or the perfume of leaves with the last drops of rain, had become meaningless. Grasses occur throughout Les Plaisirs...; the latest of the transient loves of the fickle Fabrice (14) is Giulia who, although devoid of intelligence, had pale hair that was like fragrant grass and with eyes like two innocent flowers. The grasses comprise 620 genera and about 10,000 species, being one of the largest of the families of flowering plants. They occur in virtually every type of habitat where plant life can be sustained, and most are herbs, some less than 2cm tall, others growing to 6m. (Bamboos are grasses with woody sterns and these may grow to 30 m tall.) As food for herbivores, grasses provide a vital link in the food chain of the global biota. As the staple grain carbohydrates used by humans-rice, wheat, maize, sorghum, oats and barley- grasses are a very important part of the world economy, quite apart from the role of bamboo as a building material and sugar-cane as a source of sugar. In Europe, where Proust lived, grasses are an intrinsic part of the natural and contrived landscapes about which he wrote so much. 79

The countryside

Proust's love of the natural world features in Les Plaisirs...(15). Despite still being winter, there were anemones, crocuses and violets on the bare earth and the river, a black void yesterday, was now filled with a blue and living sky. The time of year and associated flowering of violet and crocus suggest that Proust had in mind the white flowered wood anemone, A. nemorosa, see Fig. 3. There are some 150 species in the genus Anemone which are relatives of the buttercup and they have a cosmopolitan distribution. A. coronaria, a species which is wild in southern France and Italy, can have flowers up to 6.5 cm across and coloured scarlet, crimson, blueish-mauve, or white. It has been hybridised with other species such as A. fulgens, A. hortensis and A. pavonina to produce seedlings which on subsequent selection were the origin of the garden strains cv. St Brigid and cv. Giant French, of which the cv. de Caen is a synonym. For its part, Crocus is a genus of seventy five species belonging to the iris family, and occurring wild in Europe, the Mediterranean region and on into western Asia. All of the species growing from underground modified stems, or corms, they remain dormant during the often hot and dry summer until the onset of winter rains cause the attractive flowers and grasslike leaves to appear, some species flowering in autumn, others in spring. George Eliot used the image of a river reflecting the mood of the sky in her novel Felix Holt (1866) and Proust's letters state that he enjoyed reading Eliot. Proust captures the delicacy and fragility of the field poppy shedding its petals from its location in his buttonhole(16) when likening the countryside of a wind swept Champagne to the seashore. Happy days when they would collect flowers before 80

hurrying home out of the wind. There seems to be a linguistic pun here in that `wind-rose'(1597) in English is an old common name for Papaver rhoeas and a cousin, Roemeria hybrida: `wind-flowee(1551), or `windroschen' in Gennan, refers to any Anemone.

Family life in Paris Life in the Paris family apartment was enlivened for the narrator by the presence of the cook, Frangoise (17), not least in the imaginative way that she prepared the daily menu, which he likened to the ornamental elaboration of 13th• century cathedral porches, and might one day comprise cardoons with marrow because she had never done them before. The leaves of cardoon, the daisy Cynara cardunculus, are blanched and eaten like celery; the species is closely related to artichoke, C. scolymus. The vegetable marrow and certain sorts of squash are derived from Cucurbita pepo, one of fifteen species in the genus which is native to the Americas and which gives its name to the family, Cucurbitaceae. The cucumbers, gourds, pumpkins, loofahs and chochos all belong here. The truth is that Frangoise pines for her countryside (18), Paris being so mediocre compared to Meseglise where, as she is happy to tell a visiting footman, she considers it better under the cherry trees than in front of a kitchen stove. But the narrator is surprised that her daughter is full of Parisian slang (19) quite unlike her mother's country manner, which was remarkably quite unlike that of her daughter's grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin, which was quite close to Frangoise's village, the dialects differing slightly, like the two landscapes, Frangoise's mother's village, on a slope overgrown with willows. 81

Seeking to impress M. de Norpois (20) who is dining with the family, the narrator's mother placed particular importance on the pineapple and truffle salad, which the inscrutable Ambassador ate thoughtfully without giving any opinion. The underground fruiting bodies of certain species in the fungus genus Tuber are the truffles used for flavouring food, such as pate de fois gras. In France they are often found beneath the evergreen oaks, Quercus ilex and Q. coccifera, or hazels, Corylus species. Fungi are so different from plants, being unable to manufacture their own food, that they are placed in a taxonomic kingdom of their own, as are animals. In Jean Santeuil there are several references to the use of tobacco. M. Santeuil, the Permanent Assistant Director of Letters, has a well developed sense of self-importance for which Mme Santeuil is the perfect foil (21). Her husband's technique with a cigarette was an important way of projecting his official manner. When the narrator is eventually able to meet Mme de Gueiiiiantes, his neighbour in Paris, at the wedding in Combray of the daughter of Dr Percepied (22), and the smile of the Duchesse fell on him he thought with satisfaction that she must have noticed him. Surely, he thought, her unpickable periwinkle blue eyes were meant only for him and the sun confirmed the thought as it suddenly flooded the square with light from behind a dark cloud, generating a sweet, solemn, geranium glow from the red carpet laid for the wedding, with a rosy, joyful luminosity reminding him of parts of Lohengrin, some paintings of Carpaccio, or helping to understand how Baudelaire could call the sound of the trumpet delicious. It was, apparently, the Comtesse Laure de Chevigne who had eyes which suggested to Proust the colour of those of the 82

Duchesse de Guermantes. His adolescent infatuation with Mme. de Chevigné during March 1892 is documented (23). Having admired her so much from a distance he was distressed by a closer encounter, seeming to have met a stranger beneath her hat decorated with cornflowers. The narrator is invited, through his parents, to dine with the snobbish M. Legrandin (24) who on that occasion invites the narrator to share a poetic recollection of adolescence. The scent of spring flowers, the primrose, love-vine, buttercup, the stonecrop from which posies are made in the Baizacian flora are all included. Warming to his topic, M. Legrandin further calls upon the flower of the Resurrection, the Easter daisy, the snowballs of guelder-rose like those perfuming the alleys of the narrator's great-aunt's garden before the last Lenten snows are melted, the lily, providing fabric fit for a Solomon, the many hued pansies and, as winter finally departs, the first Jerusalem rose. Proust sometimes misinformed his fictional characters and the bogus Legrandin is proclaimed by his botanical malapropisms. Love-vine is another common name for the unlovely parasitic dodder, Cuscuta, see Fig. 14. Stonecrop, Sedum acre, is a little succulent with short flimsy sterns scarcely long enough to enable a posy to be made, even if the small yellow flowers warranted such treatment, see Fig. 45. Jerusalem rose is another name for the tropical ginger, Amomum, one of the sources of cardamom and a native of Java, unable to grow outside anywhere in Europe. While there are plants called Michaelmas daisies, the Easter daisy of M. Legrandin is the product of his imagination and the snowballs of guelder-rose are more likely to be seen in June to July rather than Lent.

83

The Tuileries Gardens

As he became older Proust ventured to new places and also saw familiar ones from a different perspective than when very young (25). In the garden of the Tuileries the incense of the heliotrope burned in the heat of the sun while the stone statue of a horseman furiously galloped with lips glued to a trumpet. There are lilacs too against the old palace walls showing green with their perfume of his past. The Louvre

In front of the Louvre there are shimmering fountains reaching into the sky and hollyhocks like young girls, blushing at the unconscious speeding cavalier on a marble charger blowing his trumpet forever (26). The hollyhock, Althaea rosea, is a member of the mallow family, Malvaceae, and is one of twelve species in the genus which occurs wild from western Europe across into northeastern Siberia. The hollyhock can perennate, but is often an annual with tall spires of red, pink, white, or yellow flowers which may be single, or double. Treated with a respectful neglect they are simple but very effective herbaceous garden ornamentals, often associated with cottage gardens when they are best seen in massed array. Versailles

William Robinson thought that the garden at Versailles was mouldering, slimy, and as dead as the state of things that gave them birth, a veritable garden tomb. His views on garden sculpture were equally pungent, deploring Venus leprous with 84

lichen, Mars when armless, and lions losing a tail! Wandering through Versailles in late autumn (27), Proust contemplates the wind playing on the chill water and was reminded of the wind from the sea along Normandy's sunken roads, how the glistening sea could be seen through the flowering rhododendrons, and how water enhances plantings of all sorts. Many species and hybrids of Rhododendron need shelter from the wind, the frost and the sun, being woodland trees and shrubs in many cases. In a frost-free seaside garden, very fine plantings can result. There are 800 species in the genus, largely northern temperate in distribution, but with about 250 species in montane parts of South East Asia. The main centre of species diversity is in an area extending from the Himalaya, through south-western China and on into Japan. Many beautiful species now found in gardens have been sourced from this region as a result of, in the 1911 century, plant hunters discovering species new to science. They were introduced to European gardens in such numbers that it became fashionable to have a woodland, or rock garden, in which to grow these mainly evergreen shrubs. Europe has a few native rhododendrons, such as R. ferrugineum, the Alpen-rose of the Pyrenees and the Alps, and R. ponticum which is still common in southern and eastern Europe, but was once more widespread prior to the last Ice Age, or so pollen analysis of peat deposits tells us. Bois de Boulogne On a late autumn walk through the Bois (28), after heavy rain when the trees no longer had leaves the narrator notices how a ray of sunshine gilds the highest branches, still sparkling with moisture, picking out the green mossy velvet of the trunks and, higher, the enamel of mistletoe scattered among the boughs of 85

the poplars, white globes like the sun and moon in Michelangelo's Creation. The mistletoe in western Europe is Viscum album, one of seventy shrubby species in the genus, all of which are plant semi-parasites attached to their hosts by suckers, see Fig. 56. Mistletoe seed is sticky and while the white flesh of the berrylike fruit is consumed by birds, the seed sticks to the beak, is wiped off onto a branch and, if conditions permit, there germinates on a new host-plant. The shoot system of mistletoes is repeatedly branched in a series of dichotomies, each branch bearing two leathery green leaves with a group of three flowers at the tip in the middle; this represents one year's growth. Being so slow growing, the wood is very hard and densely grained. Graves points out (29) that the prime religious ritual of the Druids was bound up with the mistletoe, even though it was, as a plant, not part of their Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet, unlike both the holly and the ivy, which were. He commented that although the Church came to admit holly and ivy as permissible church decorations at Christmas, it still forbids mistletoe as being pagan. And yet, the kisses forbidden at other seasons are still often exchanged under its bough, but only if it has berries. It was Haedury's mistletoe spear which pierced Balder's breast in the legend and this was no poetic fancy as Graves once found out when he cut one for himself in Brittany. A native of California and Oregon in the United States of America, the redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, is the world's tallest tree. In 2006 the individual tree called 'Hyperion' in Humboldt State Redwood National Park was recorded as being about 115 m tall. This species was introduced to European gardens in 1840 where it can make fine specimen trees with yew-like foliage and a soft, spongy, fibrous, red-brown bark 86

which, in nature, provides some insulating protection from periodic forest fires which the trees can withstand. Another very tall Californian conifer species is Sequoiadendron giganteum which, although being shorter than the redwood, can grow more massively. The world's largest living organism is the 'General Sherman' tree which is 84 m tall and has a volume of 1400 cubic metres. Both of these conifer species are often found planted in parks and arboreta in Europe and the Bois is no exception for the narrator refers to redwood there (30). The Swanns Madame Gaston de Caillavet (nee Jeanne Pouquet, 1874-1961), was one of Proust's adolescent passions. Together with her daughter, Simone (1894-1968), who became Mme Andre Maurois, they were both models for Gilberte, the fictional Odette's daughter, and her daughter, Mlle de Saint-Loup. In a letter to Mme de Caillavet a little before 4 June 1912 (31), Proust wrote of Simone that he was trying to think of the species of flower whose petals are exactly like her cheeks when she smiles. Intent on impressing his childhood sweetheart in his younger years (32), Proust lied that the drawing-room chairs in his home always had loose covers and that they never drank chocolate at tea-time. In fact Proust seems to have once had a poor opinion of his parent's apartment as he confided to Mme Straus soon after 21 May 1911 (33). He considered that it had a 'medical ugliness'of bronzes, potted palms, plush and mahogany, but which in retrospect he had come to find touching. The meetings with Gilberte in the Jardin des Champs-Elysées lost some of their chain', but the narrator does not forget the 87

`Marquise' (34), sitting outside attending her premises, the public toilets, near the corner of the Avenue Gabriel and illustrated in Sansom (35). She wears heavy makeup, an auburn wig, a bonnet decorated with red flowers and black lace. The Marquise is very particular who she allows to use her flower decked parlours, some patrons bringing her sprays of lilac, jasmine, or roses which she declares are her favourite flower. As his ardour for Gilberte cools (36) the narrator muses that the thoughts, or actions, of a loved woman perplex him as completely as the world's first natural philosophers must have been before science came to exist. This contemplates a time well before Aristotle (384-322 BC) and his disciple Theophrastus (c.372-286 BC), the father of botany, who inherited the botanic garden which Aristotle had founded in Athens. We could speculate that it may have been as early as the New Stone Age, 2500-2000 BC, based on linguistic arguments put forward by Graves in The White Goddess. Whenever the narrator could not see Gilberte (37) he would instead go to the Bois where in the Allee des Acacias (now renamed Avenue Longchamp) he would hope to catch a glimpse of Mme Swann, Gilberte's mother, who drove or walked there each day. Long before he reached the acacias, the name of which suggested to him something indolent and feminine, like Odette, their fragrance proclaimed their singular vegetable personality with delicate foliage and hundreds of flowers attracting a turmoil of precious insects. Even in November when these trees had lost their leaves (38), as he walked along the Allee the geometry of their trunks and branches revealed structures and relationships otherwise hidden in summer. Any deciduous tree in winter, whether in woodland, a copse, or an avenue, seems to have a different geometry when the branches 88

and trunks are not obscured by foliage and this is especially so in the false acacia, Robinia pseudoacacia, because the horizontal shoots branch in one plane while the vertical shoots have a radial symmetry. Proust seems to pick out this detail. The false acacia is a North American frost-hardy tree, tolerant of industrial pollution and now widely naturalised in many parts of Europe. It was introduced to the Jardin des Plantes from Virginia in 1601 by Professor Jean Robin (1550-1629), gardener to Henry IV and Louis XIII. Linnaeus named the new genus after him. The son of Robin, Vespasian, later planted the species extensively in France and a specimen was planted in the Jardin des Plantes in 1636; by 1878 only a stump about 3m tall remained, but its branches remained vigorous. This led William Robinson to comment (39) that it promised existence for many years to come, though its beauty was gone. W.B.Turrill (18901961), one-time Keeper of the Herbarium and Library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, described another aged specimen of this species (40) planted in 1762 in the original garden of the Dowager Princess of Wales, Princess Augusta, mother of George III, and this tree survived west of the old Fernary in the botanic garden until at least 1968. This deciduous leguminous tree with coarse, furrowed bark and, in June, racemes of white, scented, pea-shaped flowers make it suitable for civic plantings. The true acacias are trees and shrubs in the genus Acacia of which there are 800 species and which occur in the tropics and subtropics around the world. They are also legumes, often with fragrant yellow or cream-coloured, ball- or finger-shaped clusters of tiny flowers which are not pea-shaped. The leaves are very diverse in shape, many species having the leaf stalk modified into a leaf-like structure called a phyllode which seems to be an adaptation to life in dry habitats. The commonly 89

known 'mimosa' of florists is usually the flowering stage of silver wattle, A. dealbata, a native of south-eastern Australia. In Europe it was first introduced in 1820 where it is frosttender, but it is cultivated with ease on the Mediterranean coast, flowering in winter and early spring and, in Proust's time, entering the florist's trade as sprays transported north for sale in colder parts of the continent. The narrator's attentions to Gilberte resulted in his becoming known to the Swann family, not least Mme Swann who soon supplants her daughter in his affections. It was the pattern of things for Proust as well as his fictional characters. Talking to M. Swann about Balbec (41), the narrator is given an illuminating historical and architectural insight into the significance of its church with its Gothic trefoils, just as the flowers of plants in Polar regions signify a promise of the return of another spring. The narrator admits (42) that his undeclared love for Gilberte contained an element of not admitting an inclination for her so as to, hopefully, retain and enhance her inclination for him. Do not Japanese gardeners sacrifice several flowers in order to obtain one perfect one? The mother very soon commanded all of the attention of the young man. Waiting in a small drawing-room at the Swann home (43) the narrator, in the company of orchids, roses and violets, was struck by an awareness of their magnified individuality, as sometimes happens with people in the silence The narrator of a crowded doctor's waiting room. unsurprisingly shares one of Proust's weaknesses, that of making lavish floral gifts (44). Against his parent's advice the narrator sells more of his aunt Leonie's things, old silver plate, so as to be able to send more flowers to Mme Swann. Odette, after receiving an enormous basket of orchids, would tell him 90

that his father should take him to the magistrate for punishment. Mme Straus in real life held much the same view about the floral tributes Proust sent to her. Yet the narrator understands all too well the habits of Mme Swann (45). The flowers had more than a merely ornamental significance in Mme Swann's drawing-room, as well as in Proust's writing! They related more to Odette's former life as a great courtesan and her taste for secret luxuries; an immense crystal bowl filled to the brim with Parma violets, or with slender white daisy-petals floating on the water which, seeming to testify in the eyes of an arriving guest to some favourite, perhaps intimate occupation now interrupted, perpetuated a seductive sense of the inexplicable. There were days in winter when, for the narrator, Mme Swarm in her heated drawing-room almost resembled one of her roses(46) which she was able to grow and flower out of season. In a crepe-de-Chine snowy dressing-gown, or long pleated chiffon looking like a shower of pink or white petals, she had the cool flesh tints of a flower. Regular visitors meeting Mme Swarm seemed to absorb part of her floral ambience (47). On one occasion Odette suggests to Mine Cottard that her husband, Doctor Cottard, is not excited by flowers like his wife. Mme Cottard replies that her husband, a scholarly man, does have one passion and after being pressed by Mme Bontemps to tell them all what it is she artlessly replies that it is reading, at which Mme Bontemps suppresses a wicked laugh when commenting that that is such a restful passion! Beguiled (48), the narrator compares the sight of other women wearing hats seemingly decorated with the contents of a kitchen garden, or an aviary, with that of Mme Swami in a little hat with a single iris and how much she disturbed his emotions. 91

The narrator reflected (49) that happy memories tend to last longer than those associated with ones of suffering, such as those that he had felt about Gilberte, being replaced by the pleasure he could still recapture of 45 minutes spent once in May with her mother, Mme Swann, beneath the coloured shade of her parasol, as though beneath a wisteria arbour. This appears to be the only time that Proust used Wisteria. The six species include some of the most attractive flowering woody climbers that are hardy in Europe. They are deciduous legumes with often long, pendulous racemes of blue, violet, purple, pink, or white pea-flowers borne in fragrant profusion amongst the newly unfolding leaves in May or June in the northern hemisphere. They grow wild in eastern Asia and North America, but were introduced to Europe by 1816, when W. sinensis arrived from China, and 1830 when W. floribunda was introduced from Japan. Illiers

The periodic visits which Proust had made to the country still resonated. In his teenage years (50), Jean Santeuil has a deep affection for the past which, through tears of happy remembrance, or perhaps an asthma attack, he could still see the sun setting on the lines of new corn and his own long shadow on the path leading to his father's garden. The Méseglise way led the narrator past Tansonville and its lilacs (51), leaving the town by the road running past the white fence of M. Swann's park. The scent of the white and mauve lilac-trees could be perceived long before the Archer's Lodge was reached in which Swann's keeper lived, the pink spires of lilac overtopping the gothic gable of the little tiled house. But the flowering time always seemed too short with the blossom 92

being replaced by dried remains. Writing to Mme Marie Scheikevitch in the second half of May 1913 (52), Proust thanked her for sending him a bunch of lilac and in return, like the jester of Notre Dame as he put it, sent her proofs of the passage (51) just referred to. He told her that no one else had seen them and although very different in character from most of his book, she would identify the lilac passage with what she knew of him. In the garden at Combray (53) the narrator would read under a chestnut tree, deep in a hooded chair of wicker and canvas. At Etreuilles, in his uncle's house during breaks between reading (54) Jean could almost touch a branch of the Cure's pink chestnut which just reached the window. The tree seemed much larger than it really was during May when it was a mass of blossom, the flowering heads close-packed above the leaves like a pink forest on green mountain-side, and the veranda of the Cure's house sometimes looked as though strewn with rose petals. This tree is Aesculus x carnea, a hybrid between the horse chestnut, A. hippocastanum and A. pavia, known since about 1818, but with origins which are obscure. The horse chestnut grows wild in south-eastern Europe, but was introduced to western Europe about 1576; there it makes a long-lived and tall flowering deciduous tree much used in park and avenue plantings in Paris and elsewhere. The sweet chestnut is Castanea saliva, a native of southern Europe and yielding the edible chestnut from inside its sea-urchin-like fruit-coat. Proust referred to both in his writing. There are horse chestnuts in the Jardin des Oublis in Etreuilles (55), young giants bearing upright on huge leaves delicately moulded towers of blossom. The narrator also saw them one 93

autumn in the Bois (56) where a double row of orange-red chestnuts seemed to be the first and only thing that a painter had completed on a newly drafted canvas. The narrator's Robinsonian grandmother (57), like Proust's, sometimes quietly removed the stakes of rose-trees to make the roses look more natural, like a mother runs a hand through her son's hair after a visit to the barber. Madame Laudet's farm refreshments at Les Aigneaux (58) continued to be uncompromising. She was adamant that customers were welcome to go elsewhere if absinthe was required. She refused to go into competition with other farms which offered for sale vermouth and cherry brandy. Absinthe was invented in Switzerland (59), the recipe then being acquired by M. Pernod at the end of the 18th century. It became the preferred drink of artists and writers in Paris, being a strong spirit, but its addictiveness led to its being banned in France and other countries. Pemod and other pastis retain the flavour, but not the strength, nor the wormwood, a medicinal herb consisting of the leaves of the daisy bush Artemisia absinthium. The anise flavour comes from an essential oil in aniseed, the fruit of an urnbellifer, Pimpinella anisum, which like most plants in this family is an herb. Cherry brandy was once distilled from cherry juice, but it is now a liqueur flavoured with cherry and their stones, based on grape brandy, or neutral rectified spirit; it is weaker than a true brandy (60). Vermouth consists of an infusion of herbs in clarified white wine, together with grape spirit and sugar for the sweet and bianco types. Caramel gives red vermouth its colour. The origin of vermouth is reputed to go back to Hippocrates (c.460c.377 BC) and his invention of vinum Hippocraticum, a drink also incorporating wormwood. A derivative of this potion, 94

vermutwein, was long used in southern Germany, probably as a vermifuge. At the end of the 16th century its recipe was discovered and taken to France where its name was changed to vermout. By 1678 the wine was well established in Piedmont in Italy and the house of Cinzano was founded in 1757. King Carlo-Alberto (1831-1849) granted licences to those wishing to sell Turin vermouth in 1840, with Martini & Rossi receiving the first. As Doxat noted (61), it was the English who added the quite unnecessary 'h' to the word vermout. Dieppe and the seaside Tadie pointed out (62) that during Proust's youth the popular traditional seaside resorts, such as Dieppe, were gradually being neglected by smart society in favour of Trouville, and later by Cabourg and Deauville. Proust was taken to Dieppe in 1880 and the experience finds its way into his writing. Jean Santeuil is not happy about leaving Saint-Germain for a while with his parents bound for Dieppe (63). When they arrived after the sun had set, the sea looked blue-grey, unfamiliar and not at all liquid from where he stood, but the red barrier at the entry to the Forest of Argues was familiar, being the same as that at the entry to the Forest of Saint-Germain near his home. On another occasion at night (64), the wall against which Proust had leaned to rest was in full moonlight, the ivy covering it casting a sharp shadow. He could see white breakers and sails out to sea. Yet, the nearby woods and a ditch were absolutely black. He knew that they were there from the slight noise of the wind rustling the leaves, but then silence again descended. Then even this sound diminished and disappeared; only a moonlit meadow path seemed to lead into 95

the distance before him between the blackness of two rows of oak trees. The oaks belong to the genus Quercus of which there are about 450 species. Some are evergreen and others deciduous, many species being subtropical and tropical in distribution. Belonging to the beech family, Fagaceae, there are many economically important oaks which are valued for their timber, cork, tanning and dyes. Q. robur once occurred as extensive deciduous forest across much of western Europe in prehistoric time, tending to be replaced in wetter coastal habitats by the related Q. petraea; the remains of this distribution pattern can still be seen in parts of France, Wales and Ireland. Where the ranges of distribution of the two species overlap the natural hybrid Q. x rosacea may be found, for all oaks are wind pollinated, many can easily hybridise when grown in cultivation and this makes them sometimes difficult to identify. Closer to the Mediterranean, the evergreen species Q. ilex, holm oak, and Q. coccifera are found; in Iberia Q. canariensis and Q. suber, cork oak, while to the east in Asia Minor is found the Turkey oak, Q. cerris. According to Graves (65), oak (duir) is the seventh consonant in the Druidic Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet which he considers was elaborated about 1600BC: oak is the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules and Thor and was the host tree from which mistletoe is believed to have been ritually harvested by the Druids. The answer that Lucien Daudet should have made to Proust's question about the appearance of the "American oak" (66), is that there are many sorts such as white oak, Q. alba; scarlet oak, Q. coccinea; burr oak, Q. macrocarpa; pin oak, Q. palustris and red oak, Q. rubra to name a few that would have been grown in parks and arboreta visited by Proust. 96

albee On his way by rail to Balbec with his grandmother (67), the narrator reflects on the seaside resorts en route and the communities which they held of which he would never know anything. There is a station-master among his tamarisks and roses, tennis players seen from afar and a lady out walking calling to her dog which is sniffing something on the road. This railway journey is often repeated (68) so that the narrator, no longer anxious nor homesick, begins to feel that he has become part of a happy society of regular passengers in this land of chestnut trees and tamarisks. There are about ninety species of Tamarix, many being able to grow in salt-laden soils and thus often occupying habitats in semi-desert, steppe, or near the coast. They are chiefly shrubby plants which grow wild in western Europe, the Mediterranean region, on into India and into northern China. Their fine, plume-like, often bright green foliage and racemes of tiny, bright pink flowers are very characteristic once seen. The manna of the Bedouins is a white substance which accumulates and falls from the twigs of T mannifera after suffering attacks from the sap-sucking insect Coccus manniparus. The narrator's early visits to Balbec are made in the company of his grandmother (69), staying at the Grand Hotel. Entering her bedroom he notes in only a few moments its cool odour, her armchairs decorated with filigree silver and pink flowers and how the sun created complex patterns of radiance and shadow, not only in her room, but patterned a courtyard outside with shadows like a climbing vine. New bedrooms, at first so unfamiliar and threatening to the narrator, walling him up with mahogany panelling, stifling him with the scent of vetiver, gradually transform themselves into 97

more comforting, sympathetic and even memorable surroundings (70). The grass genus Vetiveria comprises ten species which occur in tropical Africa, Asia and Australia, of which V. zizattioides, khus-khus, or vetiver, has roots which emit a scent when wet; they are used in cooking and in basketry, such as for mat-making. In the Grand Hotel (71) with his grandmother the narrator recalls having lunch, and sprinkling fresh lemon juice on to a pair of soles. Sole was one of Proust's favourite dishes according to Celeste Albaret. The narrator is amazed to find (72) that the Princesse de Luxembourg is sufficiently friendly with his grandmother's friend, Mme de Villeparisis, who is also staying at the Grand Hotel, to have the Princess's carriage deliver a wonderful gift of fruit including plums, grapes and pears. Outside the hotel (73), the narrator notices an arborescent page standing with vegetable immobility in front of the porch, like some rare shrub, with auburn hair and matching plant-like epidermis, but Mme de Villeparisis uses her own maid and footman to arrange her belongings. Returning much later that night (74) the narrator observes that the page, in thick woollen garments, had been taken indoors for protection from the night air, like a hot-house plant. On his next visit to the Grand Hotel (75) the lawn behind the hotel had been altered with the removal not only of an exotic shrub, but of the page who had gone off with a Polish countess as her secretary. Proust's use of the word vegetable, with its multiple meanings, may be worth a brief digression. In a basic taxonomic sense it is one of the three classical categories into which the world was classified together with the animal and mineral. In the horticultural, culinary and esculent sense anything derived from 98

plants and eaten as a savoury rather than sweet course, cooked or raw, is termed a vegetable; the parts may be reproductive organs (flowers, fruits, seeds or tubers), or non-reproductive (roots, leaves or stems). By his own admission, Proust was engaged by plants as objects, together with the virtues of their passive ornament and availability, as in the case of the hotel page. The garrulous M. Legrandin expanding on the beauty of Balbec (76), before being forced by the narrator's father to admit that he does not actually know anyone there, comments that the evening skies of Normandy where it merges into Brittany are a sort of vegetable kingdom of the atmosphere, such are the celestial bouquets one may see, some lasting hours, others shedding their flowers more quickly. On 14 July 1905 Proust wrote to Louisa de Mornand about the places she might like to visit near Trouville (77). One of them was Les Andes Marguerite, part of the Château de Barneville belonging to Comte d'Andigne, and which was, according to Kolb, a mile long avenue of pines and rhododendrons situated between Trouville and Honfleur overlooking the estuary of the River Seine. Proust had said that Lucian Guitry (1860-1925), the actor and theatre director was mad about the place and had rented it for several years; he was father of Sacha (1885-1957), actor, playwright and film maker. She was told of its enchantment, its rhododendrons with the sea beyond. He loved the entry into Honfleur by the old Caen road, between the elms and urged her to see and send his greetings to the little church at Criqueboeuf nestling under its ivy. He had visited the church in 1884 and had incorporated the occasion into a passage where Mme de Villeparisis takes the narrator and his grandmother to Carqueville to see the quaint 99

(78) ivy-covered church with its curious amalgam of leaves and architectural features which rustled and shifted with the wind. Graves (79) lists ivy (gort) as the eleventh consonant in the Druidic Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet, as well as sacred to Osiris and Dionysus, being a part of the annual ritual process of intoxication in the Bassarid revels of Thrace and Thessaly culminating in animal and, sometimes, human sacrifice. The little church being quite so overtaken by ivy may thus have symbolic meaning, but in any case the species is likely to have been Hedera helix which is a native of Europe, into Asia Minor and on into northern Iran. It is a variable species which has given rise to many cultivated varieties, not least because this woody climber has climbing shoots with lobed leaves, but flowering ones which are unlobed: the leaf forms stay true when propagated from cuttings. There are fifteen species in the genus. The elms, Ulmus, are largely northern temperate species, but they extend in distribution into Indo-China in the east and Mexico in the west. Prior to the 20" century and especially about 1970, when Dutch elm-disease killed many trees of a number of native European elm species, they gave a distinctive topographical character to certain regions. Those elms that now remain are either resistant to the disease, or still in the process of being infected. There are forty five species in the genus, several producing excellent timber. U. minor makes an excellent coastal tree which is invaluable as a windbreak and its variety, var. cornubiensis grows wild in Brittany; the cultivar of this variety cv. Samiensis is a splendid roadside, or coastal planting choice. Many of the elms in France are the hybrid U. x hollandica which occurs naturally whenever U glabra and U minor grow close together. 100

When the narrator visits Old Balbec specifically to see its church beside the sea (80), it comes as an anti-climax to find at the railway station that the sea has receded 12 miles and the church sits prosaically in a square at the junction of two tramway routes opposite a café advertising its billiard hall. As a minor compensation, the dome of the church that summer afternoon reminded him of a glowing, ripe, pink fruit. The symbolism of certain plants seems to have already taken hold of Proust. Hawthorn, associated for Proust with early childhood and innocence is, according to Graves (81), an unlucky tree linked with the purification of temples and abstinence from sex in preparation for the midsummer festival. As uath, it is the sixth consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion Druidic alphabet and is consequently of great religious antiquity. It may have significance, then, that the narrator (82), alighting from the train at Maineville-la-Teinturière with its newly opened brothel, the first on the Noiiiiandy coast, strikes out for Balbec by way of the cliff path. Encountering hawthorns, they suggest to him sought after country girls in crumpled white dresses, while blossoming apple trees seemed more like daughters of wealthy brewers. This comparison between apple blossom and hawthorn received a longer development in the manuscript form (83) where he recalls the scent, appearance of individual flowers and habit of blossoming hawthorns at Combray in May. An old tree of hawthorn in full flower creates the impression of an avalanche of blossom and, as Proust hinted, it is difficult to simultaneously capture the overall impact and myriad of detail. Although subjective, the scent of hawthorn for me is more `lived in' than the freshness of, say, apple blossom. Graves wrote that it has (84) for many men a strong scent of female sexuality. 101

The narrator ruminates about the brothel (85) which is hardly less ancient than many a parish church in fishing ports, each with its moss-grown bawd standing at the door waiting for customers. This is one of the few times that mosses are referred to by Proust. Like ferns, mosses don't have flowers, but unlike ferns mosses also lack a significant internal conducting, or vascular system. This places a limit on how large moss plants can grow, partly because a vascular system confers rigidity on otherwise soft stem tissues, and partly because water and dissolved material can't travel very far inside a plant without a vascular system. Mosses, then, are small and can only grow in moist situations, but this does not prevent them from sometimes growing as ephemeral plants during the wet season in places like semi-deserts. They are also common in periodically dry habitats such as on bark, or on stone. They may have evolved before ferns more than 260 million years ago, but they make only small fossils and I don't know how many have been found. Cabourg

Painter's account of the redevelopment of Cabourg in the 19th century as a resort (86), mentions the street plantings of Tilia, lime-tree, and Normandy poplars, which would have been the hybrid Populus x canadensis in all likelihood. This name covers a large group of different clones having as their parents P. deltoides from eastern North America and P. nigra from Europe. Several of the clones originated in France and became important arboriculturally; the male cv. Serotina had an obscure origin in the 18HI century, the female cv. Regenerata arose in a Paris nursery in 1814, while the male cv. Robusta arose in another nursery near Metz in 1894. 102

There are thirty five species of poplar all of which are northern temperate. Many of the species are fast growing making them suitable for windbreak planting, but only away from buildings because of the invasive root system and, in later life, the tendency for the larger limbs to be broken in high wind. They are cousins to the willows, Salix species, and like them the male and female flowers are borne on different plants. This is why, for example, the Lombardy poplar. P. nigra cv. Italica never bears seed, as it is a male clone. Those often suckering poplars with silvery-white, or grey undersides to the leaves, conspicuous when ruffled by the wind of an approaching shower, are either P. a/ba, the white poplar from central and south eastern Europe, or P. x canescens, the grey poplar, which has P. a/ba and P. treinula, the aspen, as its parents. Poplars are wind pollinated. White poplar (eadha) is the fourth vowel in the Beth.-Luis-Nion Druidic alphabet according to Graves (87) and was regarded the tree of resurrection, while black poplar P. nigra was considered a funereal tree associated with Mother Earth in pre-Hellenic Greece. Brittany

Before dawn, Jean Santeuil is woken as requested, in order to be taken to Penrnarch to see a great storm that is raging on the coast (88). Even the trees near his inn have already lost large branches. Jean and two local men from Penmarch, Pierre and a fisherman, making their way back to Pont-Labbé (89) in the storm reach the top of the cliff and are forced to crawl on hands and knees clinging to the grass to avoid being blown away. I recall a very similar experience with my friend Bertie Lowry on top of the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland. 103

The narrator has a fantasy about a certain Mlle de Stermaria, whose family own a Breton castle (90). He thinks he sees beyond her hard, unsympathetic manner, a certain inner warmth like that colour in the eye of the white water-lily in the Vivonne. All that he sought was to stroll with her at twilight through the pink flowers of bell heather glowing softly, or beneath oak trees stunted by the pounding of the sea. He then ponders that the difficulty of separating the reality of her from his fantasies is but nature's way, not so very different from an insect seeking nectar, only to encounter pollen. The image of oak trees growing beside the sea and stunted by the sea wind is not a literary flight of fancy, but the reality of some of the habitats of the sessile oak, Quercus petraea, which replaces Q. robur in coastal situations in western Europe. The bell or Scot's heather, Erica cinerea, is a common species which occurs on hills, mountains and moorland in western Europe and, when in flower, may be so abundant as to give a characteristic purple-pink cast to the landscape in which it grows, see Fig. 17. Other ericas occur in Europe, on the Atlantic Islands, in parts of North Africa and the Middle East, but the majority of the 500 species occur in tropical montane Africa and especially South Africa. Railways leading to the coast

The railway stations along the line from Paris to the Norman coastal resorts held a fascination for the narrator (91), as they did for Proust. What were all of the 'flowers' ending names such as Fiquefleur, Honfleur, Flers, Barfleur, Harfleur and the `beef at the end of Bricqueboeuf? But Brichot soon told him that fleur means a harbour (like fiord), and boeuf, in Norman budh, means hut. 104

Following a passage describing cake plates decorated with images from the Orient, from the Arabian Nights, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad is another (92) describing two plants in front of a railway-station, buttercups from the Indies and Persian lilacs, which innocently creates a need for some imaginative horticultural detective work. As previously stated the Persian lilac is a hybrid, albeit cultivated in Europe since the 17th century, but there is no plant which goes by the name of 'Indian buttercup'. However, possible identities for the ones grown in front of Proust's fin de siècle railway station are the spring flowering Ranunculus asiaticus, a native of the Levant and grown in Europe since about 1596, or, more interestingly, Anemone x hybrida, the hardy, pink-flowered Japanese anemone, being cultivated in Europe from about 1847. The latter plant is a distinct possibility because Proust sometimes used the current fashion for garden ornamentals, such as Japanese chrysanthemum, to help create for the reader the sense of a particular point in time, as he also did by reference to the Dreyfus Case. The white-flowered form of this anemone hybrid arose as a mutation at Verdun in about 1858. Then, towards the end of the century Messrs V. and E. Lemoine, nurserymen of Nancy, selected more than thirty named cultivated varieties of the Japanese anemone. One of the parents of the hybrid was the Indian species, A. vitifblia, introduced from the Himalayas in about 1829, but it is frost-tender in Europe. The naming of this group of herbaceous perennials was confused until Steam (93) resolved matters long after Proust's death, but this could explain Proust's application of the name 'Indian' to these anemones, all of which are in the buttercup family. Proust was very particular with the use of plant names, so far as his researches permitted. Elsewhere (94) Proust conjures landscapes which are suggested by the names of destinations in railway timetables, such as the 105

station seen one summer afternoon surrounded by hornbeam plantations, the chill air of which anticipates the coming winter. The hornbeam is Carpinus betulus, a native deciduous tree from Europe and extending in range into Asia Minor. It is one of the thirty five species in the genus. The hornbeam has a distinctive, spirally-fluted, grey bark and in summer clusters of chaffy fruits not unlike hops to look at. Growing rather more quickly than beech, Fagus, the hornbeam also makes an excellent hedging plant if clipped regularly. Rivebelle Restaurant

Tadié (95) considered that the most likely derivation of the name of the fictional Rivebelle Restaurant on the Normandy coast is Rivabella, situated about 8 miles to the west of Cabourg. The narrator and his friend Saint-Loup set off by carriage to dine there, arriving just before sunset (96, 97). After the heat of the day the garden outside the narrow, glass-walled restaurant made it seem as though they were sitting inside an enormous aquarium. A rose-tree trained on one wall, picked out in pink by the setting sun, reminded the narrator of the figuring within an onyx. Sansom (98), not without reason, likened Rivebelle to the fashionable restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, called Le Pré Catelan and depicted in a painting by Henri Gervex (1909), illustrated in Sansom. The little band of girls

Familiarity has the power to change so much. Comparing the narrator's first visit to Balbec with his second (99) he now knew Albertine's friends very well as they brushed past the tamarisks and filled him with yearning; they were no longer strangers. On 106

this second visit the narrator intended to try to see Albertine again (100), hear her laughter and see her friends, this characteristic flora of Balbec. Proust made no reference to spores as found in cryptogamic plants, ferns and mosses, the fungi, bacteria and Protozoa. His sole inaccurate use of the word was in relation to the little band of girls being likened to madrepore corals (101) and zoophytes (102), both of which are colonial animals with plant-like traits. Remembering that he has to rest in the hotel before being allowed to spend the afternoon with Albertine and the little band of her friends (103), the ill-fitting violet curtains in the narrator's darkened bedroom always seemed to allow a shaft of sunlight to spill over the scarlet carpet like a shower of anemone-petals, which he could not resist trampling with his bare feet. The narrator spends more and more time with the little band of blossoming girls because (104), like a botanist, these rare specimens of flowers, these Pennsylvania roses by the cliffs captivate him. He saw the girls as (105) rose-sprigs charmingly silhouetted against the sea. As Albertine talked to him about everyday matters (106) he was thinking how the colour of her cheeks resembled certain roses and passionately wished to taste them. Reclining on the grassy tops of the cliffs (107), the narrator is surrounded by the little band as a gardener might be in a thicket of roses. He reflects (108) when lying on the grass among these young roses, relaxed and thoughtful, that he is so happy at their feet. Of the girls he had known, the narrator recalls (109) one with a russet skin, whose little face resembled the winged seeds of 107

some trees, wafted somehow to Balbec. His transient attraction to different girls (110) is likened to perfumes such as styrax associated with Prothyraia, saffron, spices associated with Hera, myrrh, manna associated with Nike, incense associated with Dike, Themis, Circe, the Nine Muses, Eos, Mnemosyne, and Dikaiosyne. The use of smouldering vegetable gums and resins to create an aromatic atmosphere during rituals or ceremonies, chiefly religious ones, goes back many centuries. One or more resins may be used to produce incense, but the raw materials are derived from trees and shrubs in the tropical plant family Burseraceae, which comprises sixteen genera and about 500 species. Boswellia carteri, frankincense, from Somalia is an important, but not the only species in that genus to yield fragrant resin. Several different species of Commiphora yield myrrh, which is also used in incense and medicinally. There are 185 species of Commiphora found in Africa, through Arabia and on into India. These shrubs have branches which often exude a resin which accumulates in lumps and is then collected for use. Several species of Protium supply excellent balsam resins. There are several different sources of manna, the white substance long known to Arab and other peoples. It appears on the twigs of the desert shrub or small tree, Tamarix mannifera, which grows wild in an area from Egypt into Afghanistan. Another source is from a thorny legume genus called Alhagi, of which there are five species distributed from the Mediterranean region and Saharan Africa into central Asia; brownish lumps of honey-like resin accumulate on the shoots of A. maurorum after hot weather. Finally, the manna ash, Fraxinus ornus, yields an exudate when the bark is cut, having mildly laxative and other 108

medicinal properties; the deciduous tree is native in southern Europe and on into south western Asia. In May its large clusters of creamy-white flowers are not unattractive. The resin styrax, or storax as it is more generally termed, is distinct from the plant genus St'rax, which comprises 130 species from the warmer parts of Eurasia, Malaysia and America. The wounding of the bark of the Sumatran species S. benzoin, produces an exudate of the gum resin called benzoin, used medicinally in friar's balsam and in incense. The Mediterranean species S. officinale yields a fragrant resin called storax which has medicinal use and is also used for making rosaries. A fragrant balsam, also called storax, is derived from the sap of all of the species of the quite unrelated genus Liquidambar, but chiefly L. orientalis from Asia Minor. There are a number of most ornamental Styrax species suitable for gardens and these include S. henisleyana from China, S. japonica and S. obassia both from Japan; all are deciduous trees with delicate, usually fragrant, white flowers borne in June in Europe. The narrator admits of the little band (Ill) that he was still continually surprised to find himself amongst them, as one might anticipate seeing a peacock, but finding a peony. The genus Paeonia has thirty three species of temperate Eurasian and North American shrubs or herbs, some of which are very lovely. The Chinese species and their many cultivars have been prized and grown there for millenia. Comparing the differences between Rosemonde and Andrée (112), both belonging to the little band, the narrator likens one to a geranium by the sea, the other to a camellia at night. Pelargoniums are more likely to be encountered in seaside 109

gardens than Geranium species which would not be so tolerant of salt-laden air! Explaining the pleasure that the little band gave him (113) the narrator compares himself with a convalescent in a flowergarden, or an orchard, reviving on the scent of flowers, or fruit like a grape sweetening in the sun.

Elstir the artist

There is a carnation linking the fictional artist Elstir, who enabled the narrator to become better acquainted with the little band of girls of whom Albertine was one, with Albertine herself (114). While visiting Elstir's studio, the narrator is taken by a watercolour of a young woman entitled 'Miss Sacripant, October 1872'. She sits wearing a hat resembling a bowler, but trimmed with cerise ribbon and a white linen shirt with pleats like flowers, like little lilies of the valley. There is a table beside her with a tall vase of pink carnations. The narrator correctly identifies the sitter for the portrait as Mme Swann before her marriage. Just a little later in the novel (115), while playing 'ferret' with the girls, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of Albertine, her hair loosened by the game, a brown curl against her carnation pink cheek. Hayman noted (116) that the popular singer Felix Mayol attracted Proust whenever he heard him, and for his signature always wore in his button-hole a spray of lily of the valley; there is a publicity photograph of Mayol in Sansom (117). In Elstir's darkened studio (118) the blinds were closed except for one small window which was open, draped in honeysuckle and looking onto a strip of garden. Perhaps the three most 110

encountered honeysuckles in western Europe are Lonicera periclyrnenum from Europe and into parts of Morocco; L. etrusca from Europe, into North Africa and on into Turkey and L. japonica from eastern Asia. All of these are climbers with fragrant flowers, but many of the 200 species in the genus are shrubs. Elstir's villa at Balbec sat (119) in one of the newest avenues and was, paradoxically, he being such a famous artist, sumptuously hideous and matched the neighbourhood. The narrator averted his eyes in the garden, with its lawn, its statuette of a little gardener and glass balls distorting his reflexion and that of beds of begonias, and an arbour. William Robinson illustrated one of these glass reflecting balls which he hated, but which were popular in gardens in the late century (120). Having asked someone to do some shopping for him (121), the narrator likens himself to Elstir who, remaining in his studio on days when the the woods were full of violets, would send his concierge out to buy a bunch as a model for his memories of years gone by. The botanical name for the plum is Prunus domestics, but it seems unlikely to be a true species; rather it has had an hybrid origin in the dim past. The narrator recalls one of Elstir's stilllife paintings (122) where the colour of the plums passes from green through blue to golden yellow in a half-empty dish. It is a passage which echoes another in Proust's essay on the real painter Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) (123), but there the fruits are peaches smiling like the gods on Olympus. With the dish of fruit on the sideboard is a napkin and a knife and rounds of lemon. 111

The peach is Prunus persica and is probably a native of China, although it has been in cultivation for a very long time and its origins are obscure. Some varieties are valued for their early April blossom while others are grown for the fruit; of the latter Robinson (124) listed cv. Grosse Mignonne, cv. Madeleine Rouge de Courtoy, cv. Belle Beausse and cv. Chevreuse tardive as being grown in the Paris area at the time of Proust's youth. The lemon, Citrus limon, is one of twelve species in the genus all of which are natives from an area extending from South East Asia into southern China. Botanically, all citrus fruits are berries. In a place like Paris they would need to be overwintered in a conservatory. Perhaps the most frost-hardy species is C. ichangensis from central and southern China, having been grown outside for almost thirty years in Hampshire in England. With the eye of a painter Proust created one of his many interiors in Contre Sainte-Beuve (125); a cool dining room, a sideboard, the table cloth and odours of cider, Gruyere cheese, cherries and apricots on the fruit dish and sparkling glass kniferests. This was only marginally reworked for A la recherche... becoming (126) a country dining-room, the table oilcloth and odours of cider, Gruyere cheese, cherries and apricots in a bowl and glass knife-rests scattering little rainbows. The apricot, Prunus anneniaca, is a native of central Asia and China, but it was introduced to Italy in about 100BC and reached the British Isles only in the 13th century. France has been one of the centres of apricot production, even in Proust's time, by the use of cordons grown against walls to protect the early blossom from frost in a place like Paris. Peach grafts were also sometimes worked onto apricot trees to maximise productivity for the lucrative city market. Robinson (127) 112

described the garden of M.F.Jamin at Bourg-la-Reine near Paris in 1878 where a ten year old peach tree in a cordon form of twenty vertical branches was about 3m tall and I Im wide, bearing an average of 400 premium quality fruits each season. Thanks to the skill of such growers, Proust would have been able to enjoy first class produce over an extended period. Albertine For the narrator (128) making friends with Albertine seemed as arduous as breaking horses, absorbing him as much as keeping bees, or growing roses. He thought (129) that he would soon know the taste of this rose made of flesh, but the mechanics of a kiss present an unforeseen dilemma, with his nose, eyes and lips situated so as to frustrate his desires. However, physical contact is eventually made with her cheek. The narrator finds Albertine to be an enigma (130). Sometimes her cheeks deepened in colour to a cyclamen pink, or sometimes something more perverse, unwholesome, the deep purple of particular roses, a red almost black. Each Albertine seemed different. The sleeping Albertine fascinated the narrator (131) stretched at full length on the bed like a blossoming stem, as though she had assumed that unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more alien, yet one that now belonged to him. Stirring in sleep, her tremor was like that of the leaves on a tree shaken by the wind. The alien life to which Proust refers is that which routinely converts the sun's energy into matter by the chemical process called photosynthesis and on which most of the life of the planet depends. It is a process which takes place every day inside the leaf of every living plant. Certain of the leaf cells contain a 113

green pigment called chlorophyll and together with water and carbon dioxide, intercepted sunlight provides the energy to drive the process which makes simple sugars. These chemicals are the building blocks which enable the plant to exist, to grow and, ultimately, to reproduce itself. There is a need in all perennial plants to periodically renew the leaves as growth occurs and as leaves wear out. In the tropics this renewal is more or less continuous, or in a rhythm following bursts of growth of new foliage, but in places with marked seasons the renewal is synchronous with the climate and many plants are deciduous. Before being shed the leaves may change colour to produce wonderful autumnal scenes. Later, living with Albertine(132) the narrator could take her sleeping head, lift it, press her face to his lips, wrap her arms around his neck without waking her, like a climbing plant, a convolvulus which continues to thrust its tendrils at any support. He continues (133) that once she ceased to sleep, without a moment's hesitation, she would break out in a laugh to receive his kisses. In waking her it was like cutting open a fruit, to release its juice. A little earlier in the novel (134), Proust had once again used convolvulus, not in a 'gardens of childhood' context, but to convey sexual ambiguity. The narrator describes what Proust called the invert; the man-woman who finds some way of attaching himself to a man, like convolvulus throws out its tendrils to climb up any convenient rake, or other support. Thus, by the use of another plant symbol, Proust creates a sense of unease about the emerging relationship between the narrator and Albertine. One may compare such darkness with the youthful story 'The End of Jealousy' (135) which begins, " My little tree, my little donkey, my mother, my brother, my 114

country, my little God, my little seashell, my lotus flower, my little stranger, my darling, my little plant, do go away and let me dress, and I'll meet you, rue de la Baume, at eight o'clock." She tried to close the door on Honoré, but again he said, "Neck!" and at once she held out her neck to him with a docility and exorbitant alacrity that made him burst out laughing.' Certain aspects of this passage remind me of parts of The Song of Solomon. The Albertine of the narrator's imagination is very different from the reality (136). It was not possible to touch, or later even kiss her; one might only talk to her. She was no more a woman for him than those antique table ornaments called jade grapes are really fruit. When he could not see Albertine in Balbec, the narrator often spent time with M. Pierre de Verjus, the Comte de Crécy, a gentleman of great distinction unfortunately reduced to a penurious existence (137). He wore a signet ring bearing his family arms featuring a sprig of verjuice grapes. Verjuice is used in cooking and is unripe grape, or apple juice. Céleste Albaret (138) recalled that in her time with him, Proust never drank wine although he would provide it for guests. He drank only coffee, or occasionally a beer from the Brasserie Lipp on boulevard Saint-Germain, or from the Ritz. He sometimes liked to nibble a bunch of grapes. Departing on the spur of the moment from Balbec for Paris because of his suspicions about the behaviour of Albertine there (139), the narrator upsets the hotel maids, Marie Gineste and Céleste Albaret. Marie cries bitterly, being comforted by the gentler Céleste, until Marie recites a line of poetry about lilacs which die when Céleste also bursts into tears. The names of these maids are not fictional, unlike the names of most of 115

Proust's characters. Celeste was latterly Proust's house-keeper and she treasured a longhand manuscript copy of the words to 'Lilac Time' made for her by Proust. Her maiden-name was Gineste and her spinster sister was Marie. A trip to Saint-Moritz, Switzerland

In August 1893 Proust visited Saint-Moritz with his school friend Comte Louis-Georges Seguin de la Salle (1872-1915), poet and essayist. This trip influenced certain sketches in Les Plaisirs... (140). There is a Rousseau-like setting of a lake at sunset surrounded by pine forests. On the shore of Lake SilsMaria the bright green larches contrast with the snows in the distance and the pale blue, almost mauve, waters of the lake. They watch as butterflies coloured pink by the rays of the sun leave the flowers on their side of the lake to fly perilously to the other shore, before returning in the fading light. During that holiday together, high on the mountain they shouted aloud, revelling in the glorious feeling of intimate solitude, only shared by the short grasses and the breeze. The larches, there being ten species of Larix, are one of the few deciduous conifers. They have some resemblance to true cedars, Cedrus species, except that larch cones mature in one growing season, not two or three seasons like the cedar cone. L. decidua is extensively planted for its good timber in Europe, while in North America its equivalent is the native L. laricina and in Asia it is the Chinese L. potaninii. The new foliage on larch twigs is always a lovely sight.

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Chapter 3 A camellia button-hole period There is a portrait of Proust painted by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), completed in 1892, showing him with a camellia in his button-hole. It dates from a time when Proust was frequenting a number of salons. His housekeeper said' that he called this stage in his life his 'camellia button-hole period', one calculated to seek and closely observe a wide variety of people including the elegant and intellectually interesting. He was able to do this because the years roughly between 1886 and 1894 gave Proust remission from asthma attacks. The salons of Mme Straus (1845-1926), Mme Arman de Caillavet (1844-1910) and Mme Laure Baigneres (1841?-1918) were amongst the first he regularly visited. Proust first met Mme Arman and, by that time, her lover Anatole France (18441924), in the autumn of 1889. France was an important influence on Proust's early artistic development and he wrote the Preface to Les Plaisirs et les fours, Proust's first collection of writing. These salon visits led to invitations to stay and holiday at the country homes and estates of new acquaintances like the Finaly family in Ostende in summer 1889, the Baigneres' at Les Fremonts, Trouville, in autumn 1891 and summer 1892, and the Lemaire château at Revelllon, Seine-etMarne in summer 1894. Proust had volunteered on 11 November 1889 for the twelve months national service which young men were at that time obliged to undertake and he was based in Orleans, a place that in his subsequent writing was transformed into Provins and Doncieres; more of this period of his life in Chapter 5.

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Les Fremonts From 1891 he was found more and more at the salon of Mme Straus where he met Comtesse de Chevigne (1860-1936), Jules Lemaitre, the actress Rejane (1857-1920) and Princesse Mathilde (1820-1904). In the autumn of that year he stayed at Les Fremonts after spending a month in Cabourg on the Normandy coast. Built in 1869 to an Anglo-Norman design2, the L-shaped country house was situated on top of a hill so that the drawing-room commanded sweeping views of the Channel coast on one side and rural valley vistas on the other. Proust used Les Fremonts as a model on which the fictional la Raspeliere was based, rented from the Cambremers by the Verdurins just as in reality the Finalys rented it, and later bought it, from the Baigneres in 1892. Arthur Baigneres (1843-1913) was considered to be one of the wittiest men of his generation and in a letter from Proust3 to his friend Robert de Billy dated 26 (?) January 1893, it was said of Baigneres that he took advantage on the stage of viewing the bosoms inside the bodices of ladies, including Laure, his sisterin-law, who seemed to be leaving on a long trip so much was packed down there. The same Laure, Mme Henri Baigneres, who when asked by Mme Aubernon (1825-1899) what she thought of love is said to have replied that she made it, often, but never, ever talked about it. An alternative attribution of the quotation is given (4), but whichever is correct Proust placed the words on the lips of Blanche Leroi (5) in A la recherche... It was while staying at Les Fremonts on 1 October 1891 that Jacques-Emile Blanche made a pencil sketch of Proust, also being a guest at the time, but this sketch was not preliminary to the oil which the artist later painted according to Tadie (6), contrary to Painter (7). 118

La Raspeliere The narrator commented (8) that the design of the garden at la Raspeliere, overlooking a valley one one side and the sea on the other, with clearings made in the trees to enhance views to include the horizon, gave a promise of all of the outings that may be had in the surrounding countryside. Mme Verdurin told the narrator that the setting of the property (9) was in a Normandy.with velvet cryptomeria-coloured natural lawns and borders of pink porcelain hydrangeas just like an endless English park. This is the only time that Proust used the Japanese cedar, Cryptomeria japonica, in his writing. It was introduced to Europe in 1842 and is easily grown, becoming a large, attractive, dark green evergreen tree of columnar habit with a shaggy reddish bark. There is a mainland China variety, var. sinensis, but of the many cultivated varieties of the true species, var. japonica, it is cv. Elegans about which Proust probably wrote: its leaves remain in a soft and feathery juvenile state and appear like velvet when seen from a distance, turning a rich bronze colour in autumn and winter. This cultivar was extensively planted in parks, gardens and arboreta in the late 19th century and would have been seen by Proust without much doubt. There are at least twenty named cultivars of the Japanese cedar differing in foliage type, growth form and growth rate. Related to the swamp cypress, Taxodium; the Chinese firs, Cunninghamia; the dawn redwoods, Metasequoia and the coffin trees, Taiwania, Cuptomeria is not a true cedar, despite its common name. Driving with the Verdurins in their carriage (10) through Douville, the narrator saw grassy knolls running down to the sea, spreading out into lush pastures saturated in moisture and salt. The islands and indentations of Rivebelle seemed to him 119

much closer here than at Balbec giving the coast the appearance of a relief map. The thick and lush seaside pastures described are typical of those associated with species in the grass genus Puccinellia which are adapted to saline habitats. There are about eighty species chiefly found in the northern hemisphere. The narrator (11), when greeted by Mme Verdurin, is in her large drawing-room where displays of grasses, poppies and other field-flowers gathered that morning, complemented several exquisite monochrome flower studies painted two centuries earlier. He was nonetheless surprised to find that the Verdurins retired indoors each day long before the sunset which was considered so fine seen from the terrace of la Raspeliere. Mme Verdurin carelessly acknowledged how beautiful was the view and that they never tired of it as she concentrated on her hand of cards. In conversation with the daughter-in-law of the owner of la Raspeliere (12), Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin, she tells the narrator how much she dreads sunsets and her mother-in-law's house with its tropical plants, so operatic, like a public garden at Monte-Carlo. The gardener at la Raspeliere (13) regarded the Cambremers as his true masters, not the Verdurins, who were only tenants. He complained to his mistress of their contempt for his araucarias, begonias, sempervivum and double dahlias and that they grew such common plants as camomile and maidenhair fern.. The habit that Proust had of talking to trades-people and servants is, perhaps, evident in the continuation of this passage and may even relate to the views of a gardener at the Villa Bassaraba, at Lake Geneva, which was the model for the Cambremer's second fictional garden, called Feteme. The gardener who had long worked for the mistress, sometimes for nothing and who 120

adored her, paradoxically said it was treasonable of Mme de Cambremer, caught by the invasion of 1870, in a house that she owned in the east of France, to have been obliged to endure the Germans to stay there. Of the plants about which the gardener was concerned, Araucaria comprises thirty eight species all of which occur in South America, Oceania or Queensland in Australia. He would have been growing A. araucana, the monkey-puzzle tree, which is not only one of the most frost-hardy species in the genus to survive outdoors in northern France, but was incredibly popular in the 19th century on account of its strange, formal, evergreen symmetry, its longevity and its considerable ultimate size. The globular cones borne on separate female trees may be up to 18 cm long, take three years to mature while hanging on the tree and can be a safety hazard for people beneath. It was Archibald Menzies who first introduced the tree to western Europe in 1795, but William Lobb's reintroduction in 1844 resulted in its popularity as a vegetable curiosity. The Norfolk Island pine, A. heterophylla, also became familiar in European conservatories, being frost-tender; in nature this species can grow to 30 m tall. There are about 900 species of Begonia, all coming from the tropics and subtropics and with many native in Central and South America. Many species have leaves which are more attractive than the very distinctive pink or white clusters of flower, but the summer-bedding sorts referred to in Proust's writing, (the tuberous-rooted double-flowered hybrid begonias, B.x tuberhybrida, and the fibrous-rooted selections of B. semperflorens), are both grown for their flowers. As summerbedding plants they need skilled propagation and overwintering of the new season's plants under glass. In each of Proust's three references to begonia, one has a sense that they are regarded as 121

slightly vulgar and a mildly disparaging use is made of them, as found in Elstir's garden and from the comments of Baron Charlus (q.v.). The genus Sempervivuin comprises twenty five species occurring wild in an area from southern Europe, east into the Caucasus. They are succulents belonging to the Crassulaceae family and are capable of tolerating a certain amount of drought. The houseleek is S. tectoruni and will happily grow in the crevices of stone slab roofing, or on the top of stone walls. The seeds are tiny and blown by the wind into such niches, but plants are sometimes encouraged to grow on cottage roofs in the belief that they act as lightning-conductors, or help keep the roofing in place. The dried daisy-heads of Chamaemelum nob lie provide the medicinal herb called camomile which is used in herb tea and other remedies, see Fig. 11. The use of this herb, one of three species in the genus, also extends to its use as a lawn, or living seat, because of the pleasant smell which is produced when it is trodden or sat on. Dawson (14) gave instructions on how to make a camomile lawn. The Cambremers are critical of their tenants (15), the Verdurins, over their choice of decoration and the management of the estate. Mme de Cambremer, the lover of idealist philosophy, Impressionist painting and Debussy's music cannot bear the tenant's choice of a fabric covered with huge roses, quilt-like and of peasant taste. One evening at la Raspelière with the Verdurins (16), Mme de Cambremer was asking the narrator if he would like to go to Féterne with Saint-Loup, when he utters a cry of admiration on seeing the full moon hanging beneath the oaks near the house. Mme Verdurin hears him, saying that the moon will shortly 122

light up the whole valley like nothing one might see at Féterne. Mme de Cambremer makes no reply, not wishing to diminish her property to her tenants! The interior of Ia Raspelière The narrator gains an improved awareness of the Verdurin salon from reading entries in the Goncourt Journals (17), entries which are fictional and Proust's pastiche on the originals. They begin when Verdurin calls for Goncourt and they travel together through dusk, past the towers of the Trocadéro, which in the twilight resemble towers of red-currant jelly once made by pastry-cooks, on the way to their mansion on the Quai Conti. The red currant is not simply a colour variant of the black currant, Ribes nigrum. It is a distinct species called R. sativuin which is a native of Europe; an allied species, R. rubruni, is more common in Scandinavia, but is not the common red currant of gardens. There are descriptions of dinner-plates noticed by Goncourt (18), Yung Cheng plates with nasturtium-coloured borders and purple-blue irises, Dresden plates with bloodless roses and ragged-edged tulips coloured like wine-lees, or the rococo elegance of a pink, or forget-me-not. There was also a whole service of silver plate arabesqued with the myrtles of Luciennes known to the du Barry. Goncourt also praised the simple potato salad made with potatoes as firm as Japanese ivory buttons. Louveciennes was the magnificent house near Marly built by Louis XV for his mistress Mme du Barry. The garden pink was developed by at least the middle of the 14th century, possibly as early as the 12th century, by chance hybridisation in gardens between the carnation, Dianthus 123

cagophyllus, a native of western and southern France, and the cottage pink, D. plumarius, which is a native of south-eastern Europe, but which was introduced to western Europe in the 11th century. Garden pinks usually flower only once, between June and August, and are mat forming herbs with greyish-blue foliage, having single, semi-double, or double flowers in a range of white, pink, or red colours and with a varying degree of fragrance. In the late 17th and early 18th century, amateur growers in England and later Scotland developed the laced pink, the flowers of which have dark lace-like markings on the petals; few of these pretty cultivars have survived. Other pinks, or gillyflowers, grown in European gardens in the 17th century were derived from D. sinensis, the Indian or Chinese pink. Pinks became unfashionable and therefore neglected in the 18th century, but had a resurgence in the 19th century. When the Allwood Nurseries at Wivelsfield in Sussex, England developed the perpetual-flowering garden pink in about 1917, D. x allwoodii, it began a new era in the development and popularity of the garden pink. The myrtle is Myrtus communis, one of about one hundred largely tropical and subtropical species in a genus which is particularly well represented in the Americas. The myrtle grows wild in western Asia, but has become naturalised in the warmer parts of Europe. Its small, discreet, evergreen leaves and neat white flowers have made it a popular shrub, or small tree for use in containers, or in topiary. Writing of the love that the Verdurins had for No iandy (19), Goncourt recalled the forests of great pink rhododendrons together with the smell of sardine fisheries which gave her husband awful attacks of asthma. The sorts of tall growing, pink flowered rhododendons then being commonly grown 124

might include the early hybrids between R. arboreurn and R. caucasicum, the first being raised in 1832. The narrator, like Proust, is acutely aware of the furnishing in a room and on a visit to the Verdurins town house in Paris, to which familiar pieces have been relocated from the country (20), recalls having seen through the glass doors at la Raspelière, looking out for so long over the flower-beds of the garden, a bouquet of violets and pansies in pastel, the gift of a painter friend, now dead. Mme Verdurin, Elstir and Mine Swann An evening with the Verdurins (21), involves the narrator being shown a water-colour by the artist Elstir. The scarlet and cream roses by Elstir were like a new variety perfected by a rose breeder. Mme Verdurin doubted whether her old friend still had the ability to equal such work. Mentioning Elstir's pastel sketches to Mme Verdurin (22) the narrator is told that it was she who had taught him all he knew about flowers. Until she came he was unable to tell a mallow from a hollyhock. Mme Verdurin would have known, no doubt, that the mallow has flowers with three epicalyx lobes (the apparent calyx situated beneath the real one), while hollyhock flowers, Althaea rosea, have five to eleven such lobes. Malva is the genus of forty species to which the large mallow, M sylvestris, see Fig. 27, and small mallow M neglecta belong, both being wildflowers in Europe. The tree mallow is Lavarera arborea, one of twenty five species in that genus, while the marsh mallow is Althaea officinalis coming from a smaller genus of only twelve species. The whole family of Malvaceae, with seventy five genera and 1000 species, shows a similarity 125

and conservatism of flower structure, but the fruits show great diversity and are the basis on which the family is classified to distinguish the mallow, the malope, the cotton and the hibiscus groups. She continued that as well as all of the roses painted in her house, Elstir now knew what jasmine looks like, this artist superior even to Fantin-Latour and so indebted to Mme Verdurin. There are 300 species of jasmine, Jasminum, which mainly occur wild in the tropics and subtropics; they are members of the olive family Oleaceae. The species may be shrubs like the summer flowering J. humile, or winter flowering I nudUlorum, both yellow flowered, or climbers like I azoricum, having white, purple-flushed flowers, or I officinale, with white flowers, both being very fragrant. Many of the loveliest species are frost-tender in western Europe, but can be grown as conservatory plants; one thinks off. dispermum from the Himalayas, J. polyanthum from China, or J. suavissimum from Australia. Another artist frequenting the Verdurin salon is the Polish sculptor, Viradobetski, who is usually called 'Ski' (23). He asks Mme Verdurin the name for strawberry mousse, going on to suggest that it be served with bottles of Chateau-Margaux, Château-Lafite, but not to drink, and peaches and nectarines in a composition like a Veronese. M. Verdurin mutters that such ingredients would cost almost as much as the painting. The nectarine is derived from the peach, Prunus persica, but its fruits have a thinner skin, no external hair and firmer flesh. The chrysanthemum is a floral symbol for Odette, Mme Swann, in A la recherche..., but Mme Verdurin regards herself an authority and does not hesitate to criticise Odette in an overfamiliar manner when on a visit with other members of the 126

`little clan' (24). Mme Verdurin considers that Odette has no idea about arranging chrysanthemums, which are Japanese flowers that must be alTanged as the Japanese would. Mme Cottard disagrees after Mme Verdurin has left, saying that Odette always has such lovely chrysanthemums, or chrysanthema as they should now be called, so she understands. The florist's and gardener's chrysanthemums are complex hybrids between the species Chrysanthemum indicu,n and C. x grandfloruin. Proust was here recording one aspect of the exciting times in the development of new cultivars of these flowers, not least by French growers such as M. Delaux of Toulouse. Proust's Mine Cottard even seems to make a confused reference to the segregate genus Dendranthema proposed by the French botanist C.R.A. Desmoulins (17971875). Mme Verdurin's love of the chrysanthemum is noted by the narrator (25) where her Japanese chrysanthemums are displayed on the dinner table in vases of exquisite workmanship. Robinson stressed the point that only the finest vases should be used for table decoration and should be sympathetic with the flowers being displayed. Professor Brichot

Proust's love of the poetry of names and their etymology, whether of places, people, or plants, appears continually in his writing. In A la recherche. . .he gives one of his characters the role of interpreting names. Professor Brichot teaches at the Sorbonne, has a fondness for etymological discourse with anyone to hand and frequents the Verdurin's dining-room. Speaking to M. de Cambremer (26) 127

he observes that even in the names of people, a tree may be embedded, like a fern in a seam of coal. He cites the senator M. de Saulces de Freycinet, whose name means somewhere planted with willow and ash, salix et fraxinetuin, while his nephew's name M. de Selves has more trees, based on de sylvis. Had it been published at the time, The White Goddess may have interested Proust, and Brichot, because Graves noted (27) that willow (saille) and ash (pion) are respectively the fifth and third consonants in the Druidic Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet. To further name names, the tropical climbing pandan Freycinetia is named after Admiral Freycinet (1779-1842) the French circumnavigator and not the inventor of pre-stressed concrete, Marie Eugene Leon Freyssinet (1879-1962). Brichot's fellow guest, an eminent Norwegian philosopher, asks if other trees exist in French or Norman names. Brichot replies that the name of M. Houssaye refers to a place planted with holly-trees; the name of the diplomat, d'Oluiesson refers to the elm, ulmus, beloved of Virgil, also giving its name to the town of Ulm. Even his colleagues provided examples, such as M. de la Boulaye, the birch (bouleau), M. d'Aunay, the alder (aurae), M. de Bussiere, the box-tree (buffs), and M. Albaret, the sapwood (aubier). Here the narrator, who was listening to the conversaation, made a mental note to tell this to Celeste Albaret. Brichot continues that the name of M. de Cholet refers to the cabbage (chou), and the apple-tree (pommier) appears in the name of M. de la Pommeraye, whose lectures both Brichot and Saniette attended when Porel was sent as Proconsul in Odeonia The narrator asks if the name of a station passed before reaching Doncieres, Saint-Frichoux, also comes from chou, like M. de Cholet's name. Brichot answers that it does not; Saint-Frichoux 128

comes from Sanctus Fructuosus, as Sanctus Ferreolus gave rise to Saint-Fargeau, but that neither are Norman. Princess Sherbatoff speaks for certain other guests when she murmurs that the professor knows too much and is boring. The Princess Sherbatoff is not the only other guest at dinner. M. de Charlus comments that he would soon be entitled to two trees having taken a house between Saint-Martin-du-Chene and Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs. However, Brichot responds (28) that Charlus will have only one tree for while Saint-Martin-duChene refers to Sanctus Martinus juxta quercem, the word if (yew) can be simply the root aye, eve, which means moist, as in Aveyron, Lodeve, Yvette, and which survives in kitchen-sinks (eviers). It is the word eau represented by ster in Breton, as in Stermaria, Sterlaer, Sterbouest, Ster-en-Dreuchen. Tadie pointed out that for these etymological conversations, from about 1915 Proust drew on the book Origine et formation des noms de lieu by Hippolyte Cocheris. Painter stated, p. 407, that Proust also corresponded with the acknowledged authorities on French place-names Louis Dimier and Henri Longnon. The ferns referred to in coal seams were some of the more primitive land plants in the sense that they did not, and still do not, possess flowers. As a group of plants they have existed far longer than the flower-bearers, since the upper Devonian geological period about 260 million years ago. Flowering plants first appear in the fossil record in the upper Cretaceous period of about 75 million years ago (29). Many ferns need to grow in moist habitats, both temperate and tropical, but others have become adapted to grow in seasonally wet niches, perhaps on tree branches, rocks, or amongst savanna grasses where they curl up in a dormant state during the dry season. Instead of seeds ferns produce spores, which in evolutionary terms are 129

simpler. Blown on the wind, the spores are dispersed from little envelopes, called son, situated on the leaves. Finding a suitable moist substrate the spore may germinate to begin the next stage of the fern life-cycle, the gametophyte generation about which Proust also probably knew. Coal is the fossilised remains of not only ferns, but club mosses and horsetails which 220 million years ago were not the modest herbs we now know. They then dominated extensive swamp-forest and formed tree-like structures 40 m or more tall (30). The European holly is Ilex aquifolium, one of 400 cosmopolitan species in the genus. It can be found wild as far east as in western Asia and is usually a shrub, but can become a tree more than 20 m tall. The male and female flowers are usually borne on separate plants and in this species, but not all, the leaves are evergreen. In the Beth-Luis-Nion Druidic tree alphabet the holly (tinne) is the eighth consonant, its sacred pre-Christian character still living on in the carol `The holly and the ivy' (31). Of economic importance is mate, or Paraguay tea, I. paraguariensis. Alders, Alnus species, differ from birches, Betula species, by having fruiting catkins looking like little pine cones which persist on the tree after the seed has been shed; those of birch completely disintegrate as the seed is shed. Alder is associated with wet habitats such as along water courses, around ponds and in fens. The roots have nodules in which nitrogen-fixing bacteria live in symbiosis with the tree: these nodules help the tree secure nitrogen in the wet impoverished soils in which they are rooted. All of the native European alders are deciduous, but some of the total of thirty five species are evergreen and extend beyond the northern temperate region into Vietnam in the east and into the Andes in the west. Proust is likely to have seen at 130

least one of the European species such as black alder, A. glutinosa; grey alder, A. incana; or green alder, A. viridis, all of which are particularly attractive in spring at bud-burst when the catkins of the previous year still decorate the twigs which so often overhang a stream or river. The elder is a different shrub belonging to the genus Sarnbucus which is in a completely different family; it lacks catkins and instead has berries, elder berries. Alder (fearn) is the fourth of the thirteen consonants in the Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet (32), while birch (beth) is the first consonant. Birch twigs were formerly used throughout Europe for expelling evil spirits, the beating of bounds and, in Roman times, birch rods were borne by the lictors on the installation of Consuls. There are sixty northern temperate species of Betula. Not all of the species have the pale or white, shedding, papery bark like that of B. pendula, the weeping birch and the related B. pubescens. These two species are commonly encountered in the northern parts of western Europe. Brassica oleracea is the northern European species from which, about 8000 years ago, the first ancestors of cabbage were derived. Since then the cultivated races of cauliflower, Brussel's sprout, broccoli, kale and kohlrabi have been selected from the wild species. At a performance of the unpublished Vinteuil Septet in the Verdurin salon (33), the narrator noted the bass player who seemed to caress his double-bass, fingering it as he might have peeled off cabbage leaves. There are few plant anatomical terms to be found in Proust's writing; epidermis is one, but sapwood could count as another. The bark of trees protects a relatively thin layer of phloem through which food materials are translocated in solution. Generally speaking, there is a movement of dissolved food materials away from the leaves, where these materials are 131

synthesised, to other parts of the tree through the phloem. There is a reciprocal movement of water away from the roots towards the leaves where it is required as one of the raw materials for the process of photosynthesis to occur. Beneath the phloem layer is a much thicker layer of xylem, through which only water is transported: this is the sapwood. The sap, or juice, encountered when any plant stem or trunk is cut is a consequence of the massive rupture of thousands of tiny conducting xylem pipelines in the tissues. (Francoise de Breyves experiences a comparable trauma over her passion for M. de Laléande (34), when it is completely uprooted like a plant.) As the tree trunk increases in girth with age, through secondary thickening by the addition of new xylem, the older, more internal xylem elements gradually lose their capacity to move water and progressively assume a more structural and architectural role as the heartwood, which in certain species may be economically valuable. The yew, Taxus baccata, is a poisonous, evergreen gymnosperm, see Fig. 47, one often species in the genus with a distribution range throughout the northern temperate region, but also extending into the Philippines, the Celebes and into Mexico. It is regarded as the tree of death throughout Europe (35). In Brittany it is held that the yews in a churchyard spread a root to the mouth of every corpse. As a tree it can live for more than 200 years, the timber being resistant to decay. Long bows were traditionally made from yew staves owing to their strength and elasticity. Yew (idho) is the fifth vowel in the Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet and the tree of the last day of the year, the eve of the Winter Solstice.

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The Professor, for all his erudition, was not impervious to the dubious delights of gossip. Returning home from the Verdurins and giving Brichot a lift in his carriage (36), the narrator listens to an anecdote about Charlus and a telegraph-boy who was later found a post in the colonies by the Baron. The protégé of this obliging Satan sent him delightful parcels of fruit which the Baron offered to his friends. Some of the young man's pineapples were noted by Mme Verdurin, who thought that they must have been sent by an American relative of Charlus. The pineapple is Ananas comosus, one of five species in the genus and a member of the Bromeliaceae, a family which in nature is confined to the American tropics, just as Mme Verdurin said. Unlike many bromeliads, or tank plants, which hold water in their leaf bases while often living high on the boughs or trunks of trees as epiphytes, the pineapple lives on the ground, its stalked flower-head protruding from the midst of a rosette of spiny leaves, the head slowly growing and coalescing into the familiar fruit shape crowned by its little cluster of leaves. Other terrestrial bromeliads include the spectacular species in the South American genus Puya, bearing flowering heads several metres tall with pale turquoise, or jadecoloured flowers. The garden at la Raspeliere

There was a fir plantation at la Raspeliere. These evergreens belonging to the pine family and found only in northern temperate regions, belong to the genus Abies, of which there are fifty species. They make handsome and long-lived trees when full grown as well as yielding valuable timber and resins. The spruces, in the genus Picea, of which there are also fifty species, are sometimes confused with the firs, but differ by 133

having twigs which are rough to touch because of the stubs of old leaf-bases remaining attached after the needles fall: the firs have smoother twigs which show only the scars of the old needles. The narrator had been deeply moved by the disquieting beauty of the firs in the Bois (37), perhaps moreso than the chestnuts and lilacs of Trianon. He may have recalled that occasion in the Bois at the end of an evening with the Verdurins (38) when, opening the door onto the garden, he felt a cool nocturnal breeze coming from the same fir plantation where Mme de Cambremer had once dreamed of Chopin. Arriving at la Raspeliere with Albertine by motor-car provided a different perspective on these firs (39) which appeared to run away as the couple sped up the drive. However the gardener's son was more fascinated by the motor-car. The herbaceous border at la Raspeliere provided many of the flowers cut for table decoration by Mme Verdurin (40), with tall stems of bugloss, carnations, roses and coreopsis gathered to make her table-runner. The name bugloss could relate to several different species in different genera in the borage family, Boraginaceae. The wildflowers viper's bugloss, Echium vulgare, and field bugloss, Lycopsis arvensis, are unlikely candidates for her table-runner, although the former can be spectacular in its natural setting. In the garden context used by Proust, Anchusa azurea is more likely. This native of the Caucasus was introduced to European gardens in about 1810 and is still popular for its tall, large flowered, bright blue spires well suited to a place in the herbaceous border, which was very popular as a garden feature in Proust's era. In the early 20th century several cultivars of this species were selected with deeper blue, or azure flower colour.

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The genus Coreopsis comprises 120 herbaceous or shrubby species belonging to the daisy family, Compositae, and they occur in tropical Africa, Hawaii and America. Two of the herbaceous species most often found in gardens are C. auriculata, which is about 60 cm tall, and C. grandiflora, growing to about 1 m tall. Garden races have been selected from both species and these either tend to have golden-yellow flowers with a crimson-maroon blotch at the base of each rayfloret, or buttercup-yellow flowers overlaid with Indian yellow. There are also dahlias in the garden at la Raspeliere (41), at Versailles (42) and in Proust's tribute to the work of Monet (43). Dahlia is another genus in the daisy family, all twenty species being natives of Mexico. They are all perennial herbs with tuberous roots and are frost-tender. Introduced into Europe through Madrid in 1789, the species have been hybridised to produce the great variety of flower form, colour and plant habit now found in the garden dahlia, of which there are many hundreds of named cultivars maintained by vegetative propagation from the tubers. The parent species were probably D. pinnata and the very variable D. coccinea as Sorensen explained in 1969. In Europe, dahlias begin to flower in summer and continue until the first frosts of winter blacken the new shoots and buds.

Feterne Very different from la Raspeliere, the Cambremer's other garden of Feterne near Balbec (44) was the one that Mme de Cambremer preferred, its little sheltered bay edged with her flowers, the fig trees, palms, rose bushes growing as if beside the Mediterranean. There is a village of Fetemes some little way east of Thonon, near Evian, but it seems the fictional 135

garden was based on that of the Villa Bassaraba at Amphion, near Evian, belonging to Prince de Brancovan and visited by Proust in the summer of 1899 at about the time he abandoned work on the manuscript of Jean Santeuil (45). The genus to which the fig belongs, Ficus, comprises 800 species which are chiefly tropical in distribution and occur especially in South East Asia and Polynesia. They often grow as epiphytes, twiners, or root-climbers depending on the species, rather than as normal trees like that native of Europe and the Mediterranean region, the fig, F. carica. It was cultivated in the Paris area as a commercial crop in Proust's time (46). The flowers of the fig are tiny and are borne inside the 'hollowed-out' head which later becomes the 'fig fruit': depending on the species concerned there may be as few as only two or three flowers in the head, or as many as several thousand. Each fig seed in a fig fruit is the result of the successful pollination of one of these fig flowers. Furthermore, it seems that each different species of Ficus is pollinated by a different species of gall-wasp and, if comprehensively so, is a form of co-adaptation between plant and pollinator that parallels that found in orchids. Proust was certainly aware of the strange diversity of orchid pollinator mechanisms, but did not elaborate on that of the figs. Mme de Cambremer had made a little presbytery garden behind the house at Féterne (47), into which she went each morning in her dressing-gown and after feeding her peacocks, gathered zinnias, roses, or other flowers to decorate the breakfast-room. Zinnias last well as a cutfiower. The genus commemorates Professor Johann Gottfried Zinn (1727-1759) of Gottingen University and comprises twenty species of daisy which are found wild in an area from the southern United States of 136

America, south into Brazil and Chile. Best known as, summer flowering annuals, the small but vibrant scarlet flowers of Z. peruviana, and the larger crimson, violet, pink, buff, or white flowers of the more variable Z. elegans from Mexico, have made them popular in gardens. Chateau de Réveillon Madame Madeleine Lemaire (1845-1928) first met Proust either at the home of Mme Straus, or Mme Arman. This somewhat forgotten painter became an important person for Proust as it was through her that he met Robert de Montesquiou (18551921) in April 1893. She also provided a model for his fictional Mme Verdurin, as well as illustrating his first collection of work, Les Plaisirs... In a letter to her daughter Suzanne, often called Suzette, written on 18 or 19 September 1894 (48), Proust said that he hoped that her mother was working on things other than his items, but that they were all inextricably linked with his grateful memories of Réveillon, the dove, the chrysanthemums, the pansies, and Violante's castle. Delays with the completion of the illustrations were to frustrate Proust's attempt to publish his work. It was at one of Mme Lemaire's musical evenings that Proust first met Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) in May 1894, a friendship that quickly grew into something much greater, perhaps the greatest in his life, and in the August of that year they spent a month together as guests of Mme Lemaire at the Château de Réveillon. Unlike Les Frémonts, Réveillon, situated about 80 km east of Paris, was a much older, classical, turreted and moated residence dating from the Louis XIII period, but rebuilt in the 18th century and later restored by Jules Robert de Cotte according to Tadié (49). Its long marble galleries, fine rococo 137

furnishings, painted wooden panelling and splendid flower arrangments made by Suzette, alternating with the mother's flower paintings enabled Proust to imbibe a different sort of elegance. The grounds, too, reflected a greater antiquity of planting consisting of large formal flower gardens surrounded by dense woodland (50). The property was a partial model for la Raspeliere, but in Jean Santeuil (51) it appeared under its own name, where Jean loved to wander in the garden, hatless, walking slowly down the gravel paths bordered with flowers. In that rather awkward Introduction to Jean Santeuil (52), Proust seeks to distance himself from any autobiographical link with Jean, by the creation of an unnamed deceased author known only as 'C'. Tongue in cheek, Proust asked if the author actually appeared in what was written, if he had actually known the Duc de Revelllon and if we visited the Marne could we still see the mill with its wheel covered with vines? For her part, the Duchesse de Reveillon had the curious habit of drawing close to a person being greeted (53) but then, like the pendulum of a clock, retreat no less expansively as if to suggest that one could look at her flowers, but remember that they belonged to her. Tadie (54) quotes a short poem which Proust wrote for Mme Lemaire, the painter of more flowers than God ever created in an eternal spring, sharing the fragile beauty of the ephemeral lilies, carnations and climbing roses, so many flowers, but he mused who would pay tribute and paint this beautiful gardener? Perhaps Proust had seen Manet's two studies of Suzette done in 1881 and then thought of the mother.

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Country walks Jean Santeuil's friendship with Henri, son of the Duc de Revelllon (55), led to visits to the château where, having avoided a late summer shower, they shelter under an apple-tree and watch the rain fall on fields of clover. The apple-trees already have deep red fruit and along the hedgerows the hawthorns have scarlet berries, while poppies tremble in the breeze among fields of ripening corn. Beside the road are the bells of dyer's weed, meadow-sweet and pyramids of reaped hay waiting to be carted. As the rain eases, they depart and see a rainbow against the dark sky, curving over a yellow hay-rick. With their road soon cutting through woodland, the scent of leaves and earth replace the smell of grass, buttercups and cornflowers. The name dyer's weed can refer to any plant yielding dye, but dyer's greenweed is Isatis tinctoria which is also known as woad: when the leaves are dried, powdered and allowed to ferment it produces a blue dye which was much used in Europe before the introduction of indigo. Dyer's weld is the common name for Reseda luteola, which gives a reddish-yellow dye, see Fig. 40. Both of these species are native wildflowers in Europe. The tiny bells in Proust's roadside setting can only relate to a species of Reseda which has fruits, but not flowers, fitting this description. Mignonette, the fragrant herbaceous plant, is Reseda odorata. There are more than 400 species of buttercup many, but not all, being found wild in northern temperate regions of the world. All belong to the genus Ranunculus. They are herbs often with yellow, or sometimes cream, or white flowers tending to appear in spring. Many of the species prefer moist habitats and species such as R. acris, see Fig. 38, and R. bulbosus can individually, 139

or in combination, carpet water-meadows with their yellow flowers as Proust was well aware and wrote about. In a woodland margin setting beyond Revelllon, Jean and Henri might have encountered another buttercup, R. repens. It was the custom at Reveilion, before dinner, to take a walk across the fields or, sometimes, further into more wild country about a mile west of the château (56). On these walks amongst the trees he became better acquainted with the Duchesse, talking of intimate matters, things he never supposed she could say. This had been a contrast to the reprimand that his parents had earlier given him for seeing too much of Henri (57). Jean had at that time been devastated, at one moment like a forest bathed in tranquil morning sun, the next plunged into the darkness of a seemingly everlasting eclipse. The Duchesse, unbuttoning her jacket in the sun, once said to Jean (58) that she thought that Henri should show him the way to a little pine-wood, which he had not yet seen and that close by was a farmhouse among the vines where they could have tea. Pinta is a genus of more than a hundred species found in northern temperate and northern tropical-montane regions of the world. These evergreen shrubs and trees are valuable for the timber and resins they yield, with several species being used in plantation forestry, such as P. radiata, a Californian species. The oldest known living individual plants belong to this genus; P. longaeva, described only in 1970, being dated as 5000 years old and P. aristata, the bristlecone pine, being only 2000 years old. Sometimes Henri and Jean would set out (59) on the road when the only sound was that of Virginia Creeper drying its scarlet leaves, the drops of water striking the flagstones. A little abandoned church near Revelllon (60) shared the churchyard 140

with a tangle of Virginia Creeper, and together with ivy, the plants had sought to embellish the church, Nature outdoing man in its ornament, green in summer, red and green in autumn, and in winter completely red. Both the genera Ampelopsis and Parthenocissus are members of the vine family, Vitaceae, and both contain attractive climbing species. Ampelopsis comprises twenty five species and Parthenocissus ten species, both occurring wild in Asia and North America. While the fruits of the former can be colourful and attractive, provided a sufficiently long growing season occurs, which is not always the case in parts of western Europe, the foliage is not so dramatically colourful as that of species of Parthenocissus. The correct name for Virginia creeper is P. quinquefolia, which was introduced to Europe in 1629, having brilliant orange and scarlet leaves in autumn and winter. The Boston ivy is P. tricuspidata and despite its common name is a native of eastern Asia. It was introduced to Europe in 1862 on account of its lovely crimson and scarlet autumn foliage colour, having the synonymous name of Ampelopsis veitchii, with error compounded when in older literature it was called Virginia creeper! Proust wrote 'Les marronniers' at Reveillon in October 1895 (61) lingering under the enormous horse-chestnut trees when autumn had yellowed their leaves. He wrote that he had spent hours looking overhead at the cascades of pale gold that these trees poured over him. Jean Santeuil knew similar trees (62). Henri climbed to the topmost branches of a tree to shake them hard and then Jean collected the fallen fruits from among the rotting leaves. (Henri must have been fearless. We found it easier to throw small logs up into the fruit-laden branches of the trees at aunt Elsie's farm, 141

Highway Side, at North Kilworth, provided one remembered to avoid both the falling log and shower of yellowing, globular, spiked fruits. Then to prise open the rind to find the best wellshaped, shiny, polished mahogany-smooth seed which, after careful skewering, was placed somewhere to dry slowly so that it did not crack, or become misshapen. Only then, threaded onto the end of a suitable length of bootlace and with a worthy opponent, could the game of conkers, conquerers, begin, about which Proust remains silent.) With the onset of winter at Reveillon (63) days became gloomy and the only sounds came from the breeze in the leaves of the chestnut trees, the foliage of which hardly seemed to move. Jean found that staying with his friend Henri in winter was not in the least as boring as some people might have imagined (64). The grass stretching away mile after mile in winter as in summer, was as green as the sea, but no white sail of a primula could be seen at that time of year. He thought it lovely to look at the trees stripped of foliage, showing the green and gold incrustations on their bark. The primrose is Primula vulgaris, a native European wildflower of woodland and hedgerow, see Fig. 34. In contrast the cowslip, P. veris, is found in more open meadow habitats. The sulphur-yellow petals of the primrose are larger than those of the cowslip and each flower-stalk emerges from the centre of the rosette of leaves. In the cowslip the petals are paler and all the flowers are borne on a communal stalk, or scape. Where the two species grow in proximity to each other, as they sometimes do in nature, natural hybrids can occur which look like cowslips with primrose-sized flowers; this is where the hybrid `polyanthus' of gardens arose. Proust's nautical metaphor loses nothing by both of the common lowland native primulas of 142

France having only yellow flowers; the white-flowered subspecies heterochromna of P. vulgaris grows wild only in parts of northern Iran. The chance encounter with a M. Rustinlor (65), who is cycling past the Réveillon woods where Jean is walking, reinforces the importance of experiencing life first-hand. M. Rustinlor thought that there was greater poetry in a brisk walk through the Forest of Vincennes, or in the bed of a young lady living behind La Trinité, than in all Les Contemplations or Les Feuilies d 'A utomne.

The interior at Réveillon

Staying with Henri at Réveillon in early winter (66) and waiting for breakfast, Jean sometimes gazed out at the yellow poplars and the Marne in the cold sunlight. In contrast, the summer breakfast-table was a riot of flowers freshly gathered from the gardens (67), maidenhair fern, zinnias, snapdragons, African marigolds, carnations as red as roses and violets as blue as hyacinths all thrown into relief by the white-panelled walls. There are about 200 species in the maidenhair fern genus Adiantum, which has a cosmopolitan distribution around the world, see Fig. 1. The species are particularly conspicuous in tropical America. The zinnias had been planted beneath the rose bushes in the garden (68) (which is never a good idea given the prickles which some roses bear) and augmented the summer display of pelargoniums, marigolds and violets there. The African marigold, Tagetes erecta, is despite its common name one of the fifty American species in this genus of daisy. This group of garden marigolds tend to have clear yellow, orange, or apricot flowers of larger size than the often brownish-yellow 143

flowers of French marigold, T. patula, and borne on taller, more robust plants. As a short digression, writing to Edouard Rod in the summer of 1902 (69) about that author's novel L'eau courante, published on 28 January 1902, Proust thanked and complimented him on several memorable passages, one about the scent of cowslips, another about the heavy violet heads of thistles and one about little blood-red African marigolds. The marigold mentioned here is not a Tagetes, but the African species Emilia coccinea, Cupid's paintbrush, a delightful daisy looking rather like a scarlet-flowered groundsel and sometimes grown as a summer annual in gardens. The musk thistle, Carduus nutans, has solitary flower heads which nod in just the manner described by Proust. During a party with the Lustauds at Revelllon (70), the Duchesse is the partner of Jean Santeuil and makes a general request for him to be given a glass of orangeade. Monsieur de Buest, Monsieur de Thianges, and others rush through the crowd to obey her, but Monsieur Marmet reaches the drinks table first, unaware that the Duc de Lithuanie had already offered his glass to Jean. In any case Jean refuses it on account of his asthma. The alacrity with which M. Marmet sought to do the bidding of the Duchesse, may explain why Jean found himself so disliked by Mme Marmet (71) her behaviour to him being spiky like a patch of gorse in vigorous growth. With men in white dinner jackets and women in low-cut gowns, the act of dining out is likened to a visit to a museum, art gallery, or library (72), one of the artworks being venison over which red-currant jelly has been served. At dinner Jean would sometimes meet M. Jacques Bonami (73), an old friend of the Duc having the nick-name `Talondebois', having lost his left 144

foot in a shooting accident. The Duc explained that the wooden appendage of the handsome Bonarni had only increased his allure to women. On one occasion after a family dinner (74), Henri lingers to have a smoke in the drawing-room, instead of the cold garden, in the hope of hearing from his parents some favourable comment about his friend Jean. At another time the Due and Duchesse discuss their acquaintance, Perrotin, in the presence of Jean (75). The Duchesse thought that he looked subdued and spent in a stylish way, like the stub of an expensive cigar; he had cancer. The Marquis de Réveillon lived in a large modern house, so Jean learned, in which a succession of rooms led one into the next, each expressing their function in the most artistic way (76). There was a music-room like a huge cigar-box with sycamore panelling on which Egyptian hieroglyphs had been drawn. Acer pseudoplatanus is the sycamore, a large deciduous tree which is native in Europe and western Asia, but an introduction into the British Isles where it has become naturalised. The timber is pale and uniformly figured. Like many species in the genus, the winged fruits spiral down, as children know, like little helicopters when released from the tree in autumn and are thus dispersed. There are fifty species in the tobacco genus Nicotiana, all in the Americas, with another twenty one species found in Australia and Polynesia. They grow in warm temperate and subtropical parts of the world. Tobacco is N. tabacum which appears to have arisen as a hybrid between the two South American species N. sylvestris and probably N. otophora (77). The South American species N. rustica is also used for smoking, but its 145

other use is as a source of nicotine for insecticide. Smoked, chewed, or taken as snuff, tobacco leaf contains about 1% of the highly toxic and addictive alkaloid, nicotine. The tangerine is Citrus reticulata and this fruit features in a Christmas letter from Proust written soon after 25 December 1898 to Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of Reynaldo Hahn (78). Thanking her for her Christmas card he wrote that although Christmas had lost something as a religious anniversary, the memories generated by the smell of tangerines, the scent of tea and mimosa still excite. As Ralph Manheim pointed out a very similar passage occurs in Jean Santeuil (79), concerning Jean's thoughts on the personality of the fictional poet Vicomtesse Gaspard de Revelllon. Her poems with a prevailing sadness, the melancholy thoughts of absent friends conjured by the scent of tangerines at Christmas time with the snow outside, contrasted with her gaiety. The Vicomtesse published her verse in La revue de deux mondes, just as in real life Mme Anna de Noailles did and with whom Proust had a long and warm friendship. One evening in the salon, the Due and Duchesse sit by the fireside with Mlle des Coulombes (80) with the embers settling as silently as a leaf, or a chestnut dropping to the forest floor in autumn. The garden at RevellIon

At Revelllon in late winter (81), the frosty flower-beds contained a few tulips rattling their orange globes, but no other flowers. Neither the Park, nor woods at that time of the year gave any hint of the changes of spring, the violets, daffodils, the irises and Bengal roses that would surely come. In front of the 146

château (82) the Park had two statues which seemed neglected, perhaps longing for a return of the warmth of summer. The daffodil is Narcissus pseudonarcissus which conies from western Europe, but the other sixty species in the genus extend from southern Europe into western Asia. The presence of N. tazetta in Japan and China is probably as a consequence of naturalisation after an early introduction there from Europe in the 13th century. Daffodils are members of the amaryllis family, Amaryllidaceae. The gardens in summer held many delights for Jean (83), mad nasturtiums, rose-trees and fuchsias with downcast eyes. There are about a hundred species of Fuchsia occurring wild in Central and South America, New Zealand and in Tahiti; they belong to the willow-herb family, Onagraceae. Only the South American species F. magellanica is sufficiently hardy to have become naturalised in some parts of western Europe, having been introduced there in 1823. Larger flowered and doubleflowered garden fuchsias, which are often less hardy, are complex hybrids derived from parent species such as F. magellanica, F. fulgens, F. coccinea and F. arborescens. Between about 1850 and 1914 the Lemoine Nurseries in Nancy released about 400 named cultivated varieties of fuchsia many of which are still grown, possibly some being seen by Proust at Reveillon. After lunch in summer, Jean would sometimes sit in a rockingchair, or lie on the lawn in the gardens (84) saturated in the same sunlight that glittered at the tip of a grass blade.

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The roses at Réveillon

Roses were something of a speciality at Réveillon and Proust probably learned a great deal about them from Mme Lemaire, who loved to paint them, often very rapidly, particularly the old fashioned varieties having a preponderance of rich purplish-red coloured flowers. In an often quoted reference Alexandre Dumas (fils) (1824-1895) is reputed to have said of her that no one apart from God has painted more roses, but Céleste Albaret (85) insisted that Proust told her the witticism was made by Montesquiou. She also painted landscapes and portraits as Tadié (86) described. The genus Rosa comprises 250 species which occur in temperate and tropical montane habitats chiefly in the northern hemisphere. Normally being easy to grow from seed, or cuttings, these deciduous or evergreen shrubs and climbers may have attractive foliage, colourful flowers which may be fragrant and, in autumn, some species have colourful and decorative fruits. It is little wonder that some species and their hybrids have been cultivated for many centuries. The native European species include the variable dog rose, R. canina; sweet briar or eglantine, R. eglanteria; burnet rose, R. pimpinellifolia; R. glauca with its grey-purple foliage and R. pendulina with its flask-shaped red fruits. Proust writes about the dog rose and the eglantine, but also names several other old fashioned roses such as the moss rose, R. centfolia cv. Muscosa; the damask rose, R. damascena; the Provence rose, R. centifolia•, the white rose of York, R x alba; the sulphur rose, R. heinisphaerica; the Pennsylvania rose, R. caroling cv. Plena; the yellow climbing Tea-rose, R. cv. Maréchal Niel and the Hybrid Perpetual rose, R. cv. Baroness Rothschild. The last of these roses, discovered by Pernet Père 148

in 1868, is referred to by the Baron de Charlus (87) who makes the common but, for someone as well informed as him, surprising error of calling the rose ‘Baronne de Rothschild' (There can be only one correct fancy name for any cultivated variety of garden plant). Another misnomer for this rose is R. cv. Mme La Baronne de Rothschild. Neither of these incorrect rose names should be confused with R. cv. Baronne Edmond de Rothschild which is a legitimate name for a modern Hybrid Tea rose released in 1968 by the French rose breeder A.& F. Meilland! The Bengal rose at Reveillon growing in a border before which Proust experienced an epiphany while walking with Reynaldo Hahn (88), was a general name for either an introduced R. chinensis cultivar from China, or an early Hybrid China rose variously called R. cv. Bengale Descemet, or R. cv. Zulme, according to one authority on the group (89). They reminded Proust of the floral tributes on the altar at Saint-Jacques in Illiers (90), their scarlet, fragrant blooms wrapped in a scroll of white paper. The Bengal rose represents a milestone in the development of the garden rose and with its curious history (91), it is possible to speculate that Proust may have deliberately chosen this rose for historical and anecdotal reasons. The rose collection developed at la Malmaison at the instigation of the Empress Josephine resulted in the creation of many new garden hybrids, some intentional, but many spontaneous, with seedlings being selected from massed germination trials by rose growers of the day. The summer flowering roses of the 18th century were nearly all based on the French rose, R. gallica, which is a nonrecurrent flowerer; only one flush of flowers occurs each year. When the recurrent flowering China roses were first introduced 149

to Europe in the 1780's it was only a matter of time before they were crossed, largely by French growers, with the French rose in the search for recurrence in that then immensely popular group of roses. Amongst the first of these Hybrid China roses was raised by the nurseryman M. Descemet at Saint Denis; his R. cv. Bengale Descemet is reputed to be the only one of 10,000 seedlings that was rescued by J.P.Vibert when relocating the rose nursery to Chenevieres-sur-Marne as British troops advanced on Paris in 1815. The Hybrid China roses were from 1837 subsequently parents of the Hybrid Perpetual roses which, in turn in 1867, led to the first of the Hybrid Tea roses, R. cv. La France, the group that has dominated the modern garden rose for more than a century. In Proust's story 'The death of Baldassare Silvande' (92), written in October 1894, there is casual mention of an old gardener called Rocco, who works ceaselessly tending his prize roses and perhaps suggesting the stay with Mme Lemaire that summer. Such a man and his employer could have provided Proust with much information on roses. Proust celebrated Mme Lemaire's knowledge and the Revelllon roses in Jean Santeuil (93), a collection of examples of the rose breeders art, white, scarlet, and pink double, or bowl-shaped flowers, or single ones with crimson petals, but like the eglantine. Perhaps the only rose remotely identifiable from this passage written in the mid-1890's is the crimson rose with petals like the eglantine. In 1890 Lord Penzance used R eglanteria as a basis on which to create fifteen hybrids through crossing. These are now known as the Penzance Hybrids and some are still grown in rose collections. Of the group, R. cv. Anne of Geierstein has single flowers with dark crimson petals, while R. cv. Meg Merrilies has nearly single flowers with rosy-crimson 150

petals. The cultivars were released in 1894 and it is just possible that Proust saw one or more of these 'new inventions' in a rose collection, even that of Mme Lemaire! Between 1983 and 1987 my wife and I raised five new rose 'inventions' commemorating Proust. They were illustrated and described in The Australian Garden Journal for February/March 1989 and distributed to rose enthusiasts and placed in the rose collection at Mount Lofty Botanic Garden in South Australia. Two cultivars have the moss rose R. cv William Lobb (Laffay, 1855) as female parent: R. cv. Princesse de Parme (mossy) and R. cv. Duchesse de La Tremoille (mossless): one has the old understock R. cv. de la Grifferae (Vibert, 1845) as female parent, R. cv. Duchesse de Guermantes (mossy): two have the moss rose R. cv. Henri Martin (Laffay, 1863) as female parent, R. cv. Madame de Villeparisis (mossless) and R. cv. Marie Nordlinger (mossless and petite). William Robinson was enthusiastic about the newly introduced Tea Roses of his day and others being bred from them chiefly in France. They first appeared in Europe in 1810 as introductions from China where they had long been cultivated, although some were not reliably frost hardy in western Europe. Proust made general references to rose breeders, but just some of the growers working on Tea Roses, for example, included A. Bernaix, P.C.M. Cochet, M. Descemet, R. Desprez, C. Ducher, J.B. Guillot, M. Hardy, Francois Lacharme, M. Laffay, Gilbert Nabonnand, Claude Pernet, Joseph Pernet-Ducher and J.P.Vibert. Many of the beautiful cultivars raised have now become rare, or extinct, or their identity has now become confused. Of the Tea Roses named after people that Proust would have known there is R. cv. Madame Wagram, Comtesse de Turenne released by Bernaix in 1894, not to be confused 151

with the Hybrid Perpetual R. cv. Comtesse de Turenne released by Eugene Verdier in 1867. There is also R. cv. Princesse de Sagan released by M. Dubreuil in 1887, but contemporary colour illustration of this low-growing dark red rose in The Garden for November 1897 is nothing like the taller crimson to cherry-red flowered rose now grown and which could in fact be R. cv Professeur Ganiviat released by M.Perrier in 1890. Another Tea Rose that appears to be extinct, but having a remote connection with Proust is the deep yellow flowered R. cv. Vicomtesse Decazes released in 1846 by Henri Pradel, who later released the still extant pale yellow R. cv. Marechal Niel in 1864. Proust transformed his real contemplation of Bengal roses while on a walk with Hahn, into a fictional one of white roses while with Henri in Jean Santeuil (93); the initials of the two companions are the same, only reversed. With Henri deliberately retiring for a little while, the white rose-bush with so many blooms reminded Jean of how they, together with other flowers from the garden, had filled vases at his uncle's, filling the room with the same soft fragrance produced by the rosebush. Joining the Duchesse to feed the peacocks in the great court behind the Chateau (94), Jean discovers ancient flagstones and a small white-washed bailiff's house clad in Virginia Creeper and a delicate yellow rose with blooms in airy swags. Although Proust gives no further clue, in my mind's eye only one familiar garden rose could fit this scene and description; the thomless R. banksiae cv. Lutea. This was introduced to Europe from China in about 1824 by way of the Calcutta Botanic Garden and it is a rose that might be a little tender if grown in a place like Reveillon, which explains why it was planted on the wall of the 152

bailiff's cottage in the protection of the great courtyard. This is what one would expect of the Duchesse, and Mme Lemaire, as knowing rosarians. The colour, texture, form, and different fragrances of rose flowers are a constant source of reference used by Proust to describe the attributes of his fictional young girls, such as members of the little band. His mature women tend to receive floral representation of a different character and his men something different again. In the real world he affectionately called Marie Nordlinger (1876-1961) (95) the fresh Rose of Yet Manchester in a letter dated 18(?) October 1903. paradoxically, the name of Albertine in A la recherche... derives from the Christian-name of his one-time Secretary, Albert Nahmias (1886-1979) and not the beautiful coppery-pink, floriferous, but very prickly climber bred by Barbier et Cie of Orleans in 1921, R. cv. Albertine, although it would have been a fitting tribute to Proust from the town he commemorated in his novel. The rose authority, Trevor Griffiths (96), related how a well-spoken English lady visitor to his nursery once commented on seeing an enormous cv. Albertine rose in full flower, that at its peak it is quite outstanding, but without flower becomes quite useless, in fact bloody useless. This is on account of its thorns. In a letter that Proust wrote to Mme Straus on 21 July 1906 (97) he inadvertantly refers to the dedicatee of another rose released by Nabonnand in 1899- R. cv. General Gallieni, the coppery maroon-red flowered Tea Rose- the one-time Governor General of Madagascar and career soldier, Joseph Simon Gallieni (18491916).

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Reynaldo Hahn

Unlike Robert de Montesquiou who features in a number of different guises in Proust's writing, Reynaldo Hahn is less obvious despite being, perhaps as a consequence of being, one of Proust's most intimate and lasting friends (98). The relatively small amount of time spent with Hahn in Dieppe, in Brittany and at Reveillon seems to have been amongst some of the happiest he knew and it directly inspired writing which appeared in Les Plaisirs..., Jean Santeuil and A la recherche... There was a cooling of their relationship in 1896 and by 1899, perhaps in part because of the loss of Hahn, the work on Jean Santeuil was drying up and being replaced by the first translation into French of a work by John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens, with help given by Hahn's English cousin, Marie Nordlinger. Yet, by then, the gestation of A la recherche... had already begun. During early August 1895 Proust and Hahn stayed at Mme Lemaire's villa in Dieppe. A trip to Petit-Abbeville inspired Proust to write about the beech trees on the road to Rouen (99). He wrote that there is great deal to learn from trees, so ancient and yet so young, so different from the life of man, of which it seems to be a mysterious opposite. Proust returned to beech trees at la Raspeliere (100) where there was an avenue of century-old beeches so typical of those ornamental trees used in the eighteenth century. These trees belonged to the same species that later in life he came to know in the vistas beyond the Bassin de Neptune seen from his window in the Hotel des Reservoirs at Versailles where, in 1906, he spent nearly five miserable months when the lease on 45 rue de Courcelles had expired. He would have known how the reddish-brown autumn leaves often hang on the tree late into 154

winter and, in the European beech, Fagus sylvatica, how the stately, pale grey and smooth trunks can soar to 35m tall, see Fig. 18. Beech trees have the odd habit of fruiting heavily in certain 'mast' years, then fruiting with much lighter intervening ones. In a beech woodland, or Norman bottom, very few other plants grow on the ground due to the heavy shade and competition provided by beech trees. There are ten deciduous species of Fagus all of which are northern temperate; the beeches from the Southern Hemisphere are species in the genus Nothofagus, some of which are evergreen and a number making fine ornamental trees. While any perennial woody plant having a trunk is called a tree, there are many perennials lacking wood, in the sense of that material which is laid down in the stern as the result of secondary thickening, that are still called trees. The traveller's tree, Ravenala madagascariensis; the banana tree, Musa species; tree fern, Dicksonia antarctica; tree onion, Allium cepa; and cabbage tree, Cordyline australis are just a few examples. This notwithstanding, the usefulness of the notion of the tree goes back in history to the earliest attempts at plant classification by Theophrastus, for example, in the Hellenic tradition of scholarship. Graves (101) suggested that even earlier in history, a form of Goidelic was the common language of Bronze Age Britain (1500-600BC) and that a Goidelic alphabet, called ogham and based on tree names, was used at least several centuries before the introduction of the Latin alphabet to western Europe.

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Beg-Meil Apple blossom Apple trees collected into orchards were another enchantment for Proust on his travels with Hahn. From the Norman coast at Dieppe they went by rail on 4 September 1895 to the south coast of Brittany, to Quiberon, before taking a boat to the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer where they visited Sarah Bernhardt (102). Hahn was a friend and later in life wrote a biography of her. It was hot, the island did not seem to live up to its name and by 6 September they had taken the ferry back to the mainland and Concarneau. From there they went to Beg-Meil where they found a traditional farm guesthouse with box-beds and no water-closet, as Proust informed Montesquiou's Secretary, Gabriel de Yturri (103). Proust jested that the irritating nettles had a way of trying to make themselves indispensible. `Indispensables' was a French euphemism for lavatory-paper. Nowhere else in his work does Proust use nettle, Urtica dioica, so often found growing in highly nitrogenous soil. It is the largest of the European nettles and is a perennial with a robust rhizomatous root system, see Fig. 51. The genus comprises fifty species, the leaves usually being covered with stinging hairs, which is what Proust's pun was about. However, not all members of the nettle family, Urticaceae, are herbs, or sting. Pilea is a genus of tropical herbs, some very decorative, Boehmeria a group of herbs and shrubs, some with decorative foliage and neither genera have species with leaves which sting. Cecropia is a genus of 100 species of tropical tree, some species of which have evolved a symbiotic relationship with certain ants which protect the trees from attack by other species of leafcutting ant! Proust continued by telling Yturri that Beg-Meil was wonderful and where Norman apples ripening, mingled the smell of cider 156

with that of seaweed. The same setting appears in Jean Santeuil (104), the orchards of apple-trees with their fruit extending to the edge of the sea. The green, brown and red marine algae, or seaweeds, that grow in the tidal and other parts of the world's oceans are some of the least known and understood plants; they are still being actively studied and catalogued. Many of the species often have very complicated reproductive structures and systems, but Proust did not use this rich, if arcane and complex aspect of their botany. Eight years later Proust wrote to his old friend Georges de Lauris (105) that, Begmeil has apple orchards dipping into Concarneau Bay and was the most delicious thing he knew. He also thought that Morbihan Bay must be lovely and Cape Raz, historically and geographically Finistere, the last point of land where the giant granite cliff dominates Trepasses Bay. Opposite was the island of Sein. Curiously, the only appearance of apple-trees in Les Plaisirs...(106) is in two rather mannered passages where, through the apple branches, a mauve sea was visible while pink and blue clouds scattered the horizon in the setting sun. It may be that the literary potential of apple trees in bloom or fruit had not yet been explored by Proust. The Norman apple orchards he did encounter with Hahn in that late summer of 1895 perhaps reminded Proust of Illiers in spring, for in Jean Santeuil (107) he wrote about the wonders of the fifty yards of espaliered apple trees in the Cotte orchard, the white flowers with, here and there, pink buttons turning to blush. The profusion of leaves supporting the flowers with their delicate pistil structures provided, for Proust, a design of almost spiritual quality, like a basilica. The local cider was a favourite 157

drink (108), its clinging bubbles transforming a country tumbler into Venetian glass. In later life Proust turned to beer. Proust was never to revisit Brittany which made the remarks of the narrator prescient (109). He reflected that in Paris, during May, he often took into his room a branch of apple-blossom from the florist to share the company of its flowers and leaves, thinking of their sisters on the Balbec road where he resolved one day to return. William Robinson also wrote of the pleasure of taking a branch of blossom indoors. When Albertine becomes bored with Balbec (110), the frustrated narrator goes for a walk and there finds consolation. Where last August he had seen, with his grandmother, only green leaves, now the apple-trees as far as the eye could see were in full bloom, their feet muddy, yet in ballroom-dresses, but then a shower of rain casts its grey veil across the landscape, one reminiscent of a Japanese print. The trees of Balbec gave the narrator, and also Proust, the terse message (111) that they, the pear trees, the apple trees, the tamarisks would outlive him and that he needed to set himself to work before he ran out of time. Apple orchards in blossom, then, secured a very special place in Proust's heart as he told Robert de Billy in a letter written soon after 24 May 1912 (112). He confided to his friend a spectacle he once beheld in the country one evening under a grey sky, of apple-trees in full blossom, better dressed than Mme Standish. (Mrs Henry Standish (1848-1933) was a friend of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and was elegant with an artful simplicity according to her contemporaries. The no less charming Chinese shrub with fragrant spring flowers, Lonicera standishli, was not named for Mrs Standish, having been introduced to Europe by Robert Fortune three years before she 158

was born. The species commemorates the nurseymen Standish and Noble of Bagshot for whom Fortune made plant collections in China.) The trip described by Proust was probably somewhere close to Rueil where, looking at fruit-trees in blossom with his driver, was suspected of being Bonnot and Gamier by local horticulturists as he explained to Montesquiou in a separate letter (113). Bonnot and Gamier were car thieves of the time who murdered their victims. There are twenty five species belonging to the apple genus, Malus, which is a member of the rose family, Rosaceae. The edible apple is M domestica which is considered to be a hybrid arisen in cultivation somewhere in western Asia in the distant past. Some of the contributing parental genes come from the Siberian crab, M baccata, from eastern Asia; M prunifolia from north-eastern Asia and the common crab-apple from Europe, M. sylvestris, see Fig. 26. There are more than 2000 cultivars of apple listed, but a number of these may no longer be in cultivation and may even have become extinct; new cultivars are still being raised. Robinson (114) listed the apple cultivars grown in and around Paris in 1878 and, as today, they were broadly divided into dessert, cooking and cider varieties. Unlike pears, Proust made no literary use of apple cultivar names which are no less imaginative. There are a number of apple cultivars called 'pippin', such as the old dessert cv.Wyken Pippen which happened to be the name of a public house in the Coventry district in which I grew up. Playfully flirting by letter with Mme Gaston de Caillavet whom he had known in his childhood (115), Proust wrote on 14 April 1908 that he thought she never looked better than with bare neck and her hair taken up, reminding him of golden apples and that he would willingly take her out at any time! In the same 159

year he wrote gossiping to Hahn about the scandalous behaviour of a drunken Andre de Fouquieres, with whom Proust was friendly at the time, having provided Proust with an introduction to a Mlle de Goyon at the annual ball given by the Princesse Lucian Murat (116). He wrote on 22 June that the drunken Fouquieres was totally obnoxious, asking aloud as he effected the introduction whether Proust would like to sample her little cherry pippins. Proust was embarrassed not only for himself, but for Mlle de Goyon and her fiance. I know of no apple called Cherry Pippin! Wildflowers in Brittany

The signal station in Jean SanteuiI stands at the tip of the peninsula, the Bay of Concarneau to the left, the open sea to the right (117). This is where the trees ceased and Jean reached the promontory by a path through the bracken, furze, heather and dead thistles. It circled the whole curve of the Bay above the cliff edge. Bramble is a name describing a number of different blackberry species, the arching prickly stems of which can form a dense woody thicket in time, at once an invasive weed of pasture, but also a valuable sanctuary for wildlife. The common blackberry, Rubus fr•uticosus, in the broad sense, is one of about 250 species in the genus, but this particular species is extraordinary in being so variable, see Fig. 43. Study has shown that the variation occurs as a result of the plant being able to set seed without normal fertilisation having occurred, with the resulting creation of many microspecies `within' the species. More than 3000 microspecies have been identified in R. fruticosus. Many other different plants also share this facility, which makes the work of some plant taxonomists frustrating as the differences between 160

such microspecies are so slight as to become academic. Graves (118) pointed out that the bramble was probably the Druidic substitute for the vine (mum), which is the tenth consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet and that all Celtic culture traditionally had a taboo on eating blackberry, including in Brittany, '...a cause des fees.' The fern Pteridium aquilinum is the bracken, one of six species in the genus, see Fig. 36. In western Europe bracken creates characteristically pure stands across large areas of upland and, in some woodland habitats, an incomplete ferny understorey. When the fronds die from the first winter frosts, they turn a rich brown which colours the landscape just as Proust described. Furze is also called gorse and whin, all being names given to Ulex europaeus. The more diminutive species U. minor and U gallii may also be known by these names. The species inhabit heathy areas, often occupying large tracts and, being spiny shrubs, can form impenetrable scrub favoured by wildlife, but also creating problems for farmers. The yellow flowers attract the first bees of the season and the fragrance of the massed blossom carries far on the wind. The spring equinox furze-fires were traditionally lit to burn away old growth and encourage new, which stock will graze together with pasture grasses encouraged by the firing. Belonging to the pea family, there are twenty species in the genus occurring in Europe and parts of North Africa. Graves wrote (119) that furze (onn) is the second vowel in the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet and that the plant had a reputation for being effective against witches in Welsh folklore. In Jean Santeuil (120), when M. and Mme Sauvalgue are unable to accept a dinner invitation from Mme Santeuil, it is because they had already arranged to travel to their coastal property at Beg-Meil where they often spend time each week. 161

So enchanting was their discovery on the coast that they often travelled the four hundred miles to spend two days at Begmeil where at Bec-dog as well as a boat, he kept a carriage and horse on which he could ride over moors covered with furze and heather. Proust wrote to Hahn on 1 August 1907 (121) and referred to Mme Marie de Reszke, who by that time was Comtesse de Mailly-Nesle, but who had inspired in Proust the study `Cydalise' which was first published in Le Banquet in April 1892 and later incorporated into Les Plaisrrs...in the study `Fragments from Italian Comedy'. Proust wrote to Hahn that his portrait of her in a Broceliande and furze flower setting, rather than Paris society, suited him even if others including Madame de Reske disagreed. In Kolb's note 4 to this letter, he points out correctly that Ulex minor is a feature of Breton heathland. The name thistle is a general term for any daisy-like herb with spiny leaves and flowers borne in heads. Some of the commoner sorts are carline thistle, Carlina vulgaris; spear thistle, Cirsium vulgare; milk thistle, Silybum marianum; sow thistles, Sonchus species; musk thistle, Carduus nutans and Scot's thistle, Onopordon acanthium. The genus Cirsium (150 species) and Carduus (100 species) are closely related, both being northern temperate in distribution and both containing many important weeds of agriculture. Unusually for Proust, he was unspecific about the thistles he referred to, but from the context it is sometimes possible to speculate on an identity. Thus, the autumn coastline near the signal station in Jean Santeuil may have had spear thistle, which can grow to 1.5m tall and by that time of year only the gaunt, tattered, woody, grey candelabrum would remain to persist often long into 162

winter. The same species, or perhaps a sow thistle, might have been found growing with the dandelions and campanulas in the crevices of stone steps later in the novel (122). There are some 300 species of the bellflower genus, Campanula, and they occur chiefly in northern temperate habitats with many species having blue flowers. There are four species commonly found in France and many more in gardens introduced from elsewhere. Broom, Cytisus scoparius, belongs to the legume family like furze, but the medium sized shrub has green, flexible shoots with small leaves, no spines and masses of butter-yellow flowers in May. The genus comprises thirty species which occur wild in sunny habitats in Europe, the Mediterranean region and Atlantic Islands. Many different flower colours have been selected in cultivation including cream, crimson and yellow and mahogany-brown and crimson. The only use that Proust made of this plant is in connection with times past in the Middle Ages (123); a Gothic castle near Ploërmel with its paths winding between broom and roses over the graves of abbotts from the eighth century, when Charlemagne was unborn and Chartres was without towers. In the same essay, Proust writes of an imaginary Duchess, listed in Debrett, with a castle in Scotland dating from the thirteenth century having an abbey on the estate where her ancestors lie beneath tombs in a ruined cathedral with cattle grazing among its broken arches and flowering brambles. Arriving at Beg-Meil and booked into the Hotel des RochesNoires (124), Jean is overtaken in his room by its profound unfamiliarity. Looking out of the window he sees an adjacent grocer's shop in the twilight with jars of twisted barley-sugar, brooms, packets of dried figs and soap visible and, quite possibly, the smell of paraffin had he gone down there. Barley163

sugar is no more than lump sugar clarified by boiling and then cut into shaped pieces before being allowed to solidify. Sugars are not an essential food for humans, unlike starches, and until the early 18th century most Europeans knew only honey as a sweetening substance. Yet sugar cane, the grass Saccharum officinarum, had been imported to Europe from Asia since Roman times as a luxury item. It remained a rarity being traded by apothecaries until the end of the Middle Ages. The colonisation of the tropics changed all that with the development of sugar cane plantations using slave and indentured labour, particularly in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Philippines, India and Indonesia. The juice extracted from the cane stems is evaporated and centrifuged, resulting in a crystalline brown sugar and liquid residue called molasses which, in the Caribbean, is fermented to produce rum. About two thirds of the world's sugar comes from cane, the rest being obtained from sugar beet, Beta vulgaris, a European seaside plant. This was developed as a sugar yielding crop by Franz Achard (1753-1821) in the early l9 century in Silesia and promoted by Napoleon I as a safeguard against wartime blockade on French sugar imports. The use of sugar cane as a renewable source of fuel alcohol is the latest economic twist to the story of sugar, but with the paradox that this may be at the expense of the natural environment and more fundamentally important food crops. Sugars are the simplest kind of carbohydrate and are the primary product of photosynthesis. They may be chemically broken up, respired, by both plants and animals to provide energy, or may be used as building blocks for the construction of more complicated molecules in plants, such as starch, or cellulose on which all plant growth and hence, animal life, depends. The simplest sugars are called monosaccharides, such 164

as glucose and fructose which, when combined together, produce sucrose which is a disaccharide. Sucrose is the commonest form of sugar found in sugar cane and sugar beet. At about the time that Proust and Hahn were growing apart (125), on 28 or 29 August 1896, Proust commented on a manuscript quatrain sent to him by Hahn on 15 August, composed by Stephan Mallarme (1842-1898) for his mistress Mery Laurent of whom Manet did a number of portraits. Proust wrote that it was pedantic and even ridiculous for anyone to analyse an occasional quatrain, but to humour Hahn then does so almost, it seems, with mild annoyance. Of the last line of the poem, In which your feted foot has stopped to drink.', Proust wrote that a thirsty foot drinking like a plant conveys a clever idea of the parts of the body, those entities which seem to live a life of their own, a foot drinking like a root. In contemplating the unknown aspects of even the parts of one's own body, how much more are plants with their strange lives.

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Chapter 4 The demon of generosity Even before his entry into society, Proust had begun to exhibit the instinctive generosity of spirit for which he would become notorious and which would help to deplete the small fortune he inherited from his parents. His weakness, if it can be so described, included providing expensive gifts and disproportionate tipping for services rendered, acknowledging with sensitivity, sympathy and compassion the misfortunes of others, entertaining lavishly and, in the present context, making floral gifts of all kinds. Proust once said to his housekeeper' that flowers show friendship and love for the living, that flowers placed on graves was merely a custom he followed. His devotion to those departed was through memory. Jean Santeuil2 perhaps contains an insight into what motivated Proust to give flowers to his friends and acquaintances, apart from the fact that he considered flowers to be an important way of communicating his emotions. Jean's aunt, Mme Desroches, triggered his demon of generosity and the need to lay his heart at her feet by sending her flowers to encourage the flame of liking in her eyes. Of course he would squander every penny he had on the flowers and sold the diamond in his tie pin to do so. The wilful character of Francoise in A la recherche... is very different from the young girl with the same name in Jean Santeuil. Jean' spends hours with Augustin, his man servant, looking for objects given to him by his parents with loving care, casually received and now piled in chests and boxes. Some of these items are destined for Francoise in the hope that she would write something grateful, or even loving to him in response as a garden owner invests millions to own a new tulip. The relationship develops (4), but Jean soon finds that he no longer encounters the jealousy which always awaited him like a 167

patch of twisted vegetation. It no longer grew and so he knew that he had fallen out of love with Francoise. While still struggling with the writing of Jean Santeuil sometime in June 1897 (?), Proust wrote teasingly to Mme Straus (5) that she should not think that he loved her less because he had stopped sending her flowers. He added that Mme Lemaire could tell her that he had been taking Laure Hayman out every day, the costs of which had only allowed ten sou's worth of poppies for Mme Lemaire. In fact, he thought that no-one had been sent any flowers since last he saw her in bed, lovely enough to drive mortals mad. Much later, on 31 August 1912 (6), he wrote to her that he was sending some flowers, because he enjoyed writing her name on something as on the trunk of a tree, and visualising the messenger arriving in her drawing-room with a bouquet from him. Writing to the sister of Reynaldo Hahn, Maria (1865-1948), later to marry Raymond de Madrazo, Proust told her either in 1895 or 1896 (7) that her life was very different from his own and that she resembled a joyful flower, while he was the abyss over which she dispensed her grace. She married Madrazo in 1899. Proust sent many funeral floral tributes. When his great-uncle, Louis Weil, died on 10 May 1896, Proust made sure that Mme Laure Hayman knew of the funeral arrangements (8), because this brother of Proust's maternal grandfather had been a businessman, left a childless widower in 1870 and who, over the years, had cultivated a number of intimate friendships with actresses and singers. Proust knew of his uncle's relationship with Laure Hayman. When hers was the only floral wreath at the funeral, contrary to the wishes of the deceased, Proust and his mother ensured that it was interred with the coffin. He told 168

her soon after 12 May (9) that a cyclist with her wreath had caught up with the flowerless procession and when he found out that it was from her, he involuntarily burst into tears. When his mother was told of the wreath, she had instructed that his uncle be buried with it. Proust based some of the character of Odette de Crécy, later Charles Swami's wife, on Laure Hayman who had been a close friend of the Duc d'Orléans, and the King of Greece and was an inspiration for the painter James Joseph Jacques Tissot (1836-1902) and writer Paul Bourget (18521935). At the funeral of his mother who died on 26 September 1905, the usual prohibition of flowers at a Jewish ceremony was relaxed and one of the most beautiful wreathes was from Proust's close friend, the actress Louisa de Momand (18841963), at one time the mistress of Marquis Louis d'Albufera. Her real name was Louise Montaud and she served as a model for Proust's fictional actress Rachel (10). On 15 February 1907, when his old friend Comte Georges-Alfred de Lauris (18761963) lost his mother the Marquise de Lauris, Proust wrote with warmth (11) to de Lauris sending flowers for his mother's grave. Proust had not seen Mme Arman de Caillavet for almost a decade, but when she died on 12 January 1910 he sent a wreath of camellias, arum lilies, lilac, roses and violets which was placed on the hearse (12). The arum lily, Zantedeschia aethiopica, is not a lily at all, but an aroid belonging to the Araceae and a native of southern Africa. Its long stalked, fragrant, exotic looking, waxy, white spathes surround a central spike-like spadix which is yellow; they are long-lasting in bouquets and flower arrangements. Although frost-tender they are easily grown and given a moist location can even become 169

weedy. There are ten species in the genus, all tropical African, some species with red, others with yellow spathes, which contrast with the shiny, bold foliage. Proust did not write about the arum lily. The more traumatic accidental death of Alfred Agostinelli (1888-1914) on 30 May and the subsequent funeral in Nice on 8 June, not attended by Proust, resulted in a beautiful wreath being sent costing 400 francs. The Agostinelli family had apparently wished for artificial flowers (13). Proust arranged, through his mother's friend Mine Catusse, to have a new wreath placed on the grave on the anniversary of Agostinelli's death (14). Years before, Proust had written in Les Plaisirs... (15) that November's rains have rotted the flowers on the grave, June's burned them and the soul weeps. Florists One of the consequences of Proust's love of making floral gifts is that he knew the florists in Paris very well and they are given a place in A la recherche...(16). On a visit to Odette, now Mme Swann, the Mmes Verdurin, Canard and Bontemps speak about their florists. Mme Cottard asks Odette whether she uses Lemaitre where she had been tempted to buy a pink shrub at great expense much to the disgust of her husband, the Professor. Odette replies that she uses only Debac. Mme Cottard admits that she too also uses Debac, but sometimes forsakes him for Lachaume, at which Odette promises to tell him of Mme Cottard's unfaithfulness and adds with a laugh, that his prices are indecent. Proust always ordered his flowers from 'his' florist Lemaitre on boulevard Haussmann according to Celeste Albaret (17). This 170

may be because some years earlier, on 20 June 1901, he had arranged a dinner party at his home in honour of Comtesse Anna de Noailles (1876-1933), whose first volume of poetry Le Coeur innombrable had recently appeared. For table decorations he ordered posies of the wildflowers mentioned in her poems, flowers supplied at outrageous cost by the florists Vaillant-Rozier and Lachaume, with the result that the latter was eternalised by Odette's criticism (18) Odette de Crécy Laure Hayman (1851-1932) had been born at the Hacienda de la Mariposa, in the Andes (19), a daughter of an engineer, but apparently descended from the painter Francis Hayman (17081776) who had taught Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). She had English, Belgian and French blood in her veins. After the death of Proust's father it was found that, like great-uncle Louis Weil, he too had been on friendly terms with Laure. This was why Proust's father had always seemed to be so well informed of his son's own visits to the woman (20). Certainly by 1888 there had developed a mutual attraction between her and the seventeen year old Proust; he escorted her to social functions and visited her home. She collected Saxe porcelain and christened Proust her 'little porcelain psychologist'. She presented him with a copy of the novel Gladys Harvey based on her and written by Paul Bourget. It was bound in the silk from one of her petticoats, yet bore a dedication to him, October 1888, not to love a Gladys Harvey (21). His school friends thought his behaviour ridiculous, but he still sent her flowers, poems and, later, pieces of porcelain despite their age difference of twenty years. 171

Like the fictional Odette, Laure shared the same passion for chrysanthemums, even shared the same little house at 3 rue Lapérouse not so very far from the rue Hamelin address at which Proust later died. In a letter to Laure written on 2 November 1892 (22) Proust told her that he was sending her fifteen chrysanthemums with long stems, flowers as proud and sad as she sometimes seemed. Laure, then, is very much Odette in A la recherche... (23). Night after night, she returned home in Swann's carriage. Once, standing at her gate, she turned away and impulsively picked one of the last chrysanthemums from the garden and threw it after him. Holding it to his lips while driving home, when it later withered he put the sacred object carefully in his desk. Swann would visit Odette during the day for afternoon tea (24). He entered through a narrow lobby, its walls lined with rectangular planter boxes in which bloomed large chrysanthemums. They were still uncommon flowers which had been fashionable in Paris for about a year. They irritated Swann. She would have him sit beside her in one of her little alcoves beneath enormous palms growing in Chinese porcelain pots. Only a few palms are frost-hardy enough to withstand an outdoors European winter. Chamaerops humilis from southwestern Europe and parts of North Africa will survive in mild localities and so will the Chusan palm, TrachycarpusJbrtunei, a native of central China. 1-lowever, in a conservatory, or well-lit drawing room, palms make excellent indoor plants and were very fashionable in the 19th century. Robinson listed a number useful for indoors. There are 217 genera and 2500 species in the palm family, Palrnae, many with the characteristic appearance 172

of an unbranched trunk, surmounted by a crown of foliage amongst which the flowers and fruits are borne. While there are many ornamental palms suitable for indoor use, such as species of Thrinax or Chamaedorea, the economic value of palms is considerable; palm oil from Elaeis, food and many other products from Cocos, dates from Phoenix, sago from Metroxylon and betel-nut from Areca. There are a number of plants which are popularly called palms, but which are totally unrelated, such as sago palm, Cycas, and palm willow, Salix cap rea, which has a Christian symbolic significance. Odette's flowers Flowers are pivotal in Proust's writing about love whatever form that may take. The latent sexuality ascribed to the chrysanthemum in the courtship of Odette by Swann is coupled to the role of the flower as a contemporary decorative element in her home, but the outbreak of love, as it were, is signified by the orchid and, in particular Cattleya (25). Odette's drawingroom was filled with Chinese ornaments which she found `quaint' and also orchids, cattleyas especially being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers. She thought that they did not look like flowers at all, but rather things made of silk or satin, as from the lining of a cloak. She might draw Swann's attention to some fleshy orchid flower, then blush at its indecency. As well as providing Odette's leitmotiv, the chrysanthemum creates a sense of time and place. Autumn in Paris was a time of diminishing pollen levels for Proust when he could live with a little less discomfort than at many other times of the year. It was also a time, prior to 1880 before the introduction of the chrysanthemum as a popular garden and conservatory plant, of 173

the annual decline and loss of colour in the herbaceous garden. Cox described the origins of the chrysanthemum in China where they had been cultivated in about 500BC and how these cultivars were introduced to Japan in about 800AD (26). Thus, when some of these plants were first introduced to Europe from China in 1688 and again in 1789, they were already ancient and complex hybrids, but still possessed a limited range of colours and were largely double-flowered with incurved florets on the flower-head. Not until 1861, when Robert Fortune sent Japanese chrysanthemums back to Europe, did varieties with a greater range of colour and flower-heads with quilled, shaggy and reflexed forms become available for further hybridisation at the hands of European fanciers. The Chinese incurved flower foims were greatly developed in England, notably by John Salter of Hammersmith, but the Japanese forms were further elaborated as early-flowering outdoor kinds by M. Delaux of Toulouse and these began to reach the public from 1880 onwards. Together with other forms of Japonisme, it was these fashionable flowers which Proust chose and, like his references to Manchuria (27) and the Dreyfus Affair (28), provided a sense of immediacy and chronological points past which his fiction could travel. The florist's chrysanthemum belongs to the daisy family and the genus Chrysanthemum, of which there are twenty species found wild in eastern and central Asia. The ancient garden hybrids of China seem to have been derived chiefly from C. indicum, a native of China and Japan, and C. x grandiflorum from China. The autumn flowers of these hybrids are long-lived in vases and last in the garden until the first hard frosts of winter. Perhaps another source of ideas for Proust, by association, for a flower such as chrysanthemum came from Maeterlinck who, in 1904, published sixteen essays through Eugene Fasquelle in Paris in a 174

work entitled Le Double Jardin; they included 'Crysanthêmes', `Fleurs des champs' and 'Fleurs démodées'. Having fallen in love with Odette and anxiously searched for her all evening (29), Swann finally locates her and is invited into her carriage. She holds a posy of 'cattleyas with similar flowers in a swansdown plume. Dressed in black velvet with a yoke of white silk, she wears more cattleyas in her low-necked bodice. After the couple are accidentally thrown forward by the horse starting at an obstacle, Swann instinctively places his arm around her shoulder, pretending that she is discomposed despite her smile. He tells her not to try to speak to enable her to regain her composure while he suggests that he might straighten the flowers on her bodice. Saying that it is kind of him to look after her, he then notices that some orchid pollen had become spilt on her dress and he seeks her permission to gently brush it off with his hand. And while engaged on his task the shy Swann finds a need to tuck the flowers a liitle deeper and smell them as he had never done so before. Still smiling, Odette acquiesces while murmuring that he is quite mad. So shy in approaching her was he that after this evening when she totally surrendered, they always used the same ritual pretence of arranging her cattleyas for the act of physical possession. Arriving at Odette's late one evening for some cattleyas (30), Swann is sent away by an irritable Odette who pleads that she is unwell, but when Swann get home he thinks that she may have been expecting someone else. Swann himself was not without his flaws in the early days of their courtship (31). He thought that Odette might feel more for him if she thought that there were other pleasures he preferred to that of her company. He had to admit preferring a young seamstress, as fresh as a rose, 175

with whom he sometimes spent the first part of the evening before he saw Odette. We can imagine Odette's particular style (32) in rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed with skunk, a Rembrandt hat and violets at her bosom. In those early days (33) Swann fondly recalled her look of shy entreaty beneath the artificial pansies fastened to the front of her white straw bonnet tied with black velvet ribbon. Long after they had married and his wife had adopted a more refined and 'definitive' persona Swann still treasured the photograph of Odette wearing just such a hat (34), a thin young woman with bunched hair and drawn features. This photograph resurfaces in the novel after the death of Swann (35). These hot-house tropical flowers, cattleyas, pink, or pale magenta in colour, often scented and with the substance of heavy silk were being worn when Proust first saw the beautiful Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe (1860-1952), with a coiffure of the mauve flowers (36). They were popular in the late 19th century on account of the size of each flower, up to 20 cm across, their scent and their longevity after being picked. There are sixty species of Cattleya which occur wild from Mexico, through the West Indies into tropical South America. The genus name commemorates William Cattley of Barnet in England, a patron of botany and collector of rare plants who died in 1832. Several of the introduced species have flowering times which differ, but extensive hybridisation produced cultivars which give an almost continuous supply of blooms throughout the year. These orchids are spectacular in an overblown, flamboyant way; an alternative view might be that they are somewhat vulgar. Perhaps significantly for Proust's interest, Darwin (37) devoted six pages to describing the pollination mechanism of Cattleya. 176

After her marriage to Swann (38), the narrator sometimes glimpsed Odette in a 'polonaise' of plain stuff, wearing a little hat trimmed with a pheasant's wing and violets at her bosom, walking along the Allée des Acacias acknowledging the greetings of gentlemen in carriages. At other times Mme Swann negligently reclined in a Victoria, her hair encircled with a band of flowers, usually violets, her face veiled, an ambiguous smile on her lips, a lilac parasol in her hand. He thought (39) that she seemed in winter enveloped, in the artificial warmth of her own house and drawing-room, like her flowers that looked out through windows at the falling snow, suggested by the bunch of violets crushed into her bosom. When Mme Swann sought to establish herself (40) she invited people who, like buzzing insects in flowers, would spread abroad the tidings of envy and wonder of her salon. By inviting Mme Cottard, Odette knew the multitude of bourgeois calyces that that busy worker, armed with pen and card-case, could visit in an afternoon. Odette knew her power of pollination and, based on the laws of probability, thought that some of the Verdurin set would hear, within a day or two, how the Governor of Paris had left his card with her. Pollination is the process of the physical transfer of the male reproductive unit of higher plants, the haploid pollen grain, into proximity of the female reproductive unit, the haploid egg-cell in the ovule of the ovary of the flower. The transfer may be by wind, or by animals such as insects or birds. Depending on the shape of the ovary, it may be necessary for the pollen grain to gain access through a stigmatic surface and a style by way of a pollen tube, so that the male gamete can gain access to the female, with which it fuses inside the ovule. The fusion process is called fertilisation and this restores the diploid chromosome 177

complement for the next life-cycle. Only when this has successfully occurred can the ovule develop into the seed, and only when the seed is successfully developed can sexual reproduction be said to have occurred. During a concert at which Swann is listening to Vinteuil's Sonata (41), about the time when the 'little phrase' first appears, his mind wanders and he recalls falling in love with Odette, the curled petals of that white chrysanthemum she had thrown into his carriage and he had pressed to his lips. Later, after receiving an anonymous letter accusing Odette of infamous conduct (42), Swann struggles to reconcile the behaviour he knows with such allegations; she who would arrange flowers and sip tea, an insane aberration given the remembered chrysanthemums. The narrator was sometimes entertained by Mme Swann (43) who played the piano for him and, like her clothes, the scent of her room, her chrysanthemums, her touch formed part of her mystery. On another occasion, having together heard Mme Swann play the Vinteuil Sonata (44), M. Swarm expounds on, perhaps deliberately seeking to shatter the narrator's evident enchantment, a moment when when the arpeggios of the violin signify that night is falling among the trees. Swann reckons that the passage shows the static side of moonlight, the Bois de Boulogne plunged in catalepsy. He continues dryly that since moonlight can prevent the stirring of leaves it's not surprising that the radiant heat therapy such as his wife was taking should act on the muscles. Recalling her drawing-room (45) the narrator saw once again the flowers against dark-painted walls, an orange flame, a red combustion, the pink and white flickerings of chrysanthemums in the November twilight. As a married woman Mme Swann's taste for chrysanthemums knew no bounds (46). The 178

chrysanthemums in her drawing-room were now of enormous size and variety of colour such as Swann never saw at the rue La Perouse. For the narrator these chrysanthemums seemed to be not ephemeral, but had a durability no less pink and equally copper-coloured to the setting sun through the mists of a November afternoon. Yet for the narrator (47) something changes with her, even before he penetrates the superficial layers of etiquette, or tastes the wintry delights of chrysanthemums, pleasures that do not appear and Mme Swann seems to expect nothing more. Soon even her tastes change (48) and items are discarded from her new home including the gilded woodwork that was once background to the. chrysanthemums: Japonisme was no longer fashionable. There is an unbridgeable gap between Swann's idealised perception of Odette and what she actually is. The narrator recounts (49) how Swann had a little daguerreotype of her with a Boticellian charm, for he saw his wife as a Boticelli figure. Swann even purchased a wonderful blue and pink scarf of oriental silk, exactly like that worn by the Virgin in the Madonna of the Magnificat. Mme Swann never wore it, but she did allow her husband to order her a dress covered with daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and bluebells, like that of the Primavera. Sandro Boticelli (1445-1510) was born in Florence and as well as being responsible for frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, painted the Primavera (c.1477) and Birth of Venus (c. 1485), both of which are now in the Uffizi. The name daisy can relate in a general sense to any plant belonging to the Compositae family, alternatively known as Asteraceae; more specifically it also belongs to the little whiteflowered plant which spangles lawns, Bellis perennis, one of 179

eight species in this genus from Europe and the Mediterranean region. These are, more than likely, the plants depicted on the dress that Swann bought for his wife. The bluebells also found on that dress are little cousins of the lily, with a generic name that has been shunted back and forth from Hyacinthus, to Scilla, then Endymion and on to Hyacinthoides as perceived understanding of delimitation of the group has been refined over the years. The bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, is a native wildflower in western European woodland, see Fig. 24, while the related H. hispanica occurs in drier habitats in southern Europe and parts of North Africa. The two species hybridise when grown together in gardens. H. hispanica is a tougher plant, but also more coarse than its northern counterpart. Painter wrote (50) that another model for Odette, and Proust often used multiple sources for his fictional characters, was Mdry Laurent (née Louviot) who was born in 1849, one of whose lovers was Mallarmé and who knew Proust in 1897 through her friendship with Reynaldo Hahn. By that time she had become a convert to japonisme and the interiors of her house Les Talus, 9 boulevard Lannes near the Bois de Boulogne, were largely those found at Odette's home in A la recherche.... Proust was persistent and stubborn once he had decided on a recipient for one of his floral gifts. Writing to Mme Strauss on 22 November 1890 (51) he argued that she should not complain about her chrysanthemums as the infrequent flowers spared her a letter from him and were always more beautiful than his prose. Even his dear friend Robert de Billy (1869-1953) received three of the then very special Japanese-style 180

chrysanthemums with some of Proust's verse, to the amazement and perhaps consternation of Robert's parents. The Guermantes family Having known the Swanns, the young narrator was to some extent prepared for meeting the Guermantes at social gatherings (52). He relates that at an early dinner party he found a carnation by the side of his plate, the stalk wrapped in silver paper. Then he saw all other male guests take up their carnations to slip into their buttonholes. He did the same, as a free-thinker at Mass, rising when everyone else rises. It was while with the Swanns at the zoo (53) that the narrator meets the Princesse Mathilde who, in reality as the niece of Napoleon I, presided over a Second Empire salon frequented by people like Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, TaMe and the Goncourt brothers. With such a distinguished background Proust had her appear as herself in A la recherche.... Although Proust met her when she was in her seventies, he wrote to Lucien Daudet on 11 March 1915 (54) that as he had seen Princesse Mathilde when he was a child, could he describe a costume for her suitable for a spring afternoon, wide-skirted in mauve and a hat, maybe with streamers and violets. The Princesse finally appears in the novel in a fur that the Emperor of Russia had sent her who indeed, in reality, had sought her hand in marriage. In a delightful account of the young Proust preparing for his first social function (55) we learn that he had wanted to order a button-hole from the florist, but his grandmother thought that a rose from the garden would look more natural. Scrambling up a steep bank he cut one, catching his clothes on other roses as he did so. After an omnibus trip he reached his destination and 181

found that guests were being announced as they went in and it was then that he wanted to turn back. However, caught in the stream, helpless, he distractedly deposited his overcoat, throwing away his rose which had lost it petals beneath the coat together with the now naked green stalk! The archetypal Guermantes 'family appearance' first appears in Contre Sainte-Beuve (56). The complexion of the family, already known by the seventeenth century, was a cyclamen pink sometimes roughened with small dry pimples at the angle of the nose and the left cheekbone; this could become inflamed by fatigue. Certain members of the Guermantes seldom went to Paris, but all looked like some sort of swan with beak jutting between amethyst cheekbones, clad in purple plumage, feeding irritably on irises and heliotrope. Cyclamens belong to the primrose family and there are fifteen species which occur wild in an area extending from Europe, through the Mediterranean region as far east as Iran. Growing from a corm, or modified stem, a series of long stalked leaves appear in the growing season, together with, or after the magenta, purple-pink, or white flowers have spent themselves, see Fig. 15. By cultivating only five of the species, Cyclamen purpurascens, C. hederfolium, C. cilicium, C. coum and C. repandum it is possible to have a flowering succession so that only May and June provide no cyclamen colour in the northern hemisphere. The pot-grown, larger, single- and double- flowered florists's cyclamen are hybrids derived from C. persicum. Other distinctive family traits (57) which the narrator listed was their physique, the fine hair even in the men, massed in golden tufts, half lichen, half cat-fur, and an intellectual sparkle which included the Guermantes wit. If examined closely with a microscope, any lichen will be found to consist of an 182

association between a fungus and an alga and these two component organisms work in concert with each other as an integrated whole. This symbiotic association enables lichens to live, grow and reproduce in the most inhospitable of environments, such as on bare rock, desert soil, often where little available water exists, although other species of lichen may be found on the leaves, branches and trunks of trees in the wettest of habitats. Lichens often pioneer the revegetation process after volcanic eruption, landslide, or the building of a new wall. Proust acknowledged (58) the antiquity of the name Guermantes, being synonymous with the old forests where Childebert hunted deer, those that Shakespeare, or Maeterlinck wrote about, something much more than an accumulation of trees and like an illumination in a Merovingian chronicle. He continues (59) that a full measure of fruit and flowers might be gathered from such forests of the Middle Ages, but that time has now thinned them. The narrator commented (60) that he had heard of the famous mediaeval tapestries of Guermantes, like floating clouds against that legendary amaranthine name near the forest where Childebert hunted. The word 'amaranthine', with a colour inclining to purple, or of unfading flowers, derives from amaranth, those plants with everlasting, chaffy flowers belonging to a number of species in different genera in the Amaranthaceae family. Many of the species have flowers in shades of purple and pink. The summer bedding plants from this family which Proust might have known include Iresine, Alternanthera and Amaranthus grown for the coloured ornamental leaves rather than flowers. Amaranthus caudatus is love-lies-bleeding, Gomphrena globosa, has globular white, 183

red, or purple everlasting flower heads, while Celosia argentea cv. Cristata has brightly coloured flowering heads which are fused together in a monstrously spectacular cock's-comb structure. The last species is an unusual example of a monstrosity becoming inherited after prolonged selection for a trait retained in cultivation; monstrosities are normally deleterious for the organism and lost from the gene pool through natural selection. The narrator's initial sense of awe with the Guermantes family (61) leads him to speculate that anything they do seems as graceful as a swallow in flight, or the poise of a rose on its stem. Madame de Villeparisis

It was this friend of his grandmother's, the Marquise de Villeparisis and aunt of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, who introduced the narrator into the Guermantes world. The narrator had sometimes discussed French literature while on a drive with her in her carriage (62), noticing as he did so the cornflowers, like those of Combray, following in the wake of their passage down the road, with others ahead amongst the grass and still more in his memories of these domesticated flowers. The narrator recalls (63) that after the advice given by M. de Norpois to his father, after leaving Saint-Loup, on the occasion of his first call on Mme de Villeparisis, he found her in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, against which the settees and armchairs in Beauvais tapestry stood out with the colour of ripe raspberries. Mme de Villeparisis sat at a desk on which were her brushes, a palette, an unfinished flower-piece in watercolour and arranged in assorted containers, moss roses, zinnias 184

and maidenhair ferns giving the impression of being displayed on a florist's counter. The raspberry is Rubus idaeus which, as anyone who has grown the shrub knows, reproduces largely by suckers which grow out horizontally from the main plant. In this way, large areas can quite quickly become colonised by the clump, but the flavour, scent and colour of the fresh fruit with cream make it all worthwhile. On meeting Mme de Guermantes (64) the narrator cannot but think that her name and title were palpable, the duchy casting its aura about her, the cool woods of Guermantes permeating the drawing-room and shading the pouf on which she sat. He notes that (65) Mme de Guermantes wore a straw hat trimmed with cornflowers which reminded him not so much of the fields of his youth around Combray and Tansonville, but the twilight only an hour ago when Mme de Guermantes had walked along the rue de la Paix. This hat reappears much later in the novel (66) when the narrator reminds Mme de Guermantes how much he had once liked her hat with the cornflowers, but that was now long ago. The use of the name mayflower for hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna, (67) seems to be deliberately restricted in its use to M. Pierre, the 'historian of the Fronde' who is singularly uninformed about matters relating to the plant kingdom and receives imperious guidance from the Duchesse de Guermantes. While Mme de Villeparisis is completing the painting of some apple-blossom (68), Albert Bloch in expressing admiration for her work only succeeds in knocking over the specimen of blossom with the water spilling on the carpet. Speaking to the Marquise with his back to Bloch and not having seen the accident, the historian tells her that her brushwork suggests that she has the touch of a fairy. Bloch, thinking that the comment 185

is directed at him, says that the thing is unimportant as he is not wet! At this same afternoon gathering (69) the narrator, in conversation with M. de Norpois, hopes that he might obtain an introduction to Mme de Guermantes, something that Norpois had refused for Mme Swann. The narrator refers to the paintings of Elstir of which the Duchesse de Guerrnantes has wonderful examples, in particular his work, a Bunch of Radishes. The narrator had remembered it in an Exhibition and would so much like to see the masterpiece again. M. de Norpois deftly counters with the opinion that the work is less a masterpiece, more a sketch. This fictional painting may make an oblique reference to Ivlanet's real study of asparagus purchased by Charles Ephrussi in 1880. The radish, Raphanus sativus, is a member of the cabbage family and one of the eight species in the genus; they occur in nature from western Europe, through the Mediterranean region and into Central Asia. To briefly digress, Proust had more to say on the virtues of the radish (70). Recalling the conversational habits of the Comte de Guermantes, Proust related an anecdote involving the GrandDuchess of Baden, who had told the Comte how to use the shavings of peeled radishes to protect furs from moths. So successful had this recipe been that the Comte had given it to Ketty de Dreux-Breze and to Loulou de la Chapelle-Marinieresur-Avre. The Comtesse added that it was so simple to prepare and that her servants could easily teach those of their friend Juliette. In a sort of reversal of the symbolic purity accorded to the lily (71), Proust places one in the hand of the demonstrably maculate Rachel when she gives a recitation at an earlier dinner-party held at the Bloch home. Appearing in the room 186

with a large lily in her hand, her entrance was first greeted with smiles which changed into giggles from her monotonous tone and then became so uncontrollable that she was unable to go on. This débâcle was later discussed at the afternoon party (72) when Mme de Guenriantes proclaimed that the reciter's lilies immediately told her that Rachel had no talent. It was the custom after her receptions (73) for Mme de Villeparisis to thank the performers and present the leading lady with a bouquet of roses, which cost no more than twenty francs. In contrast, those giving their services throughout the season received roses painted by the Marquise. The Due and Duchesse de Guermantes Basin, the Due de Guermantes is the cousin of his wife, Oriane, and before inheriting the dukedom from his father was the Prince des Laumes. When the narrator is finally invited to dine with the Guermantes (74) he whimsically compares the prim bourgeois ladies to whom he had become accustomed in his mother's drawing-room with those now surrounding him comparable to that introducing Parsifal into the midst of the flower-maidens. These creatures, with necks and shoulders bare except for a spray of mimosa, or a full-blown rose, exchanged caressing glances with him and seemed about to shower him with kisses. The mimosa of European floristry, Acacia dealbata, is a tree species from south-eastern Australia, but one that has become naturalised in other parts of that country and elsewhere in the world. It requires protection from hard frost in western Europe as its fragrant golden blossom appears there in late winter and early spring against a foil of silvery-green fern-like foliage. 187

He continues (75) that these flower-maidens seemed so easily pleased, with their garlands of orchids, hardly having exchanged a dozen words with him all evening, but then making a veiled allusion to further arrange something through Mme de Guerrnantes for the future. Surrounded by so many well known members of society with familiar names (76) the narrator felt the same surprise that an explorer in Central America or North Africa might have on penetrating a screen of giant aloes or manchineels, and finding local inhabitants reading Voltaire's Mérope or Aizire. While Proust uses the aloe and manchineel to denote remoteness in this passage, it is significant that the plants are also correctly associated with their respective areas of wild distribution. Manchineel, Hippornane species, occur in Mexico and the West Indies. The genus Aloe comprises about 340 species which occur naturally only in Africa, Madagascar and into Arabia; they are related to the lilies. Fonning trees or shrubs with distinctive thick, fleshy and often armed spiny leaves borne in rosettes and spectacular heads of bright orange-red, or yellow flowers borne on candelabra at the ends of shoots, aloes are adapted to hot, dry habitats. They are unlikely residents of gardens in northern France unless in a glasshouse, or used as summer bedding, but they would have grown happily at Evian and along the Mediterranean coast. It was fashionable in the late 19th century to create dramatic and labour-intensive carpetbedding displays in summer with, as highlights, spot plantings of plunged, pot-grown specimens of Aloe, Yucca, Dracaena, Phor,nium, perhaps the small palms Chamaerops or Phoenix, pampas grass, Cortaderia, or Agave forming centrepieces. Such displays required to be planted in late spring when all danger of frost had passed and dismantled again in autumn. William Robinson inveighed against the practice. The century plant, 188

Agave americans, from North America has greyish leaves not unlike those of aloe, but it is not in the lily family and never becomes a tree. However, this did not prevent the species being called an aloe in Proust's time and later. The century plant has the dual disadvantage of spending many years in a vegetative state before sending aloft a candelabrum of yellowish flowers up to 6m tall, fruiting, after which the plant dies, leaving the skeleton of its gigantic, woody, flowering stem to decay over a period of several years. On the positive side the leaves are not unattractive and the flowering extends over several months. As a prototype of the Due de Guermantes in A la recherche. the Comte de Guermantes (77) is one of Proust's most endearing creations with his uncritical veneration of the works of Balzac and even that of other authors whom he thinks are Balzac. When the Comtesse's first visitor arrived, the Comte would hurry upstairs while the servants got ready to take the blackcurrant-cup and the soda-water into the garden. All the evening, the Duke and the Marquis might be seen in the little garden, in evening dress, sitting on uncomfortable chairs with only blackcurrant-cup to look forward to. The Comte's passion for Balzac went back to his father, whose small library and Balzac volumes he had inherited and where the sirop and biscuits were brought up to him, where on rainy days he would watch the adjacent swaying poplar tree. The genus Ribes comprises 150 species which occur in northern temperate regions but also, surprisingly, down the chain of the Andes in South America. The blackcurrant is R. nigrurn; the fruit are nutritious eaten fresh, conserved, or made into cordials such as cassis. The Comte's horses (78) had caused damage to the florist's shop, breaking window-panes and flower-pots, but the Comte 189

had not admitted liability any more than the Comtesse ever bought her flowers there. When legal proceedings were initiated he thought that the florist was behaving badly, given their position in society and especially as the florist always addressed him only as Monsieur, never Monsieur le Comte. Exhibiting her forthright character when speaking of M. Legrandin (79), Mme de Guermantes tells her husband, that Legrandin is the brother of the graminivorous creature that Basin had once invited to call and that she stayed for an hour browsing just like a cow. The narrator finds her husband no less unfeeling (80). M. de Guermantes had gracious manners as unaltered by time as some rural scenes that would have been familiar to Xenophon or St Paul, where conscience has less to do with affection and morality and more with form, as in the court Louis XIV. The Guermantes, husband and wife (81), have a passion for the minutiae of purposeless people, discerning qualities of the simplest kind, like a townsman in the country amazed at discovering a blade of grass, or magnifying and endlessly commenting upon the slightest defect, often applying both processes to the same person. The narrator's infatuation with the Duchesse (82) finally expires and while waiting for an opportunity to greet her is no longer disturbed as she regally approaches in a flowing satin gown of yellow on which large black poppies are picked out in relief The Duchesse tells the Princesse de Parme during dinner (83) that she intends telling her something almost improper, about a bedroom she knows and an enchanting bed with a sculpted Siren reclining along one side, the tail being mother-of-pearl and some sort of lotus flowers in her hand. She continues with feeling that he was ill in this bed on her visit, but the palm190

leaves and the golden crown on one side made it so moving. The Princesse encourages her in understanding that the boy is good looking, only to be told by the Duchesse that he is like a tapir, with eyes similar to those on a Queen Hortense lampshade. While the genus Lotus comprises about 100 species of herb in the pea family, some being useful pasture plants, Proust here refers to the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, which is a native of tropical Asia and north-eastern Australia. It has handsome, large pink flowers and large plate-like leaves, both held on long stalks high above the water of freshwater ponds and lagoons in which it grows. Both the seeds and the mucilaginous rhizomes are eaten in Asia, where in India, Tibet and China it is considered a sacred plant. It was introduced into Egypt in about 500BC, but the sacred lotus there is yet another species, the native Nymphaea lotus, with leaves and flowers which float on the water. There is only one other species of Nelumbo and this occurs from eastern North America extending south into Colombia; N. pentapetala is no less striking having yellow instead of pink flowers. On 9 March 1916, Proust wrote to Maria de Madrazo, Reynaldo Hahn's sister (84). Promising to return her book on Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460-c.1525), the Venetian painter, Proust digresses about one painting representing a ceremony of exorcism by the Patriarch of Venice. He points out that it is both documentary and Carpacciesque with clusters of chimneypots flared like tulips and, he thought, probably the inspiration for a few little Whistlers of Venice. Waiting for the arrival of the Guermantes (85) the narrator is taken by the similarities of certain aspects of the poorer parts of Paris and those of Venice. Lit by the morning sun the tall, 191

flared chimneys become vivid pink, the brightest red, like the garden of a tulip-fancier of Delft or Haarlem planted above the houses. The similarity with the image used in Proust's letter to Mme de Madrazo is obvious, but is repeated in the narrator's description of the Carpaccio paintings seen in Venice when staying there much later with his mother (86). It was the work of Carpaccio that was most readily seen by the narrator when not working in St Mark's and it almost revived his love for Albertine. The first time he saw The Patriarch of Grado exorcising a demoniac, it was the pink and violet sky with tall, flared chimney stacks silhouetted against it that struck him as remarkable, looking like red tulips and so reminiscent of Whistler. There are about 100 species of tulip which occur wild throughout temperate Eurasia, but especially in Central Asia. They are bulbous herbs related to the lilies and they spend the summer in a dormant state safe from the hot sun, but when it gets cooler and the rains or snow comes, their showy flowers and often attractive foliage appears. Many of the species of Tulipa are grown for their own intrinsic beauty, in pots, rock gardens, or some naturalised in the garden. The different sorts of garden tulip seem to have arisen from a parent closely related to T. gesneriana, which is the name given to those tulips which were introduced to western Europe from 1554 onwards, when the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Sulieman the Magnificent, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, first saw them in Adrianopolis (now Edirne, near the Bulgarian border with Turkey) on his way to Constantinople (Istambul). The history of introduction of the tulip to Europe has often been recounted, like the tulipomania which swept Holland between 1634 and 1637 and later, Turkey between 1702 and 1720. What is remarkable is that the dozen or more distinct horticultural 192

categories of garden tulip seem to have evolved by selection in domestication from this original variable parent stock rather than by hybridisation. In his increasingly giddy whirl of social calls (87) the narrator sometimes had difficulty remembering where he was and differentiating his hostess and her guests. The Duchesse de Guermantes in her husky voice might bid him sit beside her in a Beauvais armchair illustrating the Rape of Europa set against walls draped in enormous eighteenth-century tapestries representing ships with masts of hollyhock in blossom. This place might have been the palace not of the Seine, but Neptune, at the edge of the river Oceanus, where the Duchesse de Guermantes was its goddess. Arriving late at a reception being held by the Guermantes (88) the narrator notices near the Place de la Concorde at twilight that the moon looked like a section of peeled orange, but a little bruised. Only a few hours later it had been transformed into gold. Realising that the time spent in society takes him away from his writing (89), the narrator becomes increasingly preoccupied with completing his book before he dies and reminds himself that unless the grain of wheat dies after it has been sown, it will abide alone; but if it dies, it will bring forth much fruit. Gide's novel of 1924 was entitled Si le grain ne meurt. There is a Proustian contradiction in the way that mankind has co-evolved with and come to depend on wheat as the most important food plant, but one in which there has historically been no deliberate human involvement in its development, at least not until the early 20th century. The evolution of wheat has closely followed that of human culture, the use of dry grain, bread making, fermentation, yet mankind was unaware of the 193

process in which it was a participant. Baker wrote (90) that wheat has become the most widely cultivated crop which, somewhere in the world, is growing and maturing at all times of the year. There are three main sorts of wheat, the botanical distinctions of which were still being unravelled at about the time that Proust was writing A la recherche... The diploid Einkorn wheats, Triticum monococcum, with 14 chromosomes, are still being cultivated in Europe and the Middle East: its wild progenitor, T boeoticum, the wild Einkorn, existed at least 7000 years ago based on archaeological evidence. The second sort are the tetraploid Emmer wheats, T. dicoccum, with 28 chromosomes, and these were the chief cereal grown in GraecoRoman times, still being grown in parts of Europe: its wild progenitor, T. dicoccoides, the wild Emmer, existed more than 8000 years ago. Finally, the hexaploid Bread wheat, T. aestivum, with 42 chromosomes, is the current wheat of world commerce: it is unknown in a wild state, but has existed since before 2500BC. By a careful analysis and study of the chromosome complements of the three different sorts of wheat, it appears that first the Einkorns and then the Emmers, in that sequence, each spontaneously and naturally hybridised with a different weedy grass species in the genus Aegilops, growing beside or amongst the crop plants in prehistoric wheat-fields. All that humans did was to slavishly cultivate these wheats for millenia, intuitively selecting those which best served a purpose. Thus, the concatenation of the Einkorn and Aegilops genotype produced the Emmer wheats, and the Emmer and another Aegilops genotype produced the Bread wheats. The current globally important wheat therefore essentially, yet paradoxically, contains the genotypes of the two weedy grasses A. speltoides and A. squarrosa! 194

The mind of the narrator was on more emotive matters (91) when he knew that it was not heaven alone that he associated with the thought of Mme de Guermantes, but a breath of air bringing its message from her, just as long ago the wheatfields of Meseglise had done so from Gilberte. These were not Einkorn, nor Emmer, but Bread wheatfields. Princesse de Guermantes Married to Gilbert, Prince de Guermantes, the cousin of the Duc de Guermantes, she is the sister of the Duke of Bavaria. At a gala evening at the Opera (92) the narrator describes the Princesse as seen in her box, all plume and corolla, like a great white flower. Being invited to a reception of the Princesse de Guermantes (93), the narrator is able to closely observe the celebrated Hubert Robert fountain in her garden, set in a clearing surrounded by fine trees. From a distance the impression was one of art rather than that of water. But a closer view showed a deliberately prescribed turmoil of ever changing rising and falling columns and droplets. The Baron de Charlus meets the narrator (94) and asks him whether he likes the pretty fountain. The Baron considers that there is room for improvement by removing the lamps which Bréauté was instrumental in having installed, but that not even Bréauté could disfigure the great art of Hubert Robert. This phantom fountain had its origin for Proust in the painting Jet d'eau, by Hubert Robert (1733-1808). Noting the ill-mannered yet illuminating habits of certain people, on meeting M. de Vaugoubert at the reception (95), the narrator observes that both M. de Vaugoubert and M. de 195

Charlus are never the first to greet one, both preferring to 'respond'. Vaugoubert replies to the narrator with eyes continually straying as though patches of clover might be grazed on either side of him. Another personality trait is noted in the Princesse herself (96), where silliness seems to override her vanity as she deliberately refers to the Marquise de la Pommeliere, often called 'la Pomme', by that name in a display of banal conformity with the habits of others. When departing from the reception (97) and in the company of M. de Guermantes, the narrator notices on the staircase the Prince de Sagan looking like his portrait come to life in a last appearance in society, acknowledging the Duchesse with his top hat in a white-gloved hand, matching the colour of the gardenia in his buttonhole. Prince Boson de Sagan was one of the models for Charlus and appears as himself in A la recherche.... When Proust finally won the Goncourt Prize in 1919, the actress Rejane wanted to give him a gift to celebrate the award, at which Proust requested her photograph dressed in her role as the Prince de Sagan. Her son, Jacques Porel, delivered the gift and is supposed to have described Proust's appearance to be like a yesterday's gardenia (98). Showing this treasured and autographed photograph later to Celeste Albaret (99), Proust told her that no other woman could have dressed like a man, with top hat and monocle, with such delicacy and élan. The gardenia in her buttonhole was superb, but he wished she had taken off her pearl earrings! There is an image of this photograph in Sansom (100). Gardenia comprises some 250 species which are members of the coffee family, Rubiaceae, and occur wild in the tropics of the Old World. Many of the species have deliciously fragrant flowers which are often white, cream, 196

or yellowish in colour. G. jasminoides was introduced to Europe from China and Japan in 1754 being grown for cutting in the florist's trade. On returning home with the uncertain prospect of a visit from Albertine (101), the narrator's irritable anxiety is triggered by Francolse who felt that, as he had left his party, there was no point in continuing to wear a rose in his buttonhole and tried to remove it. Reminding him that Albertine might not come, but wishing to look smart for her benefit if she did, he shakes Franeoise away only to crush the flower and be told by the servant that he has now ruined it. So it is, he reflects, when we desire one person we cannot bear anyone else. On one occasion the narrator notices that the old valet of the Prince de Guermantes (102) still retains his youthful hair colour like mosses, or lichens and others in the vegetable kingdom which remain unchanged by the advent of winter. However, M. de Charlus was ever one to assist nature. The Princesse de Guermantes's affection for the Baron resulted in the narrator being asked to deliver a letter from her (103). As he talks to the narrator, the Baron selects from a vase a number of differently coloured roses, looking undecidedly in the mirror to find one suitable for his buttonhole. Meanwhile, his valet announces that the barber had arrived and while the Baron says good-bye to the narrator the valet adds that the barber has forgotten his curling tongs. The Baron flies into a towering rage making the choice of a suitable rose for his buttonhole quite impossible.

Princesse de Parme Known for the receptions which she gave, Swann had once wished to send the Princesse de Panne a gift of fruit for her 197

birthday (104) and asked a cousin of his mother to arrange matters for him. She chose to order the fruit from different suppliers, the special grapes from Crapote, strawberries from Jauret and the very best pears from Chevet. When the Princesse thanked him so profusely, he almost tasted the strawberries and pears, but, also, had the peace of mind that someone had taken the trouble to examine every fruit in his gift to the Princesse. Proust depended on others to place his orders for fruit and flowers. Céleste Albaret (105) bought fruit for Proust at Auger's on boulevard Haussmann, unless it was a Bourdaloue pear when it was ordered from Larue's Restaurant at the corner of rue Royale and place de la Madeleine. The Princesse was the subject of one of the narrator's, and Proust's, place-name fantasies (106). The narrator longed to visit Parma after reading La Chartreuse, its name suggesting something smooth, violet-tinted and soft, the heavy first syllable but a sigh, full of Stendhalian sweetness and the reflection of violets. The large, double-flowered Parma or Neapolitan violets are probably derived from Viola a/ba, which is a closely related eastern European cousin of V. odorata from western Europe. When the narrator finally meets the Princesse (107) he explains that he had to modify his preconception of her. For years, like a perfumer, he had been impregnating the name Princesse de Parme with the scent of thousands of violets, this person who he considered Sanseverina herself Yet on meeting this humble and amiable woman, so full of dignified goodness, she was as little Stendhalian as was the rue de Parme in the Europe district of Paris, reminding him not so much of the Charterhouse in which Fabrice ends his days, but a waiting room in the Gare Saint-Lazare. Céleste Albaret recalled that Proust once told her about a large bunch of Paiiria violets being placed beside the body of his father by an unknown woman in the presence of his 198

mother when paying their last respects to Dr Proust (108). Painter (109) described the same sort of violets clasped in the hands of the dead Proust prior to his funeral. At one of the receptions given by the Princesse (110), the young and socially ambitious guests are more preoccupied with being in the presence of living royalty than with experiencing their historic surroundings, recalling vaguely that it had cacti and giant palms like a palmarium in a zoological gardens. This is the only use made of cacti by Proust, a family of plants which largely lack leaves and often have spiny, water-storing stems. There are about 2000 species which botanists variously place in as few as fifty genera, or as many as 220, depending on the interpretation of generic limits. They are largely confined to the Americas with the exception of the genus Rhipsalis which comprises species occurring in Africa, islands in the Indian Ocean and Sri Lanka. Neither Gustave nor Jean Schlumberger, mentioned by Tadie (111), are commemorated in the Christmas cactus genus, Schluinbergera from Brazil; it was named for Frederick Schlumberger an amateur student of plants. The Princesse de Panne has a disposition which convinces her that everything she sees at the residence of the Duchesse de Guermantes is superior to anything that she has at her home (112). This results in her head gardener being instructed to take cuttings of a variety of carnation not half as fine as those already growing at home. While dining with the Guermantes, the Princesse listens to the Duchesse responding to the Prince von Faffenheim who has just praised the Kaiser's intelligence (113). She makes the obliquely agreeable comment that she didn't find the Kaiser at all simple, but something amusing, something 'forced' like a green carnation. It was a thing that surprised her, didn't please her and thought it better left 199

uncreated. Looking innocently into his eyes she concludes by hoping that she is not shocking the Prince. As the guests depart (114) the Lady-in-waiting to the Princesse reappears in the dining-room to collect the wonderful carnations which the Duchesse presented to Mme de Parme. Montesquiou and Charms

Not only was the Princesse de Parme very fond of Palamède the Baron de Charlus, familiarly known as Mémé, but he was also a cousin of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac was, for Proust, an important source of some of the character traits of the fictional Baron. Perhaps as importantly, he guided Proust to, or reconfirmed the significance of such varied artists as Gustave Moreau, Whistler, Emile Gallé, Paul Hellau, El Greco and Watteau. Montesquiou was sixteen years older than Proust, but already had a considerable reputation not least, because of his unabashed selfpromotion, family history, literary talent, flourish, eccentricity and friendship with figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. Proust first met Montesquiou at Mme Lemaire's, 3 rue de Monceau, in 1893 and soon there was regular correspondence, social visits and the exchange of books and articles. Proust had gained a mentor, sponsor and, to some extent and for a little while, an arbiter of taste, although Proust came to reject the Symbolist tendencies which Montesquiou was then embracing. Following his first visit to Montesquiou, Proust sent a gift of lilies and Florentine irises and in return soon received a copy of the de-luxe edition of a recent book of poems, Les Chauvessouris. Then late in June 1893 came pre-publication notice of Montesquiou's second collection of verse, Le Chef des odeurs 200

suaves, of which Proust wrote on 25 June (115) that he had been dazzled in this heaven of flowers, intoxicated like the lotuseaters. Tadie commented (116) that an ornamental style of writing, characteristic of the Symbolist period, would remain dear to Proust, but so would his fondness for clarity while, paradoxically, retaining an aura of mystery. Montesquiou's cousin, Henriette, was married to the Marquis Charles d'Eyragues and they lived in a mansion at Falaise, Lower Normandy, with the market-place of the town close by and the gardens of the house descending to the stream (117). After making a visit, Proust wrote (118) that the house at the corner of the main square had been in their ownership for two hundred years, this family from Provence. Guests spending an evening at cards risked waking the citizens of Falaise should they leave after ten p.m., their footsteps echoing as in a novel by Barbey d'Aurevilly. One might fish from the stream at the end of the sloping garden bordered by the town walls, as in a story by Balzac. The town was devastated following the D-Day landings; the castle — birthplace of William the Conqueror — survives, but heavily restored. At one point in A la recherche... (119) M. de Charlus making overtures to the narrator says that pastimes like the study of the arts, antiques, gardens, are all surrogates. Begonias are grown, yews trimmed, because they submit to such treatment. But we, that is he, preferred a plant of human growth if he was worth the trouble. These comments are perhaps recalled by the narrator who is present when the Baron first meets Charles Morel on the platform at Doncieres railway station (120). Charlus suddenly decides to cancel his return to Paris on the departing train, impulsively tipping the porter twenty francs. This act of apparently spontaneous generosity was immediately noticed by 201

a flower seller rushing up with carnations. Charlus, giving her a few francs to go away, mutters that he wished to God they could be left alone. Tadie listed some of the gifts which Proust made to Montesquiou (121), including a flowering cherry to help foster good relations with this influential, but irascible figure whose comments were often made with an intention to outrage the recipient. Painter gave one example (122) which embarrassed a young girl whose dress was decorated with imitation cherries, after hearing Montesquiou remark flippantly that he had no idea young girls were allowed to bear fruit. As Montesquiou was fond of Japanese gardens and bonsai, it is more than likely the flowering cherry was one of the 'Sato Zakura' of Japan which have been cultivated for more than 1000 years. They have obscure origins, some being hybrids between Prunus speciosa and P. jamasakura and others being natural forms of these and perhaps other species. All are grown for their spring flower and autumn foliage. The edible cherry has had three distinct origins. Sweet cherries are descended from P. avium, the gean, or mazzard, of Europe and western Asia and they include both soft-fleshed and firm-fleshed Bigarreaux sorts. Sour cherries are descended from P. cerasus, a species from south-western Asia and they include the dark fruited Morello and paler fruited Amarelle cherries. The Duke cherries are a probable hybrid between the sweet and sour. In a case of art imitating life, the young Jean Santeuil (123) came to know many flowers not least those seen in Montesqiou's button-hole, the moss-rose, the blue of the gentian and the vivid cineraria. Baron de Charlus is wearing one of these floral ornaments when first noticed by the narrator (124) glancing at him, turning towards a playbill while 202

humming a tune and touching a moss-rose in his button-hole. On 3 June 1907 Proust confessed to Montesquiou in a letter (125) that he was indebted to him for the knowledge of many things, including the moss-rose which he first saw in Montesquiou's buttonhole and had identified when they met at (Mme Lemaire's) in rue Monceau as they took off their overcoats beneath the lilacs. The moss rose, Rosa centifolia cv. Muscosa, is so called for the mossy covering of glandular hairs and bristles on all of the aerial parts of the plant except the petals, sticky to touch and with a pleasant resinous smell; it arose as a mutation in about 1720. Seedlings grown from a moss rose may possess moss in varying amounts, or not at all. The gentians are mainly alpine perennial herbs which occur throughout the world except for in Africa. The genus Gentiana comprises 400 species having white, yellow, or blue flowers, the last being of such an intensity in some species, such as G. verna, that it has given rise to the name gentian blue, see Fig. 21. The root of G. lutea, gentian root, has medicinal properties and with alcohol is the basis for the aperitif liqueur gentiane, distilled in Switzerland and France, where it is best known as the proprietry brand Suze (126). The cineraria of floristry and spring bedding displays is a hybrid, Pericallis x hybrida, in which the species P. lanata played a major role. Proust writes only about the garden cineraria which, although herbaceous perennials in nature, are treated by gardeners in Europe as annuals with vivid, velvety, saturated red, purple, blue, or white displays of daisy flowers set off against dark green foliage. They are used in pots, or in formal bedding when the danger of frost has passed. Pericallis is a genus of fourteen species all of which come from the Atlantic Islands. 203

The indoor use of cineraria appears in Jean Santeuil (127), where Jean sees velvety red ones in the drawing-room of the house-bound, elderly Madame X decorating each end of the sideboard in china vases. Proust uses them again in the mansion of the Duchesse de Montmorency-Luxembourg in the Faubourg Saint-Geiiiiain (128). Her house had a series of pavilions separated by gardens. The outer hail had a statuette, said to be by Falconet, representing a spring. Near a bowl filled with forget-me-nots the concierge usually waved her arm vaguely to indicate that the Duchesse was at home. The statuette reminded him of a plaster statue of a gardener that stood in one of the Combray gardens. The great staircase, damp and resonant, was like a stairway found in old bathing establishments. There were vases filled with blue cinerarias in the blue ante-room and the tinkle of the door-bell was exactly like that of the one in Eulalie's room. The statuette and bell so delighted him that Mme de Montmorency was invariably greeted by him in a state of rapture, the real cause of which she never knew! Tadié wrote (129) that this damp and resonant passage was inspired by Proust's stay in the Hotel des Reservoirs, Versailles. Etienne Maurice Falconet (1716-1791) was for a time the director of sculpture at the Sèvres Porcelain Factory; his rococo style work epitomised the period of Louis XV. Sansom (130) has a photograph of part of the Pré-Catelan with a statuette of a little gardener shown in the foreground. Eulalie was the servant and confidante of Aunt Léonie and, before her retirement, a fierce rival of Francoise. The narrator is initially mistaken in his assessment of M. de Charlus (131). Charlus seemed to do nothing, didn't write, didn't paint, nor even read seriously, but could realise the deceptive charm of society people, rather like reindeer can find and digest lichens and mosses in which transformed state they 204

may be used as food by the Eskimos. This is the impression that M. de Charlus encouraged in later life. However, when he was young and used to play with his cousin, Oriane, later the Duchesse de Guermantes, the narrator is (132) amazed to learn that the Baron had painted the huge fan decorated with black and yellow irises which the Duchesse used and that he had once composed a sonatina for her. On the occasion of an early misunderstanding with Montesquiou, Proust sent gifts of a flowering cherry, as we have seen, and a bonsai specimen as the Comte had a Japanese garden and, as is so essential to such an undertaking, a Japanese gardener called Hata (133). Proust seems to have had a mild fascination for bonsai and miniature trees as he told Marie Nordlinger in a letter written in early February 1904 (134), thanking her for sending him some seeds. The seeds were ideal flowers for the man who fears perfumes, seeds, the flowers of imagination, just as the dwarf trees at Bing's were trees of the imagination. She was at that time employed by Siegfried Bing (1838-1905) who dealt in Japanese objet d'art. Proust also told Mme Straus on 21 June 1907 (135) that he had three pathetic little Japanese trees for her, obtained by his secretary (Robert Ulrich at that time), looking quite different from what he thought had been advertised. But he hoped that they would grow old and tiny. He said that Mont Blanc, 4810m high, seen through opera glasses was the same. Proust was more interested in a sense of scale than inadvertantly adding 2 m to the height of Mont Blanc; he was not a numbers person. He has Albertine fantasise to the narrator (136) about lemon ices seen as mountains on a tiny scale, like Japanese dwarf trees are still cedars, or oaks.

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There is a real difference between a bonsai plant, which is a normal shrub or tree which is kept small by regular and systematic root and shoot pruning and repotting, and a dwarf tree such as a dwarf conifer, which is abnormal and often suffering from a benign disease syndrome which stunts the growth pattern of the plant to keep it dwarf without intervention from the grower. In such dwarf plants the disease sometimes succumbs, the plant resumes normal health, losing its dwarfness and becoming useless. Both sorts of miniature tree were in vogue at the turn of the century. The hydrangea was, curiously, the flower most associated with Montesquiou in real life. He had a bathroom designed by Emile Galle (1846-1904) decorated with every variation on the theme of the hortensia, the mop-headed Hydrangea. The common name `hortensia' comes from the early Latin name for the flower, H. hortensis, which is now a synonym for H. macrophylla subsp. macrophylla. Montesquiou called the first volume of the definitive edition of his collected verse Les Hortensias bleus when published in December 1906 and sent to Proust (137). This was later inscribed by the author at Proust's request (138). Proust used hortensias in floral arrangements in a rather mannered sketch in Les Plaisirs...(139), but they are more convincing as a part of the Normandy landscape (140), as Norman as pink hydrangeas seen from Honfleur to Valognes, from Pont l'Eveque to Saint-Vaast, imported, with the fresh tints of Chinese pottery brought by Jacques Cartier from Pekin. Cartier (1491-1557) was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany, but was more associated with earlier voyages of discovery in North America and Canada than to the east where hortensias originated. However, H. arborescens with cream flowers is a 206

native of eastern North America, but was introduced to Europe later than his time in about 1736. It was Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828), a Swedish doctor working at the Dutch tradingpost on an island in Nagasaki Harbour in Japan who, in 1775 or 1776 first encountered H. macrophylla subsp. macrophylla, the mop-headed hydrangea of gardens. This subspecies is now thought to be a hybrid between long cultivated forms of the Japanese H. serrata and H. macrophylla subsp. not-malls from coastal regions of Japan. Then in 1789 the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, received more hydrangea material from China introduced by Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) corresponding closely with the plants already found by Thunberg in Japan. Further introductions to Europe, including France, occurred in 1796 and 1830 and from these beginnings may be traced the more than 300 different mop-head and lace-cap garden varieties now known. The early introductions from China and Japan had clearly been long cultivated there and grow so well in places like Normandy where the habitats are similar to those in their native Japan. Montesquiou reaffirmed for Proust the importance of Gustave Moreau as an artist, about whom Proust wrote (141). He tells of paintings with untamed horses full of sensibility, trapped with gems and roses and a poet with a woman's face, lyre in his hand, and beardless men with feminine faces, garlanded with hydrangeas and swaying branches of tuberoses. He tells of colours not found in our world. Writing to Montesquiou on 2 July 1893 (142) Proust, who was not then quite 22 years old, declared that on the day before, at the home of Mme de Wagram, he had seen the Comtesse Greffulhe. With hair dressed in a Polynesian grace, mauve orchids hung down to the nape of her neck like the 'hats of 207

flowers' M. Renan celebrated. He had never seen a woman so beautiful. Montesquiou was her cousin and in later life, although still on friendly terms, she admitted to finding Proust and his particular type of flattery very tiresome. On the occasion that M. de Charlus visits the home of the narrator, ill in bed, and loans him a book by Bergotte (143), the Baron says that one should not condemn in others what one does not feel oneself. The Baron loves the scent of roses, but has a friend to whom it gives fever, this hardly being a reason to consider him inferior. Proust suffered from rose fever and declined an invitation from Louisa de Mornand on 2 June 1903 (144) because, as he told her, each year between 15 May and 15 July he had an absurd ailment, a flower fever, during which time it was better for him to stay indoors. La fièvre des fleurs is known as rose fever in English. In his essay on Montesquiou (145), Proust refers to the oleander being like bouquets of lips showering their forgiving kisses on those who have known great love. The oleander is Neriuin oleander, one of three shrubby species in the genus and a native of the Mediterranean region and east into south-western Asia. It is not frost-hardy in western Europe and is poisonous, but its long flowering period from June to October with copious red, pink, buff, yellow, or white single- or double-flowers and its tough constitutuion in warmer gardens continue to make it popular, if old fashioned. Meeting an irritable Charlus (146), the narrator is greeted with mock anger, feigned rage, when the Baron quips that he will one day mistake Mme de Villeparisis's lap for the lavatory with unforeseen results. Charlus has been irritated because the narrator did not see, or recognise on the binding of Bergotte's 208

book the myosotis over the door of Balbec church, this being the Baron's way of saying "Forget me not". In a moment between sleeping and waking the narrator recalls (147) he had dreamt that M. de Charlus, who was strangely a hundred and ten years old, had boxed the ears of his mother, Mme Verdurin, because she had paid five billion francs for a bunch of violets. It was sufficient to make him feel entirely refreshed. The Baron speaking with Mme Verdurin after a performance of the Vinteuil Septet (148), when the Queen of Naples forgets her fan is shown it by Mme Verdurin. The Baron approaches the object with mock veneration exclaiming how touchingly hideous it is with its little violet. He is sure that if Swann was there he would have had convulsions. Composing himself somehow, the Baron tells her that he will buy it at any price when the sale of the Queen's belongings occurs, as it will, because she has no money. Writing to Montesquiou soon after 8 November 1907 (149) about the lecture which the Comte had given on Versailles, Proust thanked him and added that Montesquiou's house was entirely pervaded by his presence and an absence that is also a presence (a reference to the late Gabriel Yturri, intimate and secretary to Montesquiou). Proust also recalled the smell of dead leaves and the strains of dead lyres mingled with the scent of massed orange blossom at the event, but now he was unwell. He concluded by saying how much Montesquiou reminded him of both Pascal and of Sarah Bernhardt. Tadie wrote that (150) the Versailles of Proust was not that of Louis XIV, but of Montesquiou who had lived in the town for a time at the Pavilion des Muses. Tadie continued that (151) Montesquiou was an historian who did not shrink from comedy, horror, or erudition and who, for Proust, related romanticism to 209

a then forgotten seventeenth century and the baroque poets. Autumn in Versailles (152) is a time when only the colours of dahlias, Indian pinks and yellow, violet, white and pink chrysanthemums remain to brighten the cold sunlight. Proust apologised to Montesquiou for not having begun any promised pastiches in a letter written on 2 March 1909 (153). He thought that when he did begin he would like to use a comment of Saint-Simon's on the Regent,"a diamond as big as a greengage", made he thought when Peter the Great arrived in Paris; but only if Montesquiou had never quoted it as pastiche should not use quotation. Kolb pointed out in a footnote to this letter, that the diamond in question was bought for the young Louis XV by the Regent, the Duc d'Orléans, with the encouragement of Saint-Simon and the gem, about the size of a greengage, became known as 'the Regent'. The greengage is an old, but particularly delicious cultivated variety of the plum, Prunus domestica. It's French name is cv. Reine Claude and it ripens in Europe in August, having small round fruit, slightly flattened at each end, olive-green with a slight red flush and a slight bloom when of perfect ripeness, the flesh yellowish-green with a flavour like no other. Although a vigorous, roundheaded tree, often with a noticeably pale trunk, it crops irregularly and attention to pruning is required to keep the trees manageable for fruit picking. Painter related (154) that on an impulse, Proust had set out on a visit to see Montesquiou on 12 December 1910 to see his new home at Le Vésinet, the Palais Rose, about 10 miles north-west of Paris. It was the first time for some years that Proust had ventured out by day and, together with out-of-season sweet peas he had bought from a florist for his host, the resulting fit of

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asthma caused him to return home. Proust never succeeded in visiting the Palais Rose. Proust had accompanied Montesquiou to a dress-rehearsal of the d'Annunzio mystery play Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien, which had a short life of just eleven performances. Having music by Debussy (155), but not completely orchestrated by him, the work sustains an antique modal atmosphere that is otherwise only used in his short piano compositions. With decor by the brilliant Bakst, choreography by Fokine and Ida Rubenstein in the role of the Saint it did not lack talent, but Proust satirised the experience of early June 1911 in a letter to Montesquiou (156). He told Montesquiou that during the last act, wired to the electrode of his grip, he was convulsed as in an electric chair and had been confined to bed ever since and unable to order fruit or flowers to be sent in homage! Proust's affection for hawthorn resurfaces in a letter written to Montesquiou on 21 March 1912 (157), advising amongst other matters, that the first of four extracts from the unrevised version of Du cote de chez Swann had been printed in Le Figaro, but edited and augmented without Proust's knowledge. Proust had called the piece 'White thorns, pink thorns', but the editorial changes were 'On the Threshold of Spring' with an additional banal phrase in the introductory sentence. Clearly embarrassed and upset, Proust also complained to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (1883-1963) and to his friend Georges de Lauris before getting a reply from Montesquiou, to whom he replied on 25 or 26 March (158). Proust had the impression that Montesquiou didn't like his piece on hawthoms, although he joked about what Montesquiou had called a mixture of litanies and sperm, saying that its finest expression was perhaps in a piano piece of Faure's called Romances sans paroles being what a pederast 211

might sing while raping an altar-boy. Not content to let a playful topic die, Montesquiou sent Proust a postcard of the family seat in Gascony, the Castel d'Artagnan, for Dumas's hero of the same name was an ancestor of Montesquiou. The postcard showed an enormous hawthorn tree at Artagnan, on which Proust commented (159) that Montesquiou was bound to have a hawthorn (aubépine) bigger than anyone else. The ones that Proust wrote about were less than a quarter of the size. Kolb points out in his footnote to this letter that pine is one of the many French terms for penis. Proust associated his character Charlus, not with the hydrangea, but with orchids; he is likened to a vanilla orchid flower (160). The plant which produces vanilla has male organs separated from the female, the plant remaining sterile unless hummingbirds, or certain bees convey the pollen from one to the other, or man does so artificially. In a comparable way M. de Charlus had sexual needs which depended on the coincidence of many conditions difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. In an earlier exchange between M. de Bréauté, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princesse de Parme and narrator in the Guermantes residence (161), Bréauté says that the flavour of the ice-cream served by the Duchesse that evening came from the vanilla tree [sic], with flowers both male and female, but separated by a sort of partition. He continues that no-one could get any fruit, vanilla pods, until a young negro called Albins, a native of Reunion happened to use the point of a needle to bring the organs into contact. The Duchesse in a transport of delight tells Babal that he is divine then continues to the Princesse that Swami is her usual botany teacher, the marriages between flowers being far more amusing than human ones. Wide-eyed, she adds that even in her little garden, more 212

improper things happen in daylight than at midnight in the Bois de Boulogne. Then as now! The only orchid used as a food is the South American Vanilla planfolia and related species, the fruit pods of which when slowly dried, also naturally ferment to produce the characteristic smell and flavour of vanilla. This climbing group of orchids, with ninety species in the genus, is still the source of natural vanilla, but a synthetic equivalent is, curiously, made from clove oil. Proust probably used Darwin (162) rather than Maeterlinck as a source of information because Maeterlinck's L 'Intelligence des fleurs makes no mention of the genus Vanilla, or an 1854 French article on vanilla cultivation on the island of Bourbon; indeed Maeterlinck cited Darwin as one of his sources. Proust's anthropomorphism when describing the pollination mechanisms of flowers is similar to that employed by Maeterlinck, providing the necessary linkage with his descriptions of human congress.

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Chapter 5 Living a life During the period between 1886 and 1894, the only time that Proust experienced any significant remission from asthma attacks, he volunteered on 11 November 1889 for the twelve months of national service which young Frenchmen at that time were obliged to undertake'. The prospect of the introduction of a new law extending the period of compulsory enlistment to three years no doubt played a part in his decision, as well as learning from Gaston de Caillavet (1869-1915) that life in barracks had some attractions. Furthermore, it seems that he had good commanding officers2 whom he admired and for whom he had respect. His immediate superior was Comte Armand-Pierre de Cholet, who was transformed into Guy de Brucourt in Jean Santeuil. Cholet's superior was Captain Charles Walewski (1848-1914) who, perhaps unpropitiously for a French army officer, appeared as Borodino in both Jean Santeuil and A la recherche.... Proust was stationed in Orleans, a place that in his fictional writing he transformed into Provins and Fontainebleau, both real places for Jean Santeuil, while Doncieres was his creation for A la recherche.... There is a place with that name in Lorraine, but Proust envisaged his Doncieres not far from Balbec. Given what is known of Proust's interests and temperament, it is hard to reconcile his later comments about treasuring the memories of life with the 761h Infantry Regiment as a soldier (second class), with what he must have experienced at the time. Proust was required to have sleeping accommodation in lodgings, because his occasional asthma attacks disturbed his fellow soldiers. He lodged with Mme Renvoyze at 92 rue du Faubourg-Bannier in Orleans. Some of these experiences find their way into his fictional writing. What is surprising for a man with Proust's documented and chronic ill-health is that as late as September 1915, after 215

numerous medical examinations, he was still being required to prove why the army should discharge him from the reserve. Provins In Jean Santeuil , Henri de Réveillon was soon to join the 3r Fontainebleau Infantry Regiment, but was in barracks at Provins only two hours travel from Réveillon, thus affording Jean an opportunity to glimpse a soldier's life. When Henri attends military training exercises in Provins, Jean takes a room in the Hotel d'Angleterre to be near him (4). In the evenings the men brewed punch in barracks and the young recruits were at first overcome by the heat and stink of tobacco, but they soon got used to it. In the hotel with its low-set, clear-paned windows looking like an orangery and situated on the parade ground opposite the Château, the staircase treads were as soft as a grass lawn: it felt like a private house. Orleans

Jean, having joined his regiment in Orleans (5), asks the housekeeper of his rented room in faubourg Bannier, Mme Renvoyzé, to bring up some punch for his friends. She runs to the grocer to buy some sugar and a couple of ripe oranges. A character who did not survive the transition to A la recherche...was Sister Aline, a worldly nun with a passionate past which involved Henri de Réveillon (6). Jean visits her to bring greetings from Henri, but likens her to a solitary flower among rocks where, like the flower, she is obliged to stay until death. The notion of the 'solitary flower' may re-echo the `soliary digitalis' passage which will be discussed in Chapter 7, but both of which involve the sharing of something by Jean and 216

Henri (7). When Jean and Henri later visit her grave (8), the breeze sets the wild grasses quivering while they imagine beneath the stone the body of the woman who knew what it was to desire and be desired. Doncieres Robert, the Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, is the fictional son of the Comtesse de Marsantes, who is sister of Charlus and Basin, the Duc de Guermantes. Having been invited by SaintLoup to visit him in Doncieres where he is stationed (9), the narrator visualises that it was not far from Balbec, a little fortified town in open country, where the distant sound of a hidden regiment on manoeuvre is like the sinuous screen of distant poplars proclaiming the course of the river. Retiring for the night in his hotel room in Doncieres (10) the narrator was pleased to note that the lavatory was equipped with a rosary of orris-root. Furthermore, from this closet was a view of an enclosed courtyard and his neighbour, a solitary, fair, female stranger whom he was able to watch next morning, his captive between high walls beneath two yellowing trees. The narrator continues that he discovered a long gallery in the hotel, with a corner armchair, a spinet, a blue porcelain vase containing cinerarias on a console table and, in an old frame, the portrait of a lady with powdered hair spangled with blue flowers and holding a spray of carnations. In the morning (11) he found that, contrary to his initial feelings, he had now become accustomed to his room with its red wallpaper sprinkled with black and white flowers, as though he was living at the heart of some gigantic sort of poppy. The airy world of that room was quite different from the one he 217

knew in Paris. This lively wallpaper design was apparently found in the flat that Proust occupied briefly in rue LaurentPichat belonging to the actress Réjane, after having to vacate 102 boulevard Haussmann in 1919, the last home his family had known. Saint-Loup and Rachel

One of the triangular relationships which Proust experienced throughout his life was that between Louisa de Mornand and Louis-Joseph Suchet, Marquis, later Duc d'Albufera (18771953), one of the partial models for Saint-Loup. She was a partial model for Saint-Loup's mistress Rachel. While engaged in military training, Saint-Loup hears nothing from his mistress (12), worries and provokes the narrator's reflection that, habit being the plant of human growth that least needs nutrient to live and first appears on barren rock, perhaps Saint-Loup had anticipated a rupture with Rachel to which he would become genuinely habituated. After a disagreement between SaintLoup and Rachel while in a restaurant with the narrator (13), they make up in a private room to which the narrator is also invited. Rachel offers him champagne, a Turkish cigarette and unpins a rose for him from her bodice. Proust's role as a gobetween for d'Albufera and Mornand was real and occurred in 1903 and later (14). Travelling by rail with Saint-Loup to a suburban village on the outskirts of Paris to visit his mistress (15), the narrator notices some cherry blossom adhering to its branches like a white sheath and that from a distance amongst other trees showing neither flower nor leaf, it might be taken for snow. While the narrator waits for Robert to collect Rachel (16), he wanders into a meadow swept by the cold wind, as at Combray, or the 218

banks of the Vivonne, and there is confronted by a great white pear-tree, light materialised, its flowers trembling and transformed into silver by the sun. When they meet Rachel, the unfaithful lover of Saint-Loup (17) whose background is known to the narrator, but not to Saint-Loup, she could be seen from two perspectives. Knowing what he did the narrator turned his eyes to the pear and cherry trees in the garden opposite, so that Robert thought the young man was only moved by the beauty of the trees and nothing else. Had not the narrator already concluded that relationships with people like Saint-Loup (18) are unlike buildings to which stones may be added by admixture, but like trees which draw from their sap the next knot that appears in their trunks, or the next bud in their foliage. There is a description of the Cotte espaliered apple orchard in Etreuilles (19), but there is another much elaborated on the occasion that the narrator and Saint-Loup visit Rachel (20). The villages about Paris still cohabit with the parks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 'follies' of the great. A market gardener might utilise one for his fruit trees, perhaps preserving part of the plan of a once immense orchard. Set out in quincunxes, these pear-trees took the form of quadrilaterals of white blossom lit differentially by the sun, the espaliers sometimes shadowed, or cream, or gleaming white, to create what seemed to be the roofless chambers of some ancient palace that might be found in Crete. Apples and pears bear their fruit on short shoots, or spurs and are suited to being trained as espaliers. The commonest form is to have one or more tiers of horizontal branches disposed on either side of the main trunk, with the tree being supported on a hardwood frame, or strained on wires arranged for the purpose and firmly fixed to posts. Espaliers enable the fruit trees to 219

remain compact, productive and accessible for harvesting, while simultaneously acting as a screen or hedge, depending on its height, to other parts of the garden or orchard. An espaliered fruit tree will take seven or eight years of patient pruning and training before becoming fully productive and attractive, after which it will outlive its creator and remain bearing if correctly pruned annually. The pear, Pyrus communis, has been cultivated for many centuries and is thought to be the result of the hybridisation of a number of different wild pear species, see Fig. 37. There are thirty species in this Eurasian genus, but more than 1000 cultivars now known of the common pear. Other than the seven cultivars named by the Baron de Charlus (21), Robinson listed another forty three from the Paris area in 1878 of which only eighteen were no longer in general cultivation about a century later. Robinson explained (22) that as an example of a good French orchardist, M. A. Leroy of Angers grew 1028 varieties of pear, 550 varieties of vine, 800 varieties of apple and 250 varieties of peach. The nursery of M. M. Baltet of Troyes is named by Robinson and is commemorated in the pear cv. Virginie Baltet, one referred to by Proust. Robinson also described and illustrated the cordon and espalier cultivation of pears in France at that time. The School of Horticulture established in the old kitchen garden at Versailles specialised in espaliered pears as well as roses under M. Hardy, the head of studies and whose work was perhaps known by Proust when living at the Hotel des Reservoirs. Hardy was responsible for raising many lovely roses including the white damask R. cv. Mine Hardy. At an afternoon party held by Mme de Villeparisis (23), so irritable has Saint-Loup become by a show of his mother's 220

affection in public that she leads him away to the far end of the room in an alcove hung with yellow silk where some Beauvais chairs massed their violet tapestry like purple irises in a field of buttercups. Paris

Returning to civilian life the narrator finds that his youthful recollections of M. Swann (24) were for some reason inextricably linked with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, baskets of raspberries and tarragon. Tarragon, Artemisia dracunculus, is one of 300 species in this genus belonging to the daisy family; many of the species grow in dry habitats in western North America and on the steppes of western and Central Asia. Tarragon is a native plant of southern Europe and is not reliably frost-hardy. Its leaves are used in salads, fish sauces, or for flavouring tarragon vinegar. Of the two common varieties grown, French and Russian, the former has the more distinctive flavour. On a closer acquaintance this simplistic view of Swann requires some adjustment. Although now ageing, Charles Swann remains a connoisseur of women (25), particularly at the sight of the breasts of the Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc. On taking the Marquise's hand, he views her bosom at close range and from above plunging an absorbed, almost anxious gaze deep into her corsage, with nostrils, such is her perfume, quivering like the wings of a butterfly near a half-glimpsed flower. Abruptly shaking off the intoxication that had seized him, Mme de Surgis for her part, although embarrassed, stifles a deep sigh of contagious desire. Proust used the image of the insect being attracted to the flower on a number of occasions and with a variety of different motives as will be seen in Chapter 7. 221

Proust himself had matured, moving on from what had inspired `A Young Girl's Confession' (26), or perhaps simply burying childhood memories of his mother more deeply. In that tale a young betrothed woman gives her recently widowed mother a pink carnation which is at first refused, but then pinned on reluctantly. Standing near the window the daughter draws her mother close and kisses her passionately. At a slightly more prosaic level Proust still enjoyed, when his health permitted, `A Dinner in Society' (27). Having dined well he might arrive on the boulevards feeling himself to be the centre of attention, with a gleaming white shirt front and a dark red carnation in his buttonhole. The carnation is Dianthus caiyophyllus, a native plant of western and southern France; as early as the 16`x century there were several varieties being grown. The genus comprises some 300 hardy, perennial, usually herbaceous species tending to grow in dry, sunny habitats throughout Eurasia, especially the Mediterranean region and also Africa. The sweet william of gardens is derived from the species D. barbatus, while the garden pinks come from D. plumarius. Mme Cephise Desroches

The verbena referred to in Proust's letter to Lucien Daudet (28), written in early September 1913, is probably V. officinalis, the vervain, an annual plant with tiny purplish to lavender flowers and a native wildflower in Europe. It was reputed to be an herb which assisted with childbirth, rectified nervous disorders and was also a charm against witchcraft having magical powers. It was vervain that Proust alluded to in Jean Santeuil (29) in an episode describing Jean's beautiful aunt, Mme Cephise Desroches who, marrying into the fashionable world, did not 222

fulfil her promising artistic potential much to the disappointment of her older acquaintances. Yet despite turning her back on her abilities, Cephise never lost a certain look charged with foreboding. She had an aura of verbena with its gift of happiness about her and an enchanting way of talking to people. Verbena, the type genus of the family Verbenaceae, comprises 250 mainly herbaceous, perennial, largely American temperate and tropical species with only two or three occurring naturally in the Old World. The garden verbena, V. x hybrida, is a summer bedding plant which, like many of the more ornamental species, is frost-tender; this hybrid has parents which include the species V. canadensis, V. peruviana, and V. phlogiflora. Mme Desroches (30) abandoned her position in the world for a Dutch tenor at the Opera-Comique. His mother worked during the day at a tobacco shop and the tenor had forbidden Cephise to call in the evenings. But she talked only and endlessly about love, the Opera-Comique, Holland, or about singing when any friend visited her, as a smoker needs to regularly exhale to avoid choking. It was at this time in his aunt's life that Jean accompanied her one January (31) on a visit to the Marquise de Valtognes. In the Tuileries people were walking slowly, as though cleaving the air and its substance made them happy, although the paths may have been icy for the basin in the Gardens was only half thawed. The florists had set up stalls outside their shops with primulas, lilac, hyacinths, wallflowers and daffodils and at even twenty paces the scent was strong. On reaching Mme. de Valtognes' ground floor apartment the narrow garden path was full of sprouting clumps of pansies and dandelions. Robinson (32) described and illustrated the street flower-stalls in the Paris 223

of 1883; they were then held twice weekly at the Place de la Madeleine, the Château d'Eau, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Place St Sulpice and against the Hotel Dieu. The dandelion is Taraxacum officinale, one of fifty nine species in this genus belonging to the daisy family. It is almost cosmopolitan as a species of temperate habitats, see Fig. 46. The basal rosette of jagged-edged leaves, the soft and tubular latex-filled flower stalk, the heads of bright golden-yellow flowers are very familiar, only to become transformed into globular, silvery fruiting heads which are so easy for children to blow away with a puff of breath, each little parachute-propagule capable of creating a new plant. Like the blackberry, the dandelion has the ability to produce seed without fertilisation having occurred, with the production of identifiable microspecies within the overall limits defined by the parent species. Furthermore, the dandelion can also set seed produced by the normal sexual system, involving fertilisation. This adds a further dimension of variability to the group which is notoriously difficult to accurately identify. These aspects of the reproductive system of the dandelion were unknown in Proust's time and he used them simply as wayside herbs, but only in Jean Santeuil. New people, old places

In Jean Santeuil there is a brief encounter with an English lady called Miss Smithson (33), sharing the same surname as Berlioz' Irish mistress and later wife. Jean found this Englishwoman with a flushed face and the prevailing smell of tea as diverting as an Icelandic seal, or a Numidian giraffe when he visited her in her little flat. 224

The dried leaf of Camellia sinensis is the tea of world commerce, but on the local scale there are several others such as Catha edulis, Arabian khat; Ledwn palustre, Labrador tea; Neea the/era, caparrosa from South America, and Ilex paraguariensis, Paraguay tea. Tea drinking originated in ancient China, having become a social custom there by 500 AD. The use of tea spread to Europe at the end of the 16 th century. It is a mild stimulant as the leaf contains as much as 5% caffeine, 20% tannin, lesser amounts of pectin and dextrins, with the essential oil, theol, giving the characteristic taste. Green tea is made from the unfermented dried leaf, black tea from fermented where the caffeine and tannin become chemically dissociated from each other with a resulting enhanced aroma. Additional flavours are sometimes added such as bergamot, to produce Earl Grey tea, or jasmine petals, jasmine tea. In Les Plaisirs... (34) there is another lady called Madame Lenoir but she is empty and two-dimensional. Her snobbery was all the imagination she had. Her noble smiling face had the eyes of an imbecile and her gestures were both excessive and insignificant. Her principles appeared to be invariable, like the grapes on her bonnets. At an evening spent with the Marquise de Saint-Euverte (35) the narrator is fascinated by a statuesque livery servant, useless, like a decorative warrior in a tumultuous Mantegna painting, lost in thought while slaughter surrounds him. His crinkled reddish hair, plastered with brilliantine, had glossy undulations and beak-like points suggesting to the narrator at one and the same time seaweed, fledgling doves, a bed of hyacinths and snakes. In Jean Santeuil the character of Bergotte is a great painter, not writer as in A la recherche.... In homage to the artist (36), the 225

celebrated pianist Henri Loisel agrees to give a recital at the home of M. and Mme Delven who would not otherwise have been able to afford his fee. After the concert, Bergotte's facility with words amuses the pianist and other guests when he asks for an encore of the soft passage of encroaching dusk where the pianist bends his head over the keys as though picking flowers. Thinking of the other Bergotte, the writer (37), and the subconscious impulse which may cause different sorts of people to associate with one another the narrator reflects how often we act blindly like some animals, intuitively choosing the plant 'good for us', and that may have partly explained why Bergotte surrounded himself with beautiful women of an inferior, or false nature, so as to excite his generosity to something he considered lovely. Promising to return her watercolour studies, particularly ones of Senlis, Proust wrote to Marie Nordlinger in February 1904 (38). In August that year (39) he again wrote to her, this time to express thanks for the gift of the watercolour of Senlis, a painting which hung by his bedside and was, in his will, left to Reynaldo Hahn according to Kolb. Proust wrote to her that he had once seen a mirror fitted to a window so as to command a particular view of a chosen group of trees at any hour from inside a room. Her painting not only rekindled that memory for him, in a sense being that mirror, but now from her own hands made it a very special gift of nature. He thanked her with all his heart. Writing to the novelist Henry Bordeaux (1870-1963), who Proust had met in Evian in 1899, he wrote (40) that he was touched to be remembered, the invalid and recluse and sent beautiful Savoy grapes with their leaves. He had sampled them 226

during the previous night, but would keep some for tomorrow. This letter was written soon after 3 March 1909. On 17 or 18 July 1909 Proust wrote to Hahn (41) explaining that the Comtesse Greffuhle had sent him a vine dripping with grapes and that she offered to go and see him whenever he wished. He intended sending the vine to Marie Nordlinger with a few roses to complement Gerard's line about 'the vine intertwined with the rose', but then selected Mallarme's ' When I have sucked the clarity of grapes' as more economical, not needing any roses. Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of Hahn, had lost her brother by drowning on 2 October 1908 (42). The grape-vine is Vitis vinifera, one of seventy northern temperate species in this genus. Originating in the Middle East and north-western India, the grape has been cultivated for many centuries, the fruits being edible fresh or dried, and the juice being made into a drink which if allowed to fei went, becomes alcoholic. The fermentation proceeds naturally from the yeasts, the bloom, residing on the skin of each grape. The process involves the yeast cells, which are microscopic plants, utilising and living on the sugars in the grape juice, converting the sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol while multiplying themselves. When all of the sugar is used up, or when the concentration of alcohol stops the yeasts from functioning, the fermentation ceases. All of the gas escapes the ferment in production of 'still wines', but some of the gas is deliberately retained in 'petillant wines' such as Portuguese rosé. Spumantes or champagnes are the result of a deliberate secondary fermentation process. The best grapes produce the best wine. White wines are made from green-skinned grapes from which the skins are removed before the ferment; red wines are made from dark-skinned grapes with the skins included. All parts of the grape contribute 227

to the character of a wine, but the seeds should not be crushed in the pressing as this leads to unpleasant tastes in the final wine. There are now hundreds of different grape varieties and hybrids between them from which wine can be made. The vintage is also influenced by the soil in which the vines grow, the weather experienced in any growing season, the amount of rainfall, or irrigation, the temperature during the ripening period of the grape and the skills of the wine maker (43). The arts

At a Mozart recital given in the Conservatoire by Saint-Satins (44), Proust likened the soloist to a king with a nobility no more astonishing than that of an oak-tree, nor a grace less than that of a rose. For this composer who had composed the forest symphony since Beethoven's it was a diversion to play a Mozart concerto. But, he added, human actions such as classical music are not like violet blossoms which, once withered, are of no further use to the plant, or other flowers. Rather, they are like branches put out by trees which, though some are subject to decay, hoist the future branches higher from the ground, the tree growing by a succession of branching. The least of them, the new spike of chestnut-blossom poised on older branches, seems sensible of a series of previous actions as if assured by ancestors, or old guarantors. George Eliot's Mrs Meyrick say something very similar in Daniel Deronda (p. 316), that a mother's love is like a tree that has got all the wood in it from the very first it made. The character of the actress Berma was based on a combination of those of Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane, both of whom Proust ranked highly. The narrator (45) attends a performance of the Declaraton Scene from Phèdre by his idol, Berma, in a theatre 228

which seemed consecrated to her like an altar, its officials appointed by her, each with their white carnation. Comparing the music of Vinteuil's new unpublished work, the Septet, with what he already knew of the Sonata (46) the narrator felt that its cold, electric atmosphere changed continually and was totally different and remote from the plantstrewn world of the sonata. Where that work opened on a lilywhite dawn, lingering in entanglements of honeysuckle against white geranium, he thought that the septet's unbroken surfaces emerged from the eerie silence of darkness to delineate a rosered dawn in an unknown universe. Albertine would play Vinteuil and other composers for the narrator on his pianola (47). He might imagine an eighteenth century tapestry picked out with cupids and roses when Albertine played him Rameau, or the steppes under snow when she played Borodin. Yet as he watched her was she not the greater work of art, this rosebud on his trellis, this tamed wild thing with her back to his bookcase? Proust purchased a pianola in order to play himself, but was frustrated by being unable to obtain certain favourite pieces. Although flies pollinate the flowers of many plants, such as aroids, it is the distinctive summer sound of dipterans that Proust eternalised (48). He wrote that even before proper daylight in summer he might expect to hear a tiny chorus in his room, the chamber music of that time of year, the music of the flies being rehearsed for his benefit. Proust often engaged the Poulet Quartet and other musicians to play at his home in boulevard Haussmann so that he could listen to chamber music of his own choice (49) and of which he was very fond. Sometime soon after 24 December 1911, Proust wrote to Hahn (50) about a visit made to the Durand Rue! Gallery to see an 229

exhibition of Chinese art. Hahn was told that they had met Georges Rodier, but looking like Claude Anet, and resembling an unevenly melting dollop of honey. As soon as he had caught sight of Proust his maimer had changed from a frown to `spitting rosebuds'. Anet was the pseudonym of the author Jean Schopfer (1868-1931) and Georges Rodier was a rich dilettante known to them both. In 1905 Mme Pierre Carolus-Duran had attempted suicide: later separated from her husband and known as Mme Marie Scheikevitch, she had literary interests and Proust confided in this Russian hostess. He wrote to her sometime in late May 1913 (51) saying that he was reminded how her life had once been tragic when he saw her from afar at a function wearing a white dress with a bouquet of red roses held close to her heart, looking like a transpierced Dove. Proust apparently saw her at a performance of the Ballets Russes. On 29 May Proust had attended the first historic performance of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, with decor by Bakst and Nijinsky and Karsavina in the leading roles. Proust dined with the composer, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Jean Cocteau at Larue's (52). Versailles revisited Proust wrote when young (53) that he hesitated to approach `Versailles' after many others had described that royal cemetery of foliage, its waters and statues, aristocratic and demoralizing. Passing the Hameau, he might hear doves while surrounded by the intoxicating smell of boxwood and might even be able to pick a little spring bouquet in gardens so recently plundered by autumn. But it was still a bleak time of the year. The bare trees around the Trianon, the petals of a rose shivering in the wind and a few white geranium flowers clinging to an arch above the 230

icy water made him instinctively turn up his collar. One could conjecture that Proust referred to a white-flowered, ivy-leaved climbing pelargonium flowering at such a time. His impressions were elaborated in Jean Santeuil (54). Dwelling on the ambiguities of Versailles where artifice and nature intersect, he points out that the art of the fountain is to the natural play of water what the statue is to the real being, and what terraces and follies are to real landscape features. But then almost at the limit of sight, where the statues and fountains appear to cease, there emerges a mysterious canal planted with poplars fading away somewhere, depriving the senses of another dimension of reality. After the death of his parents, to be near his ailing uncle Georges Weil and on the expiry of the lease of the apartment at 45 rue de Courcelles on 30 September 1906, Proust moved into the HOtel des Reservoirs at Versailles on 6 August while deciding where he should next live in Paris. As he told Mme Straus on 9 October 1906 (55) he had chosen a first floor apartment in the house of which he now owned half of his late mother's share, needing to live in a house that his mother once knew. He acknowledged that this would necessarily expose him to dust, trees and the noise of the street. The new apartment was at 102 boulevard Haussmann. Today it is occupied by a banking house. Writing to Marie Nordlinger on 7 December (56), Proust observed that while she was in Manchester he had been in Versailles for four months, or rather, confined to his bed there for that time. He had visited neither the Château nor the Trianon, only waking after nightfall and should be in Paris where he had apartment troubles, had started a lawsuit, having rented from October somewhere he could not access. In much 231

the same vein he wrote to his late mother's friend Mme Catusse, on 12 December (57). He told her that he had spent four months in Versailles as though in a telephone kiosk and in a place he loved so dearly, its beauty having grown so much between the time of Louis XIV and Barres. In A la recherche...Versailles is the place where the narrator sends his chauffeur to spy on the activities of Albertine (58), to be told that from the Reservoirs she went innocently to the Chateau, from the Chateau to the two Trianons, with the chauffeur following her all the time out of sight. Albertine is, of course, in collusion with the chauffeur! Bois de Boulogne

In the Bois in November (59) where trees were still green, one stunted mane of red stood out like the miraculous winter hawthorn, or an enormous bouquet of flowers, perhaps a new variety of red carnation. This re-awakening of a May-time of the leaves was an ampelopsis, Virginia creeper, draped half-way up a tree. The narrator's sentimental fantasy about the young Mme de Stermaria (60) is easily transplanted from its Breton setting to an island in the Bois where in gathering mist, drops of rain soundlessly pattern the water and the flowers of scarlet geraniums vainly strive to intensify their brilliance against the twilight. More than likely Proust had in mind once more not Geranium, but Pelargonium, the hybrids of which have vivid scarlet flowers. Robinson had an island in the Bois illustrated for his book, but had the artist omit what he considered to be the unattractive restaurant pavilion, Le Chalet des lies!

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A Florentine fantasy Proust was never to visit Florence, perhaps fearful of its impact on his subconscious self and his asthma, even though he celebrated its floral associations in his fiction. The narrator compares its imagined delights with Easter in France (61), not the spring of Combray with its frosts, but one covering the meadows of Fiesole with lilies and anemones as in Fra Angelico's pictures. Florence was, for the narrator, scented and flower-like, the City of the Lilies with its cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. Balbec was in contrast a name that still kept the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned. The name of Florence had two compartments; one, architectural and artistic, the other a lunch-table spread with fruit and a flask of Chianti overlooking the Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, narcissi and anemones. Daydreaming about the trip to Florence he had long promised himself (62), the narrator dismisses the cold Lenten weather of Paris, the liquid, freezing air about the chestnuts and planes on the boulevards. The narcissi, jonquils and anemones of the Ponte Vecchio would already be opening their petals. The jonquil, Narcissus jonquilla, is a native of Spain and Portugal, but has been cultivated elsewhere in Europe since the 16 th century and is now naturalised in places like Italy and southern France. A large number of cultivated varieties and hybrids have been derived from this yellow flowered species and its allies. Early in January 1912 (63), Proust had written to the art historian Albert Henraux (1881-1933) enquiring about the flowers in early spring around Florence and if flower-sellers are in the open air on the Ponte Vecchio. He wondered how they differed from those of Paris and the French countryside in Beauce. Then in April of the same year Proust asked (64) if he 233

had thanked Henraux for his useful information. Proust also enjoyed news of a garden of stone flowers which would not give him hay fever and a subtle reference to an unnamed Jansenist painter, who was probably Philippe de Champaigne(1602-1674). In the original letter Kolb noted that hay fever was written in English. Stone flowers are species and genera in the largely southern African family Aizoaceae, their succulent leaves often having a remarkable resemblance to pebbles, but bearing vivid, mostly unscented flowers somewhat resembling cacti: Mesembryanthernum is one of the 130 genera. Domesticity As a reaction to his socialising (65), Jean now spent hours at home reading and drinking tea with his feet by the fire. Helped by Augustin he unearthed tea-services from the attics and, as in spring when clumps of jonquils and violets re-appear, so now a tea-service appeared and exhaled its own perfumes. The narrator also withdraws from the social whirl to concentrate on writing (66) feeling that rather than intellectual discourse which people suppose that writers enjoy, he would prefer a dalliance with young girls in bloom to fire his imagination, like a once famous horse that was fed only on roses. From the balcony of the Paris apartment of his family (67) Proust, almost the post-Impressionist, sees and writes about the unbeautiful avenue and newly painted pink wall opposite with its jumble of poster advertisements. But then the sun breaks through the autumn clouds, fusing the available colours of the red trees, the wall with its blue and yellow posters and patches of sky between the clouds into a rainbow of colour reminding him of Venice. 234

A snowy moonlit night in a Paris no less captures the narrator's imagination (68), the greenspaces of the city changed into dazzling white, or in places jade-like, as though woven from the petals of flowering pear, the fountains in the squares like statues seeming to be made from bronze and crystal. The narrator notices as winter draws to a close (69) that after weeks of storms he heard in the chimney the cooing of the nesting pigeons as unexpected as the first hyacinth gently tearing open its heart to release its flower. Between 1897 and 1899 and long after, Proust was vitally interested in the Dreyfus Affair (70), so that it is unsurprising to find that Jean Santeuil and the narrator both share that interest in their respective novels. In the passages relating to Dreyfus (71), General de Boisdeffre plays himself, top-hat at an angle, youthful looking, although his cheeks had the red and purple mottling seen on garden walls in autumn when clad in Virginia Creeper. Tadie pointed out that the General gave his evidence at the trial while in uniform, not the civilian clothes provided by Proust. The only reference to quinine comes in an episode concerning Dreyfus (72), the point being made that the professional interests of specialists, such as doctors or hand-writing experts, are usually more important to those individuals than legal matters, whether civil or military. Before the advent of synthetic anti-malarial drugs, the natural alkaloid quinine was important in the treatment of the disease. The chemical is extracted from the bark of several of the forty species of Cinchona, trees which occur in nature only in the Andes. In the mid-19th century quinine was sufficiently important for the Dutch and the British to introduce the species into their colonies in Java, India and the West Indies, where it was cultivated in plantations. The species 235

C. calisaya var. ledgeriana, known as yellowbark, provides the highest yields of the alkaloid.

Remarking on the Dreyfus Affair and an antipathy toward the Jews (73), the narrator asserts that the Rumanians, Egyptians, and Turks may hate Jews, but in a French drawing-room their differences are hardly apparent. When a Jew enters with body crouching like a hyaena's and neck thrust forward it satisfies a taste for the oriental. When a Jew becomes part of society he assumes manners so Gallicised that his nose, growing like a nasturtium in unexpected directions, is more reminiscent of Mascarille's than of Solomon's. The nasturtium referred to is Tropaeolum ma] us and has the habit of scrambling and sometimes climbing everywhere. Waking and sleeping

Proust was ever searching for universal rather than specific particularities about existence having no hesitation, for example, in devoting much creative time to the experiences of going to sleep and waking up, eating oysters, drinking cider, or hinting at the gastronomic temptations offered to him by a field of flowering buttercups. The importance of such everyday events to his writing was not understood by some of the publishers approached, such as 011endorff whose Managing Director, M. Humblot, said of the manuscript to Du cote de chez Swann that he failed to understand why an author should require thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep (74). In a reflection on waking (75) Proust considered himself only part of the sleeping house, the creaking wainscot, insensible in bed like a trellised vine, or briefly stirring to stare into the 236

kaleidoscopic darkness, hardly more sentient than an apple, or a pot of jam might be. He was no better at getting up in the morning when visiting Venice with his mother (76). One hears her voice, the narrator would see nothing of the sights as long as he remained in bed. But as the world is only a planetary sundial, a single sunlit segment in the room told him what time it was, then reminded him of the shops at Combray which, on Sunday mornings, were always closing when he arrived for mass. The coffee habit Once out of bed, it was time for a coffee ritual which probably had its origins in early childhood. Celeste Albaret (77) his house keeper, left an affectionate account of how Nicolas Cottin, Proust's manservant, was required to prepare the breakfast coffee. Only Corcellet coffee and filters were used from a shop in rue de Levis in the seventeenth arrondissement. Proust liked his coffee strong and it was made in a double boiler sufficient for there to be two cups, which is all the silver coffee pot held. Proust usually decided the day before at about what time he wanted coffee, and it was prepared slightly before that time in case he rang earlier. Sometimes he rang later. If the bell still hadn't rung the filtering had to be re-done all over again to avoid the coffee standing too long. Proust would not hesitate to criticise Nicolas over the flavour. She recalled that (78) the silver coffee pot bore his initials and that the boiling hot fresh milk was served in a lidded porcelain jug. The sugar bowl was gold rimmed and bore the family monogram. A croissant always came from the same bakery in rue Pepiniere. Proust poured his own coffee into a large cup only when left 237

alone and any second cup required freshly boiled milk to be provided for him. From an early age someone else had always prepared his coffee and like his uncle, he was demanding about how it was done! Jean Santeuil (79) is careful to humour Ernestine, the cook, who could prepare his coffee at just the right temperature. In the evidently autobiographical Preface to Sesame...(80), Proust recalls '...the glass apparatus in which the horticulturist-andcook uncle made the coffee himself at the table, a tubular apparatus, elaborate like an instrument of physics that might have sine/led good, and in which it was so pleasant to see climbing in the glass bell the sudden ebullition which afterward left on the misty walls a fragrant, brown ash.' It must have been novel for the child to find his uncle rather than a servant making the morning coffee. An uncle's coffee ritual is expanded in Jean Santeuil (81). Using an extremely primitive and complicated piece of machinery only Monsieur Albert made the coffee as his personal prerogative. This glass machine with two receptacles enabled one to see the water come to the boil, steam permeate the coffee, covering the sides of the container with deposit, the water then passing through a filter and falling back into a second cylinder from which it was used. Being almost like a fragrant game for Jean, Monsieur Albert listened for the water boiling that heralded the moment when the bubbling coffee would be served. Visiting uncle Jules at Etreuilles was always a treat for Jean (82). At lunch-time when the fruit-course came the first pangs of hunger had been appeased and grapes and coffee pointed the way, for a little boy, to more casual gastronomic delights. 238

Almost as a premonition of his own later reality Proust writes of the maid of M. Beulier, Jean's tutor at school (83), Mariette. Having become used to his habits and how his books were arranged, she could unhesitatingly pick any volume from the shelves for him, placing it on his table like the coffee-pot, or a tooth-pick. On her knees blowing the fire she might hear an early pupil asking about Spinoza and helpfully ask her master finishing his coffee if he would like the Ethics. Remembering his military service, Proust writes (84) that although reveille had yet to sound, he had to get up immediately to have time to drink a glass of coffee and milk in the canteen before one of their route marches. With more time at his disposal in civil life, reading about the latest twist in the Dreyfus Affair in Le Figaro (85) was as comforting as a bowl of coffee sipped while absorbing the day's news, hot and with plenty of sugar in anticipation of the latest revelation of Monsieur Bertulus. Proust might have agreed that reading a copy of his own new article in Le Figaro could have had the edge (86): his article, damp with morning fog under the red sky over Paris and about to be read by all of those people just woken up and about to drink a morning coffee. There is a fragmented but vivid memory of an unscheduled halt on a rail journey through the Jura (87) when the train had stopped near a watchman's but beside the curving track. Standing at the window with a smell of coal-smoke he looked down at a girl of sixteen, with steaming cups of café-au-lait, and asked for one. But she did not hear him until he called louder and, turning round, smiled and came back. While drinking the coffee and the train was about to start their eyes met in an unflinching gaze of deeply felt mutual astonishment at what they found. As the train gained momentum he promised 239

himself to return on the next day and, two years later, felt that he will do so. Coffea is a genus of about forty species which occur wild mainly in the tropics of the Old World. Coffee is C. arabica, a native plant of Ethiopia, but as Baker pointed out (88) it was domesticated first in Arabia in about 500 AD as a food, being ground and mixed with butter to make a stimulating snack on desert trips. Cultivation of coffee did not spread into the Asian tropics until the Dutch introduced it into Ceylon and Java in the 17t1 century: a little later they also introduced coffee cultivation into the New World. The seeds are the coffee beans which need to be roasted before being freshly ground and mixed with hot, but not boiling water. The drink has a caffeine content of 1-2% of the dry weight of the roasted bean and also contains caffeol, an essential oil, glucose, dextrins and proteins.

Food It was not until April 1913 that Proust first met Celeste Albaret through her new husband, Odilon, who had been a chauffeur for Proust before getting married. She did not join the household until August 1914 when Nicolas Cottin, Proust's manservant, was conscripted. Celeste's account of working for Proust includes details of his eating habits or, rather, just how little he then ate and drank; two bowls of café-au-lait and two croissants a day. During the Great War he even stopped eating croissants. Proust only occasionally ate meat, fried sole, whitebait, or mullet, rarely chicken or eggs, fried potatoes, or Russian salad, never any bread of any sort, a pear, or nibbled grapes. So often Albaret recalled Proust developing a passion for a dish remembered from his youth, only to lose interest after a few 240

mouthfulls. While coffee was a staple drink, he occasionally also had an iced beer, but cider had lost its charm for him and he never drank wine, although he provided the best for any guest that he might entertain. Provisions were purchased only from those suppliers which his mother and father had once used. Meals were increasingly often prepared for him in local restaurants, such as Larue's when it still existed, or the Ritz. Céleste freely admitted to having limitations in the kitchen (89) and recalled how Proust remembered the cooking of Félicie Fitau, the old family cook who would spoil Proust and his parents, wearing her regional costume to advantage with a tall and elegant grace. On 12 July 1909, before Céleste had joined the Proust household, he had sent a note to Céline Cottin, the wife of Nicolas and like him then an employee (90). He gave her his compliments and thanks for her boeuf mode, hoping that he might achieve in his writing that night something as brilliant as her gelée, ideas as succulent as her carrots and as sustaining and fresh as her meat. There is a similar passage in A la recherche... (91) where M. de Norpois, a diplomat, dines with the narrator's parents on cold spiced beef with carrots made by the Michelangelo of their kitchen. M. de Norpois requests that he may be allowed to come again to dine. Boeufà la node was one of the dishes by which Félicie excelled herself. Living alone with his servants, in poor health, in wartime Paris had a profound effect on his attitude to food. It was a far cry from his youth. Albaret said (92) that she realised that he had a taste for quality with a loyalty to particular proven shops and restaurants and sought perfection in all things. It was in his writing that he also sought to rekindle the lost gastronomic delights of his youth. 241

Bersani (93) referred to the abundance of eating and digestion metaphors in A la recherche...quoting the observations of Jean Pommier, who attributed the aesthetics of the following passage as derived from an unfulfilled desire to eat. The narrator reveals (94) that the name of Combray has the connotation for him of an historic city partly veiled by buttercups. Growing in multitudes among the grass singly, in pairs, as companies, they were egg-yolk yellow, lustrous. He felt powerless to consummate by taste the pleasure that the sight of them always gave him, letting its purposeless beauty accumulate as he gazed over the golden expanses. From earliest childhood, by the towpath, he had been attracted to them and could even then properly spell their name. How often have children, face to face, examined closely the laquered petals of a buttercup before holding the upturned flower beneath the play-mate's chin, seeing the skin reflect its gold and cry, "You like butter !" At another level of intimacy, when the narrator is first addressed informally by Gilberte with whom he is infatuated (95), his sense of elation was as if she had held him naked in her mouth, just for the moment that she articulated the words which seemed to expose him, as the skin from a fruit is carefully removed before the pulp is swallowed. Or again when a little older, when the narrator is aroused in Albertine's bedroom (96), but is asked to stop kissing her, he felt that he was about to discover the flavour which this pink fruit concealed when he heard, abrupt and shrill, that Albertine had rung the bell with all her strength. Celeste Albaret (97) mentioned that Proust sometimes inadvertantly burnt out the empty electric kettle in his bedroom by operating the wrong switch and the embarrassment of such a situation appears in A la recherche....(98). There is a delightful 242

description of the appearance and speed with which unattended milk boils and, only if the electric switch is operated in time, the equally rapid settling of the snowy undulations and spinnakers which scatter like magnolia petals. There are eighty species in the genus Magnolia, all of which are choice trees or shrubs the majority being deciduous, many having large and showy flowers which are fragrant and white, cream, purple, or pink. Francoise in A la recherche. . .contains elements of the characters of Felice Fitau and Céleste Albaret, being a strong willed, opinionated servant with a deep seated, almost instinctive belief in the virtues of country tradition. Speaking to a passing footman (99) of her preference for the countryside instead of Paris, Francoise says that it isn't like Paris where you can't find a single buttercup flowering at Easter any more than at Christmas. Commenting on the way that the upbringing of Françoise's relatives has shaped their character and conversation (100), the narrator noticed the refusal to allow interruption which gave their talk the impregnability of a Bach fugue, these inhabitants of this village set among its chestnuts, its willows and its fields of potatoes and beetroot. Beetroot, mangold-wurzle and sugar beet are, perhaps surprisingly, three different crops which have been selected from the same wild species, Beta vulgaris, one of six species in the genus found in Europe and belonging to the salt-bush family, Chenopodiaceae.

Asparagus

Addressing her employer, the narrator's aunt (101), Francoise proclaims that she has no time to dilly-dally with her mistress as it's nearly ten o'clock, her fire not lit and still the asparagus 243

to scrape. Madame Octave responds that Francoise seems to have developed a mania for asparagus this year, but is told that the visitors from Paris won't object when they come back hungry from church. It transpires much later (102), that Francoise had cunningly sought to render the house uninhabitable to the poor kitchen-maid required to prepare asparagus day after day, the smell provoking violent attacks of asthma so that the maid had finally to leave the household's service. Proust continues the gentle innuendo begun by Francoise in a short passage where the narrator watches the preparation of asparagus in the kitchen (103). He could only be taken by their almost animal otherworldly iridescence, ultramarine and pink coloured tips which shaded imperceptibly to the white soilstained base. Stranger still, these creatures in vegetable form standing stiff in the sunlight might reappear on his plate at dinner and, later, still have the capacity for coarse humour, like a fairy in a Shakespeare play, filling his chamber pot with their lyrical nosegay. For all who may dine on asparagus cooked or raw, this surprisingly rapid piece of biochemistry is always a reminder of another of Proust's plants. Armand, Duc de Guiche (1879-1962), painter and later a distinguished scientist, was a lifelong friend of Proust. He married Elaine Greffulhe (1882-1950), the daughter of the beautiful Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe in November 1904. Proust wrote to Guiche soon after 17 December 1909 (104), referring to his writing about asparagus and having sent a gift of fruit to his wife, the Duchesse, who had lately given birth to twin sons. Proust advised that he had sent the Duchesse this fruit, identifiable by the elegant spears of asparagus placed in

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the middle. It was a vegetable which he admired as Guiche would see from his book. Proust has Elstir paint a study (105) called Bundle of Asparagus, which is the topic of conversation over dinner at the Guermantes. The Duc says that Swann had tried to make him buy a Bundle of Asparagus, but there was nothing else in the picture, just asparagus. He refused to swallow M. Elstir's asparagus costing three hundred francs. He thought that they were only worth a louis, even early in the season. A little later the Duc declares that, following on from Elstir's asparagus and those just served, it was E. de Clermont-Tonnerre who said that green asparagus grown outdoors is less impressive than that forced and should be eaten with eggs. Elisabeth, the Duchesse de Cleimont-Tonnerre (1875-1954) was the half-sister to the Duc de Guiche. In a letter replying to Gabriel Astruc dated late in December 1913 (106), Proust wrote that the painting by Edouard Manet entitled Botte d'Asperges had not been the inspiration for the Elstir painting, but that Claude Monet's water-lily studies had been in mind when writing about them in Combray. Proust continued that he didn't know that Monet had painted hawthorns and that there was no other flower he would rather see portrayed. Perhaps the inspiration for the fictional conversation about the Bundle of Asparagus was not the painting per se, now in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Cologne, but the manner of its actual acquisition in 1880 from Manet by Charles Ephrussi (18491905) who Proust knew well and who shared the same Christian name as Swann. Edmund de Waal has pointed out that the two Charles', the real and the fictional, shared so much in common. Orienti (107) noted that Ephrussi, instead of paying the agreed 245

800 francs for the painting raised the price to 1000 francs. This prompted an amused Manet to paint another still-life of a single asparagus stem for Ephrussi delivered with the artist's comment that there was one missing from the original bundle. This painting is now in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris. In 1881 Mme Lemaire and her daughter Suzette were taken to Manet's studio by Ephrussi where the artist did two pastels of Suzette. Ephrussi often encouraged his friends to commission artists with work. He founded and was editor of the influential Gazette des Beaux-Arts, in which Proust published the Preface and parts of his translation of The Bible of Amiens in 1900 before it came out in book thin,. in 1904 published by Mercure de France in Paris. The Gazette and its supplement La Chronique des arts et de la curiosite were both important sources of information for Proust. Edmund de Waal has described Charles Ephrussi who was a cousin of his great grandfather. With the narrator having become one of the regular guests of the Guermantes (108), it was the custom to serve ritual orangeade in the garden during the evening. However, at the narrator's instigation and to the amazement of old visitors the juice of stewed cherries or stewed pears was now made available. The narrator took a dislike to the Prince d'Agrigente who, covetous and unimaginative, chose the new fruit juices and so deprived him of a portion of a magical pleasure, the sense of a fruit-coloured flavour and the blossomtime that produced it.

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Motoring Proust's school friend and the son of Mme Straus, Jacques Bizet, became the director of a taxi service, Taximetres Unic de Monaco, having branches in Paris, Monaco and Cabourg (109), with skilled drivers such as Odilon Albaret and Alfred Agostinelli. Proust hired these taxis to enable himself to see more of the people and places important to his researches and, of course, became acquainted with the drivers who went on to become his employees, and more. Unic motorcars were founded and designed by Georges Richard in Puteaux, Seine in 1904 and the 12 cv model remained in production for almost twenty years being used in the taxi trade. In 1939 Unic was taken over by Simca, which was then expanding having been founded in 1935 assembling Fiat Topolino's in France (110). There is a photograph of Albaret in the driver's seat and Agostinelli as passenger in a Unic taxi parked beside the public gardens at the rear of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg in 1907 on Plate 25 in Painter. Venables, p.17, shows a picture of a Unic 10/12 hp taxi cab in Britain where there was a fleet of 250 of the French built vehicles based in Hammersmith at the National Motor Cab Company. Its works superintendent in 1911 was E.C. Esse whose assistant for about 12 months was W.O.Bentley. The young man made the vehicles more efficient and the fleet expanded to 500. Bentley had raced only motorcycles until July 1911 when he bought a Riley and then later a Sizaire-Naudin. His inventiveness and move to motorcars was the beginning of events which led to the formation in 1919 of Bentley Motors. Contre Sainte-Beuve contains an early comment on the joys of motoring (111). Looking like a single field of sunlit corn in which cornflowers and poppies showed, there would be 247

occasional gusts of wind which swept like a wave across the limitless expanse. Corn is the general term for wheat in English usage, as opposed to the word meaning maize in the Americas. Both wheat, Triticum species originating in western Asia and long cultivated, and maize, Zea mays, originating in Central and South America and long cultivated by the indigenous cultures there, are grasses. A similar image appears in A La recherche...(112) when the smell of petrol conjures a motor trip which the narrator made from Saint-Jean de la Haise to Gourville, a smell which recalled, lying in his darkened bedroom, the cornflowers, poppies and red clover which once intoxicated him. Marvelling at the transformations to time, space, landscape and art brought about by motoring (1.13) the narrator explains that when they reached the bottom of the cliff road, the car climbed effortlessly with a sound like knife grinding, the sea widening beneath them, the old houses of Montsurvent rushing towards them clutching a vine, or rose-bush. Motoring from Quetteholme past Marcouville-l'Orguei1leuse at sunset with Albertine (114), they stop to look at a half restored church with modem statues on pillars caught in the sun, together with a tall cypress which seemed to consecrate the scene. The European cypress is the Mediterranean Cupressus sempervirens, one of twenty species in the genus, the others coming from Asia and North America. With a narrow, columnar, dark evergreen habit, these familiar sentinel-like trees of the ancients are more frost-tender than the false cypresses, Chamaecyparis, of which there are seven species. The latter are distinguished from Cupressus species in having `flattened' foliage sprays instead of ones which are three-dimensional. Both genera belong to the same conifer family, Cupressaceae. 248

The junipers, Juniperus and arbor-vitae, Thuja, also belong to that family. With the narrator sharing life with Albertine in La prisonniere (115), they motor to the Bois de Boulogne and travel, during their homeward journey, along a series of little wintry lanes clothed like ruins in ivy and brambles, seeming to lead to the dwelling of some sorcerer. Graves pointed out that both ivy and bramble were sacred to the Thracian Dionysus and Osiris and, as adjacent consonants in the Beth-Luis-Nion tree (and season) alphabet at the turn of the year, are both jointly dedicated to that most magical of resurrections, the new annual cycle of seasons to which Proust may have been indirectly referring. Travels The primaeval forest cover of Europe was largely destroyed several thousand years ago as a result of the use of timber and ongoing agricultural activity. The remaining tracts of woodland became smaller and disappeared, unless deliberately conserved for hunting, or being replanted. Only a few vestiges now remain of the original post-glacial forest cover of Europe. Many of the woods about which Proust wrote are relatively modern plantations and his countryside is a place bearing the traces of repeated human intervention over the centuries, where plants and animals have been introduced from other parts of the world to create irreversible change but, yet, a cultural inheritance. Writing about the way in which exotic things may gradually, over time, seem to become quite ordinary (116), Proust gives the example of trees native to India, or the Cape, but so well acclimatised in France that nothing seems less exotic than their leaves and blossoms. He might have specified from India the garden trees and shrubs, Betula wills var. 249

jacque,nontii, Cedrus deodara, Cornus capitata, Leycesteria formosa, Picea smithiana, Pinus wallichiana, Rhododendron arboreum and R. campanulaturn. From the Cape come Aloe species, C'alodendrurn capensis, Erythrina caffra, Melianthus major, Psoralea pinnata, Sparmannia africana and Virgilia capemisis. Replying to Suzette Lemaire on 25 or 26 September 1894 (117), it seems she must have enclosed an autumn leaf in her letter to Proust for he wrote that the trophy from her walks in the woods was turning red. He goes on to say that he had never written anything for the pleasure of doing so, but only to express and so share something that particularly struck him. At the time that he wrote this letter, Proust was working on 'La Mort de Baldassare Silvande' which appeared in Les Plaisirs..., a story which Kolb speculated may contain acknowledgement of a platonic intimacy between Proust and Suzette. She was regarded by some contemporaries as not very attractive and she never married, although Charles Ephrussi was fond of her and Manet's studies show an engaging young woman. Owned by the Lavallée family since 1856, the Château de Segrez, Seine-et-Oise, had only one abortive visit by Proust whose asthma curtailed the stay with his old school friend Pierre Lavallëe (1872-1946). Yet, the property features in Les Plaisirs... (118), as he told Lavallée in a letter written on 7 or 8 April 1895 (119). Proust remembered the springtime reflections of the sky and grasses in the waters of the river (118), the poetry of the paved court of the farm, the barnyard, the dunghill and the pear tree, bent and broken like an old woman. Accompanied by his mother, Proust spent three weeks in August 1896 at the spa of Mont-Dore, Puy-de-Dôme, in central France. It was from here that Proust wrote to Hahn (120) 250

seeking to repair damage arising from disagreements with his friend. He said that at any moment of life one is the descendant of oneself and if bad seed has been mixed with the good the harvest will reflect that fact. Proust had used the same theme in Les Plaisirs...(121), which collection was published on 12 June 1896 less than two months prior to his writing to Hahn. This took the form that one should be grateful to cruel friends who may have caused pain, but who may have sown some good seed under the shower of tears which will have dried before the uncertain harvest. Proust had gone to Fontainebleau staying at the HOtel de France et Angleterre in late October 1896 in an effort to improve his health, but in a letter to his mother on 22 October (122) he wrote that he felt out-of-sorts, probably because it always took so long for him to get started on anything! He had walked for two hours in the woods in the rain, but felt fine. Then after dinner Leon Daudet took him driving until after midnight, but insisted on taking his meals with Proust and continually talking, which Proust hated. Leon (1868-1942), novelist, right-wing journalist and friend of Proust, was Alphonse Daudet's eldest son and elder brother of Lucien, one of Proust's more intimate friends. Perhaps with Leon in mind in Les Plaisirs... (123) Proust writes that your soul, to talk like Tolstoy, is a forest of genealogical trees deeply rooted in the oldest French soil, trees cultivated with such care for the fruits gathered each year with so much joy. Thinking of Combray (124), the narrator observes that he bore no ill-will against Legrandin, as they were both linked by memories of fields of buttercups and the wooden bridge there, just as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.

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On the little train making its way to the Normandy coast the narrator, ever susceptible to a new attraction (125), remembers that at Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs they were joined in their compartment by a lovely girl with magnolia skin, dark eyes and an admirable composition of form. Wanting to open a window she asked him if he minded a little fresh air and the narrator instantly thought that what he would rather have was her name and address! Not far from Evian, Thonon and Lake Geneva the Château de Coudrée was once a fortress belonging to the d'Allinges family according to Tadié (126). The château was surrounded by a fine park, splendid plane trees, together with box alleys and it was the home of Mme Anatole Bartholoni and her daughters (127). There are ten species in the plane tree genus Platanus and together they constitute the small family Platanaceae, which is northern temperate in distribution. The planes referred to by the narrator (128) are P. x hispanica, considered to be a hybrid between P. orientalis, a native of south-eastern Europe and P. occidentalis, from eastern North America and Canada. This hybrid has proved to be tolerant to mistreatment from heavy pruning, or being exposed to the atmospheric pollution of cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is accordingly often seen in city parks and streets making an elegant sight, shady in summer, colourful in autumn, or with attractive bark and persistent bauble-like fruits in winter. In spring its unfurling bright green leaves, grey below, are a delight. It was first recorded in Europe in 1663. The oriental plane is no less a magnificent tree often living to a great age if allowed. Some botanists think that the 'hybrid' is but a form of the oriental plane tree. Proust was one of the Bartholoni's guests at a musical soiree on 17 June 1897 and he afterwards sent them a copy of his Les 252

Plaisirs.... Responding to Mile Eugenie `Kiki' (1873-1951), Mme Bartholoni's daughter, on 7 July (129), Proust commented that somewhere in his book he had spoken of hollyhocks tall like young girls and when she had read that far she might greet them with the same affection as the elegant foxgloves she had described to him. Proust misquotes himself in that his hollyhocks blush like young girls. They bear no family relationship with foxgloves. The foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, is one of twenty species in a genus confined to Europe, the Mediterranean region and Central Asia, see Fig. 16. The larger flowered garden foxgloves were unknown to Proust as they originated in 1925 when the true-breeding tetraploid D. x mertonensis was created in England by hybridising D. purpurea with the yellow flowered D. grandiflora. From Bad Kreuznach in Germany, where he was staying for the second time with his mother, Proust wrote to the Marquise Sauvage de Brantes (1842-1914), a cousin of Montesquiou, on 1 September 1897 (130), beginning with a quotation about the fragrant August peach on the espalier waiting to be bitten. The extract was from a recently published poem by Stephane Mallanne in his collection called Divagations (1897). When Jean Santeuil spends time with his mother at a spa in the mountains (131), on one occasion he rests on a rock. The rows of vines before him sweep down into shadow, but it seems that the topmost leaves are paler than they should be and become gradually paler still, almost golden. It is only then that he realises that, through the clouds, a shaft of the setting sun has begun to spotlight certain of the vines. Further into autumn (132) when bunches of grapes hang at the root of every leaf, pearl-like, a hare at a sudden standstill between the rows seems

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to watch the boys who, a few yards on are working in the vines and have not seen him. Returning from a trip to Holland in October 1898 after seeing the Rembrandt Exhibition in Amsterdam (133), Proust learned of the death of Gustave Moreau and proceeded to write a tribute to the Symbolist painter. The essay contains a paragraph that poets do not entirely die and are in some form preserved to us in their work. The poet that was Moreau was dead, but the pilgrimage to the Luxembourg is made, as to a grave, to see the Woman carrying the Head of Orpheus and in those penetrating sightless eyes in that head is something seen that is the colour of pansies. Painter (134) attributed Proust as saying to Albert Flament on 11 April 1897 that the only flower he could smell without getting asthma was a pansy as he thought that it smelled like skin. Proust spent the late summer of 1899 at Amphion near Evian in the company of his friend Prince Constantin Bassaraba de Brancovan (1875-1967) who was brother to Comtesse Anna de Noailles. The family estate at the Villa Bassaraba had a fine arboretum with a noted collection (135). Amongst the specialist dendrological delights were species in the genera Crataegus and Sorbus, both members of the rose family. Like the hawthorn, C. monogyna, about which Proust wrote a great deal, the rowan (luis), Sorbus aucuparia, has an equally rich associated folklore being the second consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion Druidic alphabet (136) and celebrated for its divinatory use as well as being a protection against lightning strikes and witches' chant's. But Proust did not write about the rowan. He visited Venice twice in 1900, in May with his mother and meeting Marie Nordlinger there, then again in October during the time the family changed apartments in Paris. The narrator 254

described Venice (137) as a fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering and refreshed in the midst of the sea. This travelling, however, did not improve his health which deteriorated quite badly. Writing to his mother, whose health was not good either and who was at Zermatt in Switzerland, Proust told her on 31 August 1901 (138) that he could not understand what was causing his current asthma attacks. He did not think it was the Bois, having only driven with Roche. Marie had suggested to him it might be the saffron used for his mother's jabots, but he doubted it. Kolb pointed out that lace was laundered with saffron at one time to give it a delicate yellow shade. Saffron consists of the dried, scented, orange-yellow stigmas of the flowers of Crocus sativus. It was once used as a dye, but then production costs relegated its use to food and liqueur manufacture and now turmeric, safflower and even aniline dyes are increasingly used instead of saffron. The origins of the species C. sativus are not known, but it is probably a hybrid because it has a triploid chromosome number, is sterile and does not produce seed, only reproducing vegetatively from its corms. It has long been cultivated and has Sanscrit, Indian and Arabic names. Bowles (139) gave an interesting account of its history in his classic A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for gardeners (1952). Proust visited Cabourg in each of the years 1907, 1908 and 1909. It is in the Casino at Balbec (140) that the narrator decides to decline an invitation from Dr Cottard to join him on a visit to the Verdurins because he had heard Albertine's laugh, flesh-pink, evoking for him the pungent sensuality of the scent of geraniums. Again Proust may have had in mind

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Pelargonium species and hybrids which can have a pungent smell.

With Mme Straus staying at a spa at Lake Geneva and Proust in the Hotel des Reservoirs at Versailles, he wrote to her on 27 October 1908 (141) that he could imagine her return with sweet Alpine roses on her cheeks. Proust may have been thinking of the deep pink flowered Rosa pendulima which grows in the Alps and has the synonym R. alpina, but this would have endowed Mme Straus with more of a rubicund than fragile complexion that he said she possessed! Health

Proust's vocation was still very unclear when Ruskin died in January 1900, followed by that of Proust's father in November 1903, his mother and Charles Ephrussi in September 1905 and his uncle Georges in August 1906. This series of losses, particularly that of his mother with whom Proust had shared so much and on whom he had been so dependent, had a serious psychological impact which added to the burdens of his asthma. For six weeks in December 1905 to January 1906 he submitted to entering the psychotherapeutic clinic of Dr Paul Sollier (1861-1938) at Billancourt near the Bois de Boulogne (142), probably because he knew that Anna de Noailles had also spent a brief time there after the birth of her son and Mme Straus also knew the Drs Sollier, as the wife was also a doctor. Proust returned home as unwell as ever. Proust had always been able to identify with the grief caused by lost loved ones. In Les Plaisirs... (143) he writes about a young woman soon to be married whose mother, widowed for ten years, that evening and for the first time since her husband's 256

death wore a head of lavender on her formal black gown. She appeared confused to be so dressed, sad and happy in her mourning, giving pleasure to her daughter. Claude Ferval was the pen-name of Baronne Aimery Harty de Pierrebourg (1856-1943), the novelist, and of whom the writer Paul Hervieu (1857-19 15) was at one time grand ami. Proust wrote to her on 23 October 1908 from Versailles (144) complimenting her on her novel Ciel Rouge, also adding that Hervieu's innate sensibility beneath a cool exterior burned like a cyclamen beneath snow and surely derived from his mother. The deterioration of Proust's health was not helped by his need to move from the old family apartment at 45 rue de Courcelles to the one he finally chose after much deliberation with his friends at 102 boulevard Haussmann. This he moved into in December 1906, having rented it in October, but he knew that sentiment had overruled common-sense when making the final choice. His Mama had known the house and he was later to occupy the bedroom in which he had sat with his dying uncle Louis Weil, but it was dusty and noisy, particularly from the neighbouring tenants engaged in major renovations. The regime of sleeping by day and working by night in an effort to reduce his attacks of asthma had already started by about June 1906, but it also had the consequence of cutting him off from social interaction. In a letter written in March 1910 to Robert de Billy, a diplomat and old friend of Proust with whom he had done his military service (145), Proust confided that traces of albumin had been found in his urine, a family trait. This exacerbated his daily routine of taking veronal, on which he once over-dosed, to sleep during the day and taking caffeine as a stimulant to help him work all night. Veronal is diethyl-malonyl-urea, a white 257

crystalline substance which was used as an hypnotic from about 1903. His need to sleep during daylight and the unsuitability of the new apartment led to his decision to have his bedroom lined with cork to help combat his asthma. On 17 July 1910 he set out for Cabourg with Nicolas Cottin (146), leaving his wife, Celine, in the apartment to supervise redecoration and the installation of the cork, sealing the bedroom like a bottle as Proust put it. Writing from the Grand Hotel in Cabourg to the novelist and historian Maurice Duplay (1880-1978) sometime prior to 8 September 1910 (147), Proust explained that he had arrived there while his house was being altered. Three years earlier he had gone out all day in a closed car, but at present had only been able to go downstairs in the hotel for an hour or two every other day, yet that being more than he was able to do in Paris. Cork is the stripped and flattened bark of the Mediterranean cork oak tree, Quercus suber, an evergreen which is cultivated in Spain and Portugal for harvesting of the bark. As a material the bark is impermeable to vapour and has good sound and thermal insulation properties as well as being the traditional material used for corking bottles. In A la recherche...(148) the narrator enumerates the different kinds of sleep which can be induced by various sorts of drug of which Proust had personal experience, the sleep of datura, Indian hemp, the multiple extracts of ether, belladonna, opium and valerian all like unopened flowers until the stranger unfolds them. Datum is a genus in the potato family, Solanaceae, with ten species which occur in nature in warm temperate and tropical habitats. They are all herbs with often attractive white, pink, or purple-streaked flowers and many with distinctive spine-

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covered fruits containing numerous black seeds. These herbs contain alkaloids of the tropane group in their sap which is poisonous if not used with professional medical supervision. The drug belladonna is derived from another member of the same family, the deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, the active constituent being the alkaloid atropin. Other genera in the Solanaceae used medicinally from the earliest times include mandrake, Mandragora, and henbane, Hyoscyarnus. The plant family Cannabidaceae comprises only two genera and five species. One of the species is Cannabis saliva, Indian hemp, being the only one in the genus. The inner bark of the stems of hemp yields a useful fibre from which ropes were once made and, increasingly, clothing is now made. Other selected forms of the species yield a narcotic resin not unlike opium in its uses, secreted by glands on the leaves and flowering tops of the plants. The other genus in the family includes the species Humulus lupulus, the hop, the essential flavouring for most beers. The poppy, Papaver somnferurn, is the source of opium, the partly ripened seed pods being cut on the outside and the latex which exudes then drying and being collected, see Fig. 33. The most important alkaloid found in opium is the narcotic morphine, which is used in medicine as an alleviator of pain. Madame de Breyves's all-consuming passion for M. de Laléande (149) was formidable, his glances at her described as sweeter than shots of morphine. But had she not been the coquette, her eyes opening like flowers to tempt the young man? Proust's admiring portrait of Alphonse Daudet (150) contains a passage about the suffering that Daudet experienced while writing and how only morphia and chloral enabled him to work. 259

How strange that for different medical reasons Proust eventually found himself in the same predicament of becoming dependent on a different set of medications which enabled him to continue to write. Chioral is chloral hydrate, used as an hypnotic and anaesthetic. There is now a statue of Alphonse Daudet in the Jardin des Champs-Elysées where Proust played as a child. The valerians comprise some 200 species in the genus Valeriana occurring in Eurasia, southern Africa, temperate North America and down into the Andes. The common valerian of Europe is V. officinalis, see Fig. 52 and, as its specific epithet implies, it is used in medicine. The epithet derives from opJIcina, or officina, meaning workshop or shop, a monastic storeroom, herb-store, pharmacy, or drug shop (151). The rootstock contains a drug which has been used as a sedative and stimulant. The red valerian, Centranthus ruber, a rather weedy cottage garden plant with red or white heads of flower in summer is in the same family, but is not the medicinal valerian. In a digression on the different kinds of drug induced sleep in La prisonnière (152), the narrator observes that more varieties might be produced than a gardener could produce of carnations, or roses. He adds that gardeners also produce flowers, some of which are beautiful, others nightmare-like. As a younger man it had been sufficient for him to go to Cabourg to regain some respite from his asthma attacks (153); the Normandy where breezes mingle the odour of salt, wet leaves and milk along its woodland paths. Proust's sense of humour survived all but his most serious bouts of illness. Perhaps viewing himself as he thought others might see him he writes in Jean Santeuil (154) of the neurotic patient expecting some profound diagnosis from the doctor, only to be 260

told to replace their hat to avoid catching cold, or a snob who receives fruit from a duchesse instead of an invitation to her ball. Perhaps the secret of Proust being able to write while being chronically ill, his literary muse leading a life almost independent of his physical being (155), is explained in the passage that the idea discovered is all the food needed, reviving him, like seeds which suspend their germination if too dry, but which moisture and warmth bring to life. He is here referring to the various ways in which seeds exhibit dormancy to ensure the best chance of successful germination when favourable conditions again present themselves, but the seed itself represents a remarkable adaptation for the life of land plants. The seed, consisting of a protective envelope for the embryo of the new generation of plant and one that may be dispersed often large distances away from the parent anchored, as Maeterlinck so eloquently put it (156) by, `..the terrible law of absolute immobility,..' into its already utilised habitat niche, seems to have conferred an important adaptive advantage on seedbearing plants. They are currently the most common on earth. The more ancient gymnosperms, the ginkgos, cycads and conifers, have seeds which are borne naked on the plant, but the angiosperms, the flowering plants, have protected seeds which are more or less enclosed within an ovary of the parent plant. The seed occupies a curious position in relation to that cyclical process in sexual reproduction where the chromosome number of the old (diploid sporophyte) generation must necessarily become halved in the gamete (haploid gametophyte) generation, to facilitate reconstitution of the new sporophyte generation after fertilisation has occurred. The seed coat is diploid and represents part of the old parental sporophyte; the nutritive 261

tissues surrounding the embryo are haploid and represent the remains of the female gametophyte, while the embryo itself is diploid and represents the new sporophyte, the progeny with, most importantly, a different genetic makeup from that of the seed coat

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Chapter 6 A Ruskin interlude When Les Plaisirs...was published in June 1896 the book met with little commercial success although a number of critics recognised the literary promise of its author. Proust's work on the manuscript of Jean Santeuil had continued, but in an unresolved sort of manner. When in March 1897 Proust read an article by Robert de la Sizeranne entitled 'Ruskin et la religion de beaute in La Revue des deux mondes, his interest finally deserted his novel struggling to find a direction and by late 1899 Proust's attention was firmly focussed on a translation of John Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens, first published in parts and completed in 1884, for which no French version then existed as explained by Tadie. In Professor John Dixon Hunt's biography of Ruskin, The Wider Sea (p.382), he said of The Bible of Amiens that Ruskin described Amiens as the 'Venice of Picardy' associating his new topic and his methods in the 1880's closely with those of thirty years before in the writing of The Stones of Venice. Ruskin established the true significance of Amiens through legends, concluding in the detailed description of the sculpture of its cathedral. Venice and Amiens were founded at about the same time in the 5th century and this was not lost on Proust, as he made clear in his Preface to La Bible..., any more than Ruskin's style of writing with its long, sinuous sentences, full of colour and imagery. Through the process of translation into French, Ruskin's prose seems to have had a lasting effect on Proust's own style of writing and expression, albeit less than that of Anatole France. John Ruskin was held in the highest esteem for his influential and educative views, writing and illustrations on art, architecture and many other topics in the late 19 th century not 263

only in Britain, but in the western world. The decline of popular interest in his work makes it now difficult to appreciate the scale of his importance. However, Ruskin's aesthetic sensibilities were instructive for Proust and struck a chord in his own personality as he indicates in the Preface' to La Bible...; `...with my love for Ruskin's books was mingled, in the beginning, something of a selfish interest, a joy of the intellectual benefit I was going to draw fro,n them.., my admiration for Ruskin gave such an importance to the things he made me love that they seemed to be charged with a value greater even than that of life.' Marie Nordlinger

We may gauge Proust's excitement from the fact that he wanted to translate Ruskin into French, but had only an imperfect grasp of English. This difficulty was overcome with particular assistance from his mother, friends such as Reynaldo Hahn, Robert, Vicomte d'Humières (1868-1915), the poet and translator of Barrie and Kipling, and Marie Nordlinger, who was English and whom he had met in December 1896 through her cousin Reynaldo Hahn. She sent Proust Christmas cards and soon after 25 December 1898, het thanked her saying that while Christmas had lost meaning as an anniversary, it still had accumulated memories of candlelight, its cold and its fires and the scent of tea and mimosa. After the news of Ruskin's death appeared in Le Figaro on 21 January 1900, Proust3 wrote to her as they were still working together on the translation of La Bible.... She had earlier sent him her annotated personal copy of Ruskin's The Queen of the Air and Proust sent belated thanks with the comment that her notes inside were like little dried flowers and the gift was all the 264

more precious in being her copy which was never intended to be given away. In another of his letters to her, probably written on 18 October 1903 (4), he declared that she should not think that he'd forgotten the fresh Rose of Manchester, or disdained the heather of Varengeville. With an ailing body he had visited the Hospital at Beaune because Viollet-le-Duc said it was so beautiful it made you want to fall ill there. Varengeville-surMer was a resort close to Dieppe where Proust had promised to meet her in early August 1903 (5). The heather to which he refers is Calluna vulgaris, also known as ling, the only species in the genus, but with a wide distribution in cooler parts of Europe, east into Siberia, parts of Morocco, the Azores, Iceland and eastern North America, see Fig. 8. Growing on mountains and moorland as well as drier heath, it is evergreen and longflowering from about July until November. It is very variable in nature and many cultivated varieties have been selected and maintained from cuttings for different flower colour, foliage colour, habit and flowering time. The species grows in acidic soil and the flowers when cut are long lasting even when pressed and dry. Marie Nordlinger knew that Proust's asthma became more severe in spring and so she sent him a small, symbolic floral gift least likely to afflict him. In early February 1904 (6) he thanked her for sending him the non-balsamic balsam, seeds for one who loved flowers, but feared their perfume. These seeds were probably those of Impatiens balsamina, a tender annual once popular as a pot plant on window sills in Europe. The species is a native of India, but extends as far east as China; it was introduced to Europe in 1596. The double-flowered cultivated forms had large scentless flowers in a variety of colours. In the 265

1880's and 1890's the introduction of the balsams I. walleriana from tropical eastern Africa and I. sultanii from Zanzibar led to the hybrids called I. x holstanii and one of these is another possibility. It is less likely that she sent him seeds of the European native I. noli-tangere which has rather insignificant yellow flowers, or the 2.5m tall I. glandulifera from India, but having glorious purple or pink flowers. The 700 species in the genus are mostly tropical herbs, being notably absent from South America and Australia. The delicate brightly coloured flowers have a conspicuous spur-like projection in which nectar resides; the capsular fruits open explosively to eject the seeds. The stems are usually succulent and fragile, the leaves thin, or sometimes tending to succulence. The plants are usually easy to propagate from cuttings. She also sent him a packet of Japanese coloured pith, or paper pellets which, when dropped into a glass of water expanded into miniature flower-like and other structures of many colours. Thanking her on 17, or perhaps 24 April, 1904 (7) Proust wrote that her miraculous flowers enabled him that evening to make his own spring, a play on the words of Madame de Sevigne, his very own fluvial and inoffensive spring. Proust immortalised this gift in A la recherche. . .(8). He wrote that the Japanese place in bowls of water little fragments of paper without character or form but, becoming wet, stretch and untwist and become coloured flowers, houses, or people, as in his garden, M. Swann's park, the water-lilies on the Vivonne, all coming into being in his cup of tea. Proust's relationship with Marie Nordlinger may have been influenced by her being Hahn's cousin, but in any case it seems to have been a platonic, spiritual thing from the overall tone of Proust's correspondence. It is interesting to compare the letters 266

with, for example, those sent to Louisa de Mornand. In the dedication he made in Louisa's presentation copy of La Bible d'Amiens, published on 27 February 1904 and dedicated just after, was the couplet (9) which expressed the sentiment that although he could never win her, needing to be content with Onan's sin, he loved and admired her with all his heart. Proust did write to Marie, probably on 6 February 1904 (10), by then having completed La Bible..., the fourth French translation of the various works of Ruskin. He finished the short letter with the comment that when fit to receive her he would write, being on fire for her and Sesame. This enthusiasm for another translation, to become the fifth French translation of Ruskin's work, is somewhat at variance with the comment he made to Reynaldo Hahn in another letter written on about 27 February (11) concerning his very boring new Anglomaniac exercises. On 31 August 1904 (12), Proust wrote to Marie Nordlinger that he wanted her to feast on life with a plate full of cherries, not weeping beside a regret-filled urn. La Bible d'Amiens To assist the process of translation Proust immersed himself and his friends in Ruskin, making visits to the churches and cathedrals described by the Englishman as well as two trips to Venice to personally experience what Ruskin had written and illustrated in The Stones of Venice. Prince Emmanuel Bibesco (1877-1917) was a friend of Proust's who had had a large part to play in planning one of the itineraries of a trip to inspect religious architecture made by Proust and some friends in April 1903. Bibesco who was later to become a member of the Romanian parliament, had a sound knowledge of religious architecture according to Tadie (13). Proust wrote to Bibesco in 267

March or April 1913 (14) reminiscing on their earlier travels together saying that he remembered Senlis, Saint-Leu, Laon, Coucy and all of the fascinating things he had imparted and the almond trees in blossom at the time. The almond, Prunus dulcis, has been cultivated since before the 161h century for the edible seeds contained inside a papery or woody shell, but the early spring blossom is a delight in its own right. The species occurs naturally from parts of northern Africa, through southern Europe and on east into western Asia, but the fruits and seeds of the wild plants are smaller than those of the cultivated varieties. In the same letter, Proust declined an invitation to visit the Corntesse Joachim Murat adding that he could tell Bibesco a lot of things about those ladies and perhaps Mlle de Briey, who had recently sent him some lovely carnations. The translation of La Bible... begins with a Preface and annotations on the text are made by Proust. This is where a number of plant references are to be found, some inspired by Ruskin himself. In the Preface (15), one approaches the cathedral of Amiens, `And, coming quite up to the porch, everybody must like the pretty French Madonna in the middle of it, with her head a little aside, and her nimbus a little aside, too, like a becoming bonnet... But they could still carve, in the fourteenth century, and the Madonna and her hawthornblossom lintel are worth your looking at... ' A little later (16) Proust continues, `...how 1 love her welcome at this door of the cathedral in her simple and exquisite adornment of hawthorn. Like the rosebushes, the lilies, and the fig trees of another porch, this sculptured hawthorn is still in bloom. But this mediaeval springtime, prolonged for so long, will not be eternal, and the wind of centuries has already stripped from the front of the church, as on the solemn day of a Corpus Christi without fragrance, some of its stone roses.' Then he writes (17) 268

'She is not a work of art. She is a beautiful friend..., she will continue to receive directly on her face the wind and sun of Amiens and to let the little sparrows alight with a sure instinct of scenic effect in the hollow of her welcoming hand, or pick at the stone stamens of the antique hawthorn that has been her youthful attire for so many centuries.' In a note (18) Proust points out that Ruskin cited Bourges Cathedral as pre-eminent for its hawthorn decoration when the latter stated, 'The architect of Bourges cathedral liked hawthorns; so he has covered his porch with hawthorn,-it is a perfect Niobe of May. Never was such hawthorn; you would gather it forthwith, but for fear of being pricked. (The Stones of Venice, I, ii, 13-5).' Pevsner (19) noted how sculpted hawthorn, oak, vine and leaves of other native plants decorated the capitals of Gothic architecture in many parts of Europe including, near Nottingham, Southwell Minster which I recall once visiting as an unappreciative schoolboy. In the next note on the text (20) Proust defers to Ruskin when acknowledging difficulty experienced in identifying, '...a lily.. .not the Fleur de Lys, nor the Madonna's...' Ruskin's succinct overview (The Queen of the Air, II, 82) was as follows with my comments in square brackets, 'Consider what each of these five tribes has been for the spirit of man. First, in their nobleness; the Lilies of the Annunciation [Lilium candidum]; the Asphodels, the flower of the Elysian . fields [Asphodelus species]; the Irids, the fleur de lys of chivalry [Iris species]; and the Amaryllids, Christ's lily of the field [Narcissus tazetta?]: while the rush, trodden always underfoot, [Juncus species] became the emblem of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of their lower influence. Perdita 's 'The Crown Imperial [Fritillaria imperialis], lilies of all kinds, ' are the first tribe; which, giving the type of perfect purity in the 269

Madonna lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament of war was continually enriched by the curve of the triple petals of the Florentine 'giglio ' and the French fleur de lys...' While Ruskin was scathing about botanical Latin and, indeed, botanists in general, he also knew his plants and was able to distinguish between the lilies, amaryllids and irids of the classical authors which may have helped and perhaps reassured Proust. There are eighty species in the genus Liliu,n, which gives its name to the family to which it belongs. It is one of the largest families containing 250 genera and 3700 species. Lilium species are perennial herbs which grow from a scaly bulb. The leafy stem is terminated by racemes of often large, striking, fragrant flowers. Many of the species make excellent garden ornamentals and include L. candidum, Madonna lily; L. regale, Regal lily and L. tigrinum, tiger lily. The asphodels of classical literature are cousins of the lily and belong to the genera Asphodelus, comprising twelve species which occur wild in the Mediterranean region east into the Himalayas, and Asphodeline having fifteen species confined to the Mediterranean area. The white asphodel is Asphodelus albus and the yellow is Asphodeline lutea, both making attractive garden plants. Graves commented in his book The Greek Myths (21), that other than in acorn-eating Arcadia, asphodel roots and seeds made the staple Greek diet before the introduction of corn [i.e. wheat], asphodels growing well on waterless islands. The name amaryllid can be applied to any species in the Amaryllidaceae family, which includes not only Narcissus, daffodil and Galanthus, snowdrop, but also Leucojum, 270

snowflake; Crinum; Nerine; Hippeastrum and the type genus of the family, Amaryllis. The rushes are the 300 species of herbaceous, often tufted plants in the genus Juncus, common in cold wet habitats of the temperate zone, but not common in the tropics. Growing from tough rhizomes the leaves are variously grass-like, or needlelike, and have a long sheathing base. The dried leaves of some species are used in basketry and traditionally for chair-bottoms. The leaves were often strewn as a floor-covering and, in England, was widely celebrated as a church rushbearing custom until the early nineteenth century as described by Arthur Taylor. The clusters of small, chaffy, often brownish flowers are followed by groups of small, but distinctively flask-shaped, brown, or black fruits containing tiny seeds. (The sedges, Carex and Cyperus, may be distinguished from the rushes by usually having a stem which is three-angled and leaves arranged in three ranks about the stem. Papyrus is derived from the flattened stems of Cyperus papyrus and makes a brief appearance in La prisonniere in connection with Vinteuil's music (22)). Fritillaria imperialis, the crown imperial, is perhaps the most spectacular of a very fine group of eighty-five species in the genus. They are confined to northern temperate habitats in the wild. Growing to 1.3m tall, the crown imperial is a stately plant with a spiralling cluster of leaves arranged up the flower stalk, which is terminated by an apical tuft of smaller leaves, but beneath which are arranged a number of orange, or sometimes yellow, lily-like, pendulous flowers. Proust uses a sort of biblical pastiche in the Preface (23), 'Not appreciating until then the import of religious art in the Middle Ages, I said to myself in my enthusiasm for Ruskin: He will 271

teach me...He will make my spirit enter where it had no access, for he is a door. He will purify me, for his inspiration is like the lily of the valley. He will intoxicate me and will give me life, for he is the vine and the life. Indeed, I have felt that the mystic perfume of the rose trees of Sharon has not vanished forever, since one still breathes it, at least in his words. And now indeed the stones of Amiens have acquired for me the dignity of the stones of Venice, and almost the grandeur the Bible had, when it was still the truth in the hearts of men and solemn beauty in their works.' The genus Convallaria comprises a single species, C. majalis, the lily of the valley and it is indeed a member of the lily family. Found naturally in woodland in the northern temperate region its fragrant racemes of small, white, bell-shaped flowers appear somewhat before the two leaves expand, only ever two leaves each year. The flowers are followed by a small cluster of red berry fruits which, while attractive, are poisonous. The use of the name 'rose of Sharon' in the Holy Bible has an imprecise meaning probably having suffered from the process of multiple translation over the centuries. It is almost certainly not a rose per se, with tulip, crocus, rock rose, Cistus, daffodil and oleander all being put forward as candidates by different authors. Gardeners today know Hypericum calycinum, the evergreen, somewhat weedy ground-cover with large, unscented, yellow flowers as rose of Sharon; but it is a native of Bulgaria and northern Turkey, not the Holy Land. Some also use this common name for the pink, violet, or purple-flowered shrub Hibiscus syriacus which, despite its promising specific epithet, is a native of China from whence it was introduced into Europe some time prior to the late 16th century.

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The only reference to gourd occurs in Proust's Preface (24), in the biblical episode where Jonah sits beneath a gourd, although sometimes alternatively described as an ivy, Hedera helix. The bottle-gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, a member of the cucumber family, Cucurbitaceae, is also a climbing plant like ivy. The outer casing of the fruit becomes woody as it ages and being impermeable to liquid has long been used as a natural bottle, or cup. In a passage in the Preface (25) concerning wood-carving Proust wrote, 'Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here-but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century, and has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of it; but wood-carving was Picardy 's joy, and so far as I know, there is nothing else so beautiful cut out of the goodly trees of the world...' Proust then immediately interpolates a translated quote from Ruskin, here placed in brackets-'... (Sweet and young-grained wood it is: oak, trained and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame... and it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, and fuller of story than any book.)...' Still on wood carving, Proust continues, '...The simplicity of the figures sculpted here seems to take on, from the material in which they live, a certain quality which makes them doubly natural. And as for 'those fruits , those flowers, those leaves and those branches, ' all motifs taken front the local vegetation, which the Amiénois sculptor carved from Amiens wood, the diversity of the planes here having resulted in different degrees of chafing in the wood, one sees some wonderful contrasts of colour-as 273

where a leaf stands out in a shade other than that of its stem, recalling those loft) strains which Mr Gallé could evoke from the melodious heart of oak trees.' Commenting on Ruskin's perceptiveness, Proust writes in his Preface (26), 'If he attaches so much importance to the aspect of things, it is because this alone reveals their deep nature. Mr de la Sizeranne has admirably translated a page in which Ruskin shows that the principal lines of a tree indicate what other pernicious trees have come in its way and pushed it aside, what winds have tormented it, etc. The configuration of an object is not merely the image of its nature, it is the expression of its destiny and the outline of its history.' Thomas Hardy described the same silent struggle between trees in his atmospheric novel The Woodlanders (1887) and his poem 'In a Wood' (1887: 1896). One can acknowledge and, perhaps, agree with Wilfrid Blunt (27) who, writing of Ruskin's work Proserpina (1874-86), identified the strengths and weaknesses of Ruskin's approach to the world. Despite its untidy diffuseness and didactic tone it is probably the most stimulating book ever written about flowers for Ruskin loved them. However, his approach to nature was that of the poet and the painter and, on his own confession, was at war with botanists and their terminology. Reginald Farrer (1880-1920), the author and plant hunter, considered that Ruskin was an admirable, but very verbose, writer of doubtful mental balance through most of his life and quite off it in later years. It was the magic of the wildflower that fired Ruskin's imagination and passion as his description of the field poppy, Papaver rhoeas, shows (28). '1 have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday in the palace of the 274

Caesars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral, flower. All silk and flame. a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild grass far away like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's altars... We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field.., the poppy is painted glass; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it... always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby... When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture: the two, imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the aggrieved corolla smoothes itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can; but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days.' Such perception must have been one of the things about Ruskin that appealed to Proust. In Jean Santeuil (29), Proust wrote of the poppy in the dark world of the grass, its scarlet and simple beauty giving to a passer-by the pleasure born of brief discovery, the mystery of something which flowers lose when planted in gardens, or gathered in bunches. Proust wrote elsewhere of the pleasures of lying on the grass which, when grown tall and viewed ant-like at soil level, becomes the dark world described. There are 100 species in the genus Papaver, the poppies, and they occur largely in temperate parts of the world. The Papaveraceae family comprises twenty six different genera, some with very decorative species which may be found in gardens, such as Romneya, Eschscholzia, Meconopsis and Argeinone, but about half of the species in the family belong to Pap aver. The poppies are often annuals and may become weedy with red, red and black, or orange flowers which appear to nod coyly, but not due to the intrinsic weight of the flower, rather because the flower stalk always grows unequally along 275

one side. This nodding would seem to help protect the interior of the flower and pollen from heavy rain. The capsular fruits contain tiny seeds which are scattered over a period of time by the wind shaking the capsule like a pepper-pot. While celebrating the interaction between plants, art and architecture found in the writing of Ruskin and perhaps seeing further possibilities which existed for his own work, Proust made no distinction between art and science and he used botanical topics, such as pollination mechanisms, for their symbolic or metaphorical literary value just as he did with the new technology of his day. Macksey pointed out that (30) 'During his apprenticeship to Ruskin, Proust discovered that he saw, that he felt, and-ultimately that he wrote like Ruskin.' Just as Ruskin likened young women to different flowers in the latter part of Of Queen's Gardens, so Proust was to use a similar device in his writing. Macksey continued (31), '...the lesson of Ruskin could not be fully absorbed until his pupil had passed through all the successive stages of infatuation, discipleship, and disillusion. The trajectory of Proust 's 'affair' with the Sage of Coniston-...describes a pattern that will become familiar as he charts the course of so many passions in his novel.' One aspect of Proust's disillusion, to which Macksey referred, appears in the Preface (32) where Ruskin is criticised for the human infirmity, the intellectual insincerity, of fostering an aesthetic idolatry in his writing. Proust illustrates this tendency with the example of the views of Robert de Montesquiou who is, however, unnamed. Those who have heard him once...will know... of whom I mean to speak, whom I take here as an example, when I tell them that he recognizes admirably in the material with which a tragic actress drapes herself the very 276

fabric seen on la Mort in Le Jeune homme et Ia Mort, by Gustave Moreau. . .touched by the nobility of his recollections he exclaims: "It is truly beautiful! " not because the fabric is beautiful, but because it is the fabric painted by Moreau. . . and is thus forever sacred... to the idolaters. In his room you will see, alive in a vase or painted in frescoes on the wall by some of his artist friends, bleeding hearts, because it is the very flower one sees represented at the Madeleine in Vézelay. . .1 enjoy too deeply, even to the point of intoxication, the witty improvisations to which a particular kind of pleasure he finds in this veneration leads and inspires our idolater, to want to quarrel with him in the least.' Proust has Charles Swann indulge in this same aesthetic idolatry when buying Odette a silk scarf with a design like that worn by the Virgin in Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnjicat. The wallflower, or bleeding hearts, is the European species Cheiranthus cheiri, one of ten in the genus which occurs in the Mediterranean region and further north; they are members of the cabbage family. Although a perennial, the wallflower is often treated as a biennial in horticulture because older plants develop rather unsightly woody stems after the main flush of blossom. Wallflowers have long been cultivated being easy to grow from seed, or cuttings, and providing a splendid show of fragrant colour, yellow, red, or mahogany-brown, in early spring. Continuing his commentary on Montesquiou's aesthetic idolatry (33) Proust writes, '...I wonder whether the incomparable talker-and the listener who gives in-do not sin equally through insincerity; whether because a flower (the passion flower) resembles in some of its parts the instruments of the crucifixion, it is sacrilegious to make a present of it to a person of another• 277

religion; and whether the fact that a house may have been inhabited by Balzac (if, moreover, nothing remains in it that may inform us about him) makes it more beautiful.' Proust put his sacrilegious literary notion into practice when, shortly before 4 December 1907 (34), he wrote to Montesquiou to advise that he had sent him a plaster passion flower. Kolb pointed out that 'passion flower' was Montesquiou's nickname for his invalid sister-in-law and confidante, Comtesse Gontran de Montesquiou who died in 1887 and it was also the title of a forthcoming book of poetry by Montesquiou. As Macksey wrote (35) 'In discerning the rounds that Ruskin lost in the continuing struggle against idolatry, Proust acquired insight into his own susceptibilities- his penchant for 'sacred texts' and idolatrous pursuits. The analysis of these temptations whether under the guise of snobisme, or love, or erudition, or a mystified conception of art, became the major deconstructive activity of the novel he was yet to write but was already gathering into the `inner book'.' Passiflora is a genus comprising 500 chiefly American species of climbing plant with very distinctive flowers. The common name for these sometimes spectacular plants when in flower is a reference to Christ's passion and is attributed to Spanish priests who, first encountering these plants in South America, imagined the three stigmas to represent three nails, five anthers the five wounds, the ring of filaments, or corona, the crown of thorns, the ten perianth segments, or sepals and petals, the apostles less Judas and Peter and the lobed leaves and climbing tendrils, the hands and scourges of the persecutors.

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Sesame et les Lys Ruskin's two lectures given in Manchester in 1864 'King's Treasuries' (later 'Sesame') on reading and the value of books, and 'Of Queen's Gardens' (later 'Lilies') on the need for women's education became the work known as Sesame and Lilies first published together in 1865. It was this work that Proust translated into French and published in 1906 (36). The translation proceeded more rapidly than with La Bible.., and Marie Nordlinger, the 'Rose of Manchester' (being where Ruskin first gave his lectures), assumed the role that his mother had taken in the earlier translation by providing a first text on which he could work. Sesamum is a genus of thirty tropical species which occur from southern Africa, east into Asia, with S. indicum, sesame, or gingili, cultivated largely in India for its oil-yielding seeds. It has been described by authors as the `enchanted grain', but Proust's note to the translation (37) contends that Ruskin's choice of title for his book, based on Ruskin's own epigraph from Lucian, "You shall each have a cake of sesame,-and ten pound", was based on something more subtle. Proust writes, 'This quotation states clearly at the outset the three meanings of the word Sesame, reading which opens the doors of wisdom, Ali Baba's magic word, and the Burford (loc.cit.) further elaborated, enchanted grain.' `...Ruskin in this opening epigraph announces that all men in need should get not merely the usual charitable dole but rather a special sesame bread and ten pounds in money, which would give them the possibility of enjoying the pleasures of civilised humanity. The aesthetics of Ruskin, as of Marx who was also appalled at the ugliness in which the poor lived in London, is based on a revolutionary economic ethics-...' The sum of £10 referred to by Ruskin was not an arbitrary figure, but one which alluded to the annual sum deemed to confer voting rights for 279

householders as a result of passage in Britain of the Great Reform Bill of June 1832. In the boroughs the Act enfranchised all adult males who occupied houses with a rental value of £10 per annum or more. The Preface to Proust's translation of Sesame...takes the form of an essay on the importance of reading and in it he advocates the pursuit of rare literature back to its very source (38), `...in the leaves of a folio jealously preserved in a convent in Holland...No doubt we shall have to make a long trip,... we shall have to stop at Dordrecht, whose ivy-covered church is reflected in the still waters of the interlacing channels and in the trembling and golden Meuse where, in the evening, boats gliding along disarrange the reflected lines of the red roofs and the blue sky...' It had been with Bertrand, Vicomte de SalignacFenelon (1878-1914) that Proust had made the last of his trips abroad in October 1902 to see an important exhibition of early Flemish painters, whom Ruskin discounted, held in Bruges on 4 October and then, alone, Proust went on to Dordrecht by rail on 11 October (39). Towards the conclusion of the Preface (40) Proust writes, `Furthermore, it is not only the sentences which trace for our eyes the forms of the ancient soul. Between the sentences-and I am thinking of very ancient books which were . first recited-in the interval separating them, there still remains today as in an inviolate burial chamber, filling the interstices, a silence centuries old...This silence was still filling the pause in the sentence which, having divided to enclose it, had kept its form; and more than once, while I was reading, it brought me the perfume of a rose which the breeze entering through the open window had spread in the upper room where the Congregation

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was gathered and which had not evaporated for seventeen centuries.' Recalling the importance of Theophile Gautier's le Capitaine Fracasse to his childhood reading (41), Proust writes of the pleasure of lifting tired eyes when, '...all the exhalations of the endless fields came from far away to play silently near me, without a word offering to my inattentive nostrils the smell of clover and the sainfoin...' In his Preface, writing of the importance of the role of the poet and the painter in moulding the imagination of their audiences (42) Proust writes, ' "Take us" we would like to be able to say to Maeterlinck, to Madame de Noailles, "to the garden of Zealand where the 'out-of-fashion flowers grow', on the road perfumed 'with clover and Saint John's won", and all the places on earth about which you have not spoken to us in your books, but which you deem as beautfil as those." ' There are about 400 species in the genus Hypericum, a group of herbs and shrubs found in temperate and tropical montane parts of the world. Certain of the European herbaceous species were used by herbalists, the plants being known to Dioscorides and they were known by the common name Saint John's wort. They are easy to recognise having flowering heads filled with small fiveparted flowers and stems with opposite leaves which, when held up to the light, have clearly visible pellucid glands inside. Some of the species are weedy and can be found along roadsides and on waste ground. The flowers are not particularly fragrant, contain no nectar, but have lots of pollen which bees collect. The reference to Maeterlinck concerns his essay entitled 'Fleurs ddmodée', one of sixteen published in Paris in 1904 in his collection called Le Double Jardin.

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Among the notes to the translation of Sesarne...(43) Proust once more raised the issue of Ruskin's worship of things in the arts for what they might represent rather than what they actually are. 'When Ruskin says of the Lily that it is "the very flower of the Annunciation" he has said nothing that might make us better perceive the beauty of the lily, he only wants to make us revere it. When Maeterlinck says: "Meanwhile, in a blaze of light, the great white Lily, old lord of gardens, the only authentic prince among all the commoners issuing from the kitchen garden,... unvarying chalice with six petals of silver, whose nobility dates back to that of the Gods themselves, the immemorial Lily raises his ancient sceptre, inviolate, august, which creates around it a zone of chastity, of silence, of light," no doubt the nobility of the lily is portrayed here (as in our mind when we see it elsewhere, historic, mystic, heraldic, in the midst of the garden), but "in a blaze of light" in the midst of the other flowers, in full reality.' The lily being referred to is Lilium candidum, the Madonna lily, a Mediterranean species, but one cultivated in western Europe for several centuries. Reflecting his views on the limitations of translation, Proust wrote to Gabriel Mourey (1865-1945), publisher of the magazine Les Arts de la vie, in January or February 1905 (44). Proust told him that he was as careful as he could be with his translation, but that he was aware that the result was like a flowerless branch with only the memory of its fragrance. The magazine was planning to serialize Proust's translation of Sesame... Like the names of the sisters Gineste, another of the occasional shadows of reality that Proust allows to appear in A la recherche... occurs outside Jupien's brothel (45). When Jupien realises that M. de Charlus has been compromised by being 282

seen inside the premises by the narrator, Jupien engages the narrator in talk about the Thousand and One Nights and a copy of a translation of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies which, unknown to Jupien, the narrator had sent M. de Charlus. Jupien continues that if the narrator ever requires access to a private Sesame he is very welcome, but if he requires Lilies, he would need to go elsewhere. Proust thus makes Jupien aware that Ruskin's Sesame referred only to 'King's Treasuries', the gender speciality of Jupien, but that Lilies, Queen's Gardens, concerning the opposite sex, was another matter entirely. This reference to Ruskin's writing in a brothel context can also be construed as another example of Proust's 'sacrilegious' use of a once revered topic. Tree of Jesse Ruskin's influence may be felt in an episode where Proust simultaneously depicts an historic building containing a window in which stained-glass artists have created the genealogy of ancient families, the branches of which are symbolised by different plants, a Tree of Jesse (46). Proust writes with his mind's eye traversing the imaginary stainedglass window from a crystal sprig of clove pink, ascending on the right to a wild rose, then on the left a lily, still climbing the tree, on the right a blue love-in-a-mist, then a damask rose, a fringed pink and a Provence rose, once more a love-in-a-mist and then a clove pink. Each of these floral signatures also has a genealogical meaning and the families of Montmorency, Montmorency-Luxembourg, Choiseul and Charost are referred to. Sometimes a purely local name occurs amongst the famous ones, like a rare flower seen in a van Huysum painting. But then Proust goes on to notice on either side of the Jesse 283

window, more of them narrating the lives of persons who were at first only a lily, or love-in-a-mist, old, painted on glass and wonderful. That window shows a representation of the Prince of Wtirtemberg, symbolised by a yellow marigold, son of Louise of France, symbolised by a blue love-in-a-mist. In A la recherche... the Guermantes family has a stained-glass genealogical tree (47). The delicious scent of cloves found in only some carnations is also found in some garden pinks, because the carnation is one of the parents of the garden pink. The fringed pink referred to might be the cottage pink, Dianthus plumarius, or perhaps the Cheddar pink, D. gratianopolitanus, or even D. monspessulanus all having petals with a fringed edge. The French marigold was introduced to Europe from Mexico in 1573, the African probably being introduced at about the same time. Thus, Proust seems to have ensured that this part of the chronology for the Tree of Jesse window was correct! The genus Nigella comprises twenty species of annual herb belonging to the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae. They are easily grown from seed for annual bedding display. The finely divided leaves of many species resemble those of the unrelated fennel plant and N. hispanica from southern France and Spain is for this reason called fennel flower. The species N. damascena is native in the Mediterranean region, but was introduced to western European gardens in 1570; this is love-in-a-mist, the common name referring to the blue flowers hidden in a mistlike corona of bright green finely cut foliage. Maeterlinck described the pollination mechanism of love-in-a-mist in his little book L'Intelligence des flews. The black seeds of N. saliva, a native of parts of North Africa, Asia Minor and into Ethiopia, are often used to decorate cakes. 284

Flowers and painters Ruskin commented on how rarely the great masters painted flowers other than simply as accessories to another subject, even in the mid-19`h century (48). Blunt lists the exceptions of John Crome (1768-1821), Thomas Stothard (1755-1834), John Constable (1776-1837), Paul Sandby (1725-1809) and possibly Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1888), before the advent of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and the Impressionists such as Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883) of whom Elstir may be considered a follower. The two exponents of flower painting, as distinct from botanical illustration, in A la recherche...are Elstir and Mme de Villeparisis. Proust does acknowledge one of the earliest botanical illustrators albeit at a time when the science of botany was still developing, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) (49). In thinking of Gilberte when her plaits brushed his cheek they seemed a work of art, the very grass of Paradise, worth more than any celestial herbarium, more precious than a study of flowers by Leonardo. It is possible that Proust had in mind the study in red chalk and pen and ink held at Windsor, Folio 12424, called 'a star of Bethlehem and other plants' dating from 1505-1508. The leaves of that depiction of Ornitho ga/urn uinbellaturn, the star of Bethlehem, leaves which Lord Clark described as `swirling grasses', when growing in semi-shade describe a luxuriant almost liquid tracery which Leonardo returned to in different unrelated studies. So far as I am aware, of his contemporaries Ruskin is conspicuous in not mentioning anywhere in his writing the name of Walter Hood Fitch (1817-1892) (50), the most prolific and famous botanical illustrator of his day who worked with the Hookers of Kew, father and son, Sir William Jackson (1785285

1865) and Sir Joseph Dalton (1817-1911) for more than fifty years. This may have been partly because Fitch was esteemed by the botanists with whom he worked and to whom Ruskin objected. The facility with which Fitch generated 9960 published drawings from living and dried herbarium plant specimens during his career and his technique of subtle stylization led to his having his critics. He gave useful and genial advice to budding botanical artists in the eight articles he wrote for the Gardener's Chronicle for 1869. Certain of Fitch's illustrations are used here in the Appendix. As a curious parallel, Proust makes no mention of Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840), the most celebrated and influential flower painter in Europe, born in Belgium, but finding fame and wealth under the patronage of the Empress Josephine (1763-1814) during the First Empire. At the exhibition of the artist Bergotte in Jean Santeuil (51), the artist and his ageing model, Mme Delven, together with Jean look at his paintings as she comments on each one. In front of a vase of flowers bearing a more recent date she says to the artist that the painting is the one she wanted him to give to her husband, adding with irony that he must well remember painting it. Jean had reflected (52) that in autumn he might become aesthetically hungry for a forest of yellowing leaves to walk beneath, but more than that, he might want the whole of Fontainebleau, or perhaps to walk Hobbema's avenues with their indefinable washed out tints. Proust's essay on Rembrandt (1606-1669) (53) while perceptive, creates a totally fictional visit to the Rembrandt Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898 by an elderly John Ruskin taken there by his housekeeper as she might have taken an old 286

man to watch a card game, or brought him some grapes. From August 1889 until his death on 20 January 1900, Ruskin suffered the trauma of total mental breakdown. The delightful essay on Chardin (54) celebrates the integrity of that painter, even in the later self-portraits when his skin has faded like a well worn coat, richly and softly coloured like all things nearing their end, be it rotting leaves, sinking suns, or old men. With a pen flourished like a brush, Proust saw the whole horizon from the churchyard at Beg-Meil (55) where the pasture with its grazing cows fell away steeply in the evening, past the nearby houses and roads and where, in the distance, the fields seemed pink and the woods blue. Then above the pale violet hills, huge almost pink clouds were braided with wisps of grey. Madame de Villeparisis (56) is dismissive of the compliments about her flower paintings saying in a contradictory sort of way that it was delightful occupation even if the flowers painted were nothing wonderful. It obliged one to live with and closely study real flowers, of which one could never grow tired. But Mme de Villeparisis was at Balbec on holiday to rest her eyes. The discipline of accurately illustrating a plant, whether by a botanical artist, or a botanist having the necessary skill, often brings to light features which are not initially evident. It is time consuming, demanding and tiring. On another occasion while she is painting (57), M. Legrandin, whose opinions always seem to be vapid to the point of invisibility says, flattering her, that the flowers she is painting are of a celestial pink, even sky-pink for, he insists, there is such a colour. Drawing closer to the Marquise he tells her that her work is far beyond that of Pisanello and van Huysum with their dead herbals. Mme de Villeparisis responds that those artists 287

skillfully painted the flowers of their time some of which no longer exist. Legrandin then blithely applauds her ingenious `flowers of their time' theory. Antonio Pisanello (c.1395-1455) in the Renaissance anticipated Leonardo da Vinci's return to naturalism from stylization, while Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) from a later period created superbly finished fruit and flower studies which often included contemporary cultivated varieties some of which are now extinct. At the same afternoon party (58), the Prince von Faffenheim asks whether Mme de Villeparisis had seen the recent exhibition of flower paintings by Fantin-Latour. M. de Norpois, the diplomat, has the opinion that they are first class, the work of one of the masters of the palette, but they do not compare with those of Mme de Villeparisis which show the colour of the flower better. These comments cause the narrator to observe that the judgement of society people is so often based on a negation of true taste in favour of the habit of flattery, prevailing opinions of society, or the partiality of an old lover! In precisely this way the narrator was more interested in being introduced to members of the little band of girls by Elstir (59), than to watch the artist finishing a flower study in his studio and have its botany explained by the artist. Having become better acquainted with the little band and, in particular Albertine, the narrator is with her on the esplanade at Balbec when they meet Mme de Cambremer, her daughter-inlaw and the family lawyer (60) and they happen to discuss painters. The daughter-in-law makes comment on water-lilies, Claude Monet's paintings of them and her land near Combray. Albertine then says that the paintings must be the ones that Elstir previously told them about. Mme de Cambremer murmurs that Albertine is obviously a lover of the arts and, 288

overcome by thoughts of great art, draws a deep breath and recaptures a trail of spittle...her little signature of aesthetic rapture. With the setting sun transforming the seagulls into yellow creatures, like water-lilies on a different canvas of the series by Monet, the narrator says that had they been there the day before at the same time they could have enjoyed a Poussinlike sunset, but Mme de Cambremer will have none of Poussin, preferring by far the 'moderns' Monet, Degas, and Manet. The narrator makes the discreet comment that M. Degas has the highest regard for the Poussin's at both Chantilly and the Louvre at which, after a silence, she promises herself to renew their acquaintance. Writing about Balzac (61) Proust contended that this writer who would examine the same theme from twenty different perspectives, created books as powerful and original as Monet's fifty cathedrals, or forty water-lilies. Balzac wrote more than sixty novels depicting the various aspects of the civilization of his time under the overall title La Comedie humaine. Of Monet (62) Proust writes that while art lovers may travel far to look at a Monet painting of a poppy-field, they may not, perhaps, bother to walk amongst a field of poppies. He explains this by the proposition that the artist unveils the constituents of reality for the viewer, telling the viewer what should be recognised and loved in a painting. Proust goes on that Monet's pictures depict Argenteuil, Vetheuil, Epte and Giverny and so we seek these holy places where pink sunbeams dapple treetrunks and, in the shadow of the garden hedge, tall dahlias push through flaring scarlet. The garden of Claude Monet, Giverny, unlike that of Elstir, was and is very lovely, but owing to ill-health Proust was unable to visit it as he told Mme Straus on 8 October 1907 (63). He 289

explained that while at Evreux he went one evening to visit M. and Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre at Glisolles, but was so fed up he left the next morning without seeing any of the lovely places they had planned. Nor did he see Claude Monet's garden at Giverny, near the same bend in the river of which there was a painting in Mme Straus' drawing room. Mme Straus owned a Monet which hung in her Paris drawing room; it was the painting An arm of the Seine near Giverny, at dawn. Painter (64) said that the Clermont-Tonnerre's 18`h century chateau was set amongst water-meadows of the River Iton and that Proust arrived very late, departing after midnight and only able to see their rose garden lit by the headlights of Agostinelli's taxi. The remarkable tree lobelias of the Hawaiian Islands include species in the genus Clermontia, named by C. Gaudichaud-Beaupr6 (1789-1854) to commemorate the Marquis a generation before the one known to Proust. In his essay on Gustave Moreau (65), Proust writes that the style of this artist enables one to recognise his work even if a particular painting has never been seen before. In this strange landscape filled with foreboding and organic menace, the untamed horses seem to keep a secret and men with female faces wearing garlands of hydrangeas and branches of tuberoses are engaged on unknown business. The most familiar species in the genus Polianthes, belonging to the Agave family, is the tuberose P. tuberoses, the double-flowered form tending to be the one grown most. One of the thirteen species in this Mexican genus, the tuberose was introduced to Europe in 1629 because of its spikes of intensely fragrant white flowers which soon became popular in the cut-flower trade. It needs protection from frost in winter.

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Of François Auguste René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (17681848), who was not a painter, but writer and politician who inspired the following plant image, Proust writes (66) that there is something which surpasses the momentous events being described when Chateaubriand speaks of a small flower gathered at Chantilly, a juxtaposition which has almost spiritual The narrator quotes from Chateaubriand's impact. autobiographical Mé,noires d'outre-tombe, not published in its entirety until 1902 (67). He cites a passage about the scent of heliotrope exhaled by a patch of beans that were in flower and brought not by a breeze from our own country, but from Newfoundland and unrelated to the plant in exile; a perfume from a different world with the melancholy of regret, absence and youth. The field or broad bean, Vicia faba, has such sweetly scented flowers and had its origins in the Old World, probably in the Mediterranean area. Proust's inner self In an illuminating self-analysis focussing on his abilities to write pastiche, or dissect out and pinpoint the essence of a painter from his paintings (68) Proust writes of an inner self that expires in what is particular, but immediately lives again in what is universal. Like M. Becquerel's grains of corn he does not die, but rather revives when concord returns. He thought that the originality of a man of genius could be likened to a flower-head, a blossoming crest added to a body similar to those of other merely clever men of his generation. Proust must have recalled a classic and elementary biological experiment shown to school children where wheat grains, in order to germinate, require the simultaneous presence, the concordance of oxygen, 291

water and warmth, but without any one of which they remain alive, but dormant.

Some writers Complimenting Maurice Duplay (1880-1978), son of a former colleague of Proust's father and a family friend, on a first novel La Trempe: l'Ecole du Heros (69), Proust writes sometime in May 1905, that he enjoyed the landscape, the river and houses covered with roses and vines, the glow of the vineyards in the sunset. In a critical essay celebrating the work of Baudelaire (70), Proust selects a number of examples of lines of poetry including one about African palm-trees, as pale as ghosts, the absent coco-palms behind towering walls of fog, like scattered phantoms. While the coconut does occur in Africa, having reached there probably from somewhere in South East Asia, Baudelaire may either be referring to their apparent absence in the fogs, or his having seen other indigenous palms there such as the doum palm, Hyphaene species which, having branched trunks, are unusual in this group of plants. In the same essay Proust also cites the theme of wine in those poems praising the grape, whether ripening on hillsides, or, as a vegetable ambrosia, becoming entombed in a labourer's breast. Proust's essay on Gerard de Nerval (71) and an admiration for the novel Sylvie includes the passage that the haunting novel has a colour like the bloom on a grape and contained not in the words, but among them, like morning mist at Chantilly. Writing about authors he considers great (72) Proust declares that their souls form a garland of flowers, Regnier's sentences 292

sharply detailed like a columbine, those of Anatole France smooth, shining, like the petals of a damask rose.

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Chapter 7 Human herbalist-moral botanist Many writers have described and named particular plant species from time to time to create atmosphere, a sense of place, or provide colour in their fiction. One thinks of Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, or the Venetian garden in James' novella The Aspern Papers (1888) for example. Edith Wharton used plants in this conventional, subordinate, sometimes trifling way in The House of Mirth (1905), where Mrs Trenor comments to Lily Bart that Lady Cressida Raith wears Indian jewellery, botanizes, and makes Gus take her through the glass-houses, bothering him to death by asking him the names of the plants and treating him as if he were the gardener! In contrast, Proust places plants centre-stage, celebrating the use of a much wider range of plant-related topics which include taxonomy, botanical terminology, plant breeding systems, pollination ecology and plant geography as well as naming a large selection of plant species, some familiar, others less so. Proust's use of plants in his writing could be described as orthodox only in Les Plaisirs...and perhaps the Ruskin translations. His improvisations began in Jean Santeuil and find full expression in A la recherche.... Tadiei explained that Proust's manuscripts from about 1909 showed that he toyed with the notion of having a naturalist called Vington in his novel, but that he merged this character with that of the musician Berget sometime in 1913 and who finally became Vinteuil in the master work. As an extension of Tadie's thought about the illogicality of having a naturalist appear in the novel, this study repeatedly shows Proust having dispensed with the scientific character of Vington to retain for himself, the author, the freedom of use and misuse of botanical 295

imagery in greater variety through his other characters. He thereby reserved custodianship of his very personal, overarching, plant kingdom in the fictional world being created. The fact that Proust had ever conceived a Vington demonstrates the importance of the role of plants in the fabric of his novel. No other science receives comparable attention in A la recherche... It is equivalent to Elstir, Bergotte, and Vinteuil respectively representing the importance of fine art, writing and music. Tadie wrote that scientists play a virtually non-existent role in Proust's work. Indeed, so far as plants were concerned Proust did not distinguish between their art and their science. Some would say that botany is an amalgam of the two. In Modern Painters (1844) Ruskin expressed the view that '...the difference between the mere botanist's knowledge of plants, and the great poet's or painter's knowledge of them..' is that '..the one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium, the other, that he may render them vehicles of expression and emotion.' William Robinson though horticultural thought much the same. Samuel Beckett took another view, Proust (p.64), thinking that the impression is to the artist what the experiment is to the scientist, with the signal difference being that for the scientist the act of intelligence precedes the event, while for the artist it follows it. Proust's knowledge of plants enabled him to equip some of his fictional characters with botanical expertise, while making others ignorant of, or misinformed about them. His knowledge not only enabled him to write about an aspect of the world which was important to him and which he clearly wished to share, but one which also had a profound effect on his health and his ability to create. His knowledge provided material for the 'eccentric similes' in which he delighted as well as providing fitting symbols associated with certain events, 296

activities and characters in his writing. Another writer who would have known Balzac's 'eccentric similes' was Henry James. James was born in 1843 and had met Flaubert, Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant and Edmond de Goncourt when briefly living in Paris in 1875, when Proust was four years old. In 1905 James lectured on Balzac on a return trip to the U.S.A. His magnificently claustrophobic study of the relationship between Adam Verver and daughter Maggie, The Golden Bowl (1904), uses on several occasions in the closing chapters a repeated unspecific floral reference to signify a sense of growing completion of Maggie's 'treatment', or 'fixing' of her husband and her step-mother, his mistress. There are several instances where Proust introduces a botanical or horticultural term, the name of a famous botanist, or an obscure plant for no other apparent reason, one suspects, than that of the enjoyment of using his knowledge, or the sound of a word and committing that pleasure to posterity. Unlike Flaubert's M. Pecuchet, who considered that nomenclature is the least important part of botany and was happy to invent a plant name when he did not know, Proust understood the power of plant names. Taxonomies The informal training that Proust received from Fr Joseph Marquis, the parish priest in Illiers, the formal training at school in his biology classes, later visits to the countryside and to gardens, or from the books he read or consulted, would all have reinforced the intuitive attraction to plants he seemed to have had. This instruction would have included the principles of classification and identification of plants and other living things. It is not always generally understood that classification and 297

identification are two discrete and different activities because Proust is not the only one to sometimes use them synonymously. Bersani2 and others have commented on the stress which Proust placed on the identification and classification of perception in his work, both being parts of the same taxonomic activity which he would have encountered in a biology class. Furthermore, his perception of plants was one that he particularly wished to record', as it was with society at different periods, like a distinctive and unique flora to be found nowhere else. Proust was not the first French writer to make literary improvisations with plants, but his versatility and extended use of them seems to be unique. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais (?1494-?1553) anticipate certain of the interests of Proust's M. Brichot, such as the naming of people from plants, from places, and from regions, and vice versa in Book Three, Chapter 50. There are the narrator's digressions on the proper names of persons and places, also seen in Rabelais' Book Four, Chapter 37. Rabelais satirises a pre-botanical herbal description of a fictional herb called Pantagruelion in Book Three, Chapter 49, which when its properties and virtues have been described in Chapter 51, sounds very much like Indian hemp, Cannabis saliva! Rabelais was writing about herbals at the time when they were undergoing great change. The printed herbals of Otto Brunfels, Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530-36) and Leonhart Fuchs, De Historia Stirpium (1542) inaugurated a new approach to plant illustration begun by Pisanello and Leonardo da Vinci based on reference to the actual plant instead of a blind acceptance of received images from classical times and earlier illustrators. This change was to assist the birth of the new science called 298

botany and incidentally later resulted in Linnaeus naming the plant genera Brunfelsia and Fuchsia after these two authors. However, Rabelais was targeting an earlier generation of herbals which contained fabulous and mythical plants like the 'barnacle-goose tree' from which these birds were supposed to originate. Plants were classified according to a 'doctrine of signatures' whereby the usefulness of any particular plant to humans was thought to be shown by the shape of its leaves, flowers, or fruits. Edward Lear satirised these same notions more than three centuries later. In Book Three, Chapter 51, Rabelais provided a delightfully surreal and entertaining list of what might be described as 'plant opposites' which include dodder to flax; broom-rape to chick-pea; darnel to barley; tares to wheat; garlic to magnetic iron; fern seed to pregnant women; willow seed to immoral nuns; the smell of fig trees to mad bulls, and hemlock to goslings! The attributes, or 'characters' used in the identification and classification of organisms, or anything for that matter, are contemplated by Proust's narrator (4) who notes, having been given a verbal description of the appearance of Mme de Cambremer's lawyer, his wife and their son somewhere on the beach at Balbec, that the wife had a face like a flower in the ranunculus family and a vegetable-like growth at the corner of her eye. Helping this process of classification and identification he further notes, mankind preserving their characteristics like a family of plants, that the son had an identical growth beneath his eye like that of his mother. When living plants are unavailable for study the dried and pressed plants stored in 'herbaria' are the only alternative and these have an indefinite longevity if stored carefully. Once the herbarium specimens are correctly identified, and this may 299

involve deciding that the specimen represents a new species and requires foiiiial description according to a prescribed international code of nomenclature, they are stored in a systematic arrangement to facilitate ease of retrieval for any subsequent study. The Duchesse de Guermantes (5) murmurs an aside to the narrator towards the end of a long dialogue on family pedigrees between the Duc and General de Monserfeuil that it was not always as boring as this in her house, like an herbarium filled with plants of an earlier time. Unbeknown to the Duchesse, the narrator's researches into fashionable society made her particular herbarium one which he relished. The forerunner of the herbarium was the 'florilegium', being a collection of flowers, either illustrations of some sort, or dried and pressed flowers bound into one or more volumes for future reference, sometimes having a utilitarian value, sometimes a sentimental one. Referring to the Baron de Charlus (6) the narrator observes that he found Brichot one of his more intelligent friends, being not only kind to Morel, but also taking the trouble to cull from the Greek and Latin appropriate texts to decorate the Baron's disposition, as one might choose specimens for a curious florilegium. Boissier There comes a time when the assembled knowledge about the plant species which occur naturally in a particular area, or country makes it possible to write a manual for their identification. Most parts of the world now have such plant identification manuals, or 'floras'. This was done for the Near and the Middle East for the first time by the botanist Edmond Boissier who wrote his Flora Orientalis between 1867 and 1884. It was a significant botanical publication of its era. 300

Stearn wrote (7) that in his flora Boissier had lacked modern names for districts in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and so used the old classical names when recording the distribution of its plants. Two such classical geographic names which feature in botanical Latin, which so infuriated Ruskin, are Palatinatus pertaining to the Palatinate (Pfalz) in Germany, and Tiberis the River Tiber (Tevere) in Italy. Both names are used by Proust in conjunction with the name of Boissier when the narrator reflects on classical antiquity (8) that like his colleague Boissier, strolling from the Palatine to Tibur, he derived a more vivid sense of the writers of classical antiquity from the Baron's conversation. This is surely an oblique reference to Flora Orientalis celebrating one of the great botanical publishing events of Proust's time. If not, it is a remarkable coincidence.

Sainte-Beuve The central essay in Contre Sainte-Beuve, arguing against the method of literary criticism adopted by the then widely respected French writer Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (18041869), contains plant taxonomic imagery (9). Proust begins by stating that Sainte-Beuve's acknowledged achievement was to elicit from the biography of the artist a sense of his work and the nature of his genius; the documentation of a sort of naturalhistory of the intellectual. Proust then quotes Hippolyte Adolphe Tame (1828-1893), another respected critic, historian and philosopher, who endorsed Sainte-Beuve and his method saying that such a botanical-style analysis of the human individual is the only means of reconciling moral and natural science. Proust then allows Sainte-Beuve himself to declare (10) that with human beings it is not possible to proceed exactly as with animals or plants, a man being more complex. But he 301

continues that today it is where botany was before Jussieu and the day may come when we discover the great biological divisions of the family systems that comprise the intellect. It is only at this point that Proust proceeds to demolish the SainteBeuve system for what he considers its fundamentally flawed philosophy and concludes with a damning indictment of SainteBeuve over his cynical treatment of a trusting Charles While rejecting the intellectual Baudelaire (1821-1867). arguments of Sainte-Beuve and Taine, like them Proust uses a botanical imagery in his writing. The Baron's pears and roses

Proust enjoyed the gentle, provocative banter of showing off and sharing his plant knowledge. The Baron de Charlus in contrast openly flaunted his knowledge of plants as well as many other things. According to Painter (11), Mallarme wrote to Mery Laurent in the summer of 1897 including for her a snippet of botanical information with the comment that it would give her a chance of showing off her knowledge in front of Proust It was in her salon that Hahn had taken Proust to meet the painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) on whom the character of Elstir is partly based. Botany as a literary vehicle provided endless fascination and fin for Proust who arranges for Mme de Villeparisis to artlessly tell the Prince von Faffenheim (12) that she could claim no credit for knowing about flowers having lived all her life in the fields. She recalls that when very young she had certain notions about them due to Herr von Schlegel, who talked to her about them and she couldn't understand all he said. But he played with her and sent her a beautiful botany book in memory of a drive they took together to the Val Richer, when she fell asleep 302

on his knee. Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) was an academic, critic and leading figure of the German Romantic movement whose wife Proust once referred to in a letter (13). Proust's love of the poetry of names and their etymology, whether of places, plants, or people, occurs repeatedly in his writing such as when the Baron de Charlus (14) wishes to impress his current partner, Morel, the waiter and anyone else within earshot with his superior knowledge of pear and rose cultivars in a restaurant at Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, when Charlus quizzes both Morel and the waiter about the lack of dessert pears on the menu. The pear cultivars Bon Chretien, LouiseBonne d'Avranches, Doyennee des Cornices, Triomphe de Jodoigne, Virginie-Baltet and Passe-Colmar are all mentioned, together with appropriate and scurrilous asides about equally exotically named female acquaintances with Charlus concluding that since the menu contains no dessert pears and the Duchesse d'Angouleme not yet being in season, they may as well depart. All of these pear cultivars were grown when Proust wrote about them. Others he could have used include Beurre Bose, Beurre d'Amanlis, Beurre Diel, Jargonelle, Urbaniste, Fondante d'Automne, Comte de Lamy, Desire Cornelis, Marie Louise, Baronne de Mello, Marechal de la Cour, Glou Morceau, Josephine de Malines and Seckel, all grown in the Paris region of Proust's time (15). To further name names the Baron speaks of a M. Thibaudier sending Bon Chretien pears to the Comtesse d'Escarbagnas; Jacques Thibaud (1880-1953) was the famous violinist, Albert Thibaudet (1874-1936) was a leading critic with the Nouvelle Revue Franoise, while M.J.M.B. Thibault de Chanvalon (1725-1788) was a botanical writer, onetime Secretary of the Linnean Society of Paris and is commemorated

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in the attractive tropical American genus of heather-like plants Thibaudia. In another restaurant on another occasion (16), when the narrator is with Saint-Loup, Proust makes a subliminal association between pears and the de Jussieu family tradition for plant taxonomy in a description of the waiters, one of whom looked like an academician examining a dish of pears with an expression that M. de Jussieu might have had. But back in the same Norman restaurant (14), with the Baron playing his role as the elderly family retainer and Morel the kind-hearted master, yet impressing Morel with an overbearing snobbery about rose cultivars the Baron pleads for the removal of three withered roses decorating the table. Morel is embarrassed and asks if the Baron dislikes roses only to be told that, on the contrary, his request indicates that he does. The Baron adds that he is more susceptible to their names: ones like Baronne de Rothschild, or Marechale Niel. Morel is then asked if he likes pretty titles such as ones for his concerts when playing the violin. The 'pretty titles' for these roses involve a misnomer in the first case and incorrect spelling in the second. Is this Proust whimsically undermining the authority of Charlus while he plays gender games with the marshal, or my imagination? It was Henri Pradel of Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, who raised the lovely Tea Rose Marechal Niel in 1864 from parents unknown. The vigor of this rose has diminished alarmingly in recent time, possibly from genetic deterioration which can afflict some cultivars. It would be a pity if this rose became extinct because a number of Tea Roses have done so.

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The lone Digitalis One of several instances of fictional characters being uninformed about plants occurs in Jean Santeuil (17). To appreciate Proust's botanical pun in this passage one should be aware that both the foxglove, Digitalis and the snapdragon, Antirrhinum belong to the same family group, the Scrophulariaceae, which is characterised by species with flowers having four or five fused petals. After Jean's profound musings on a lone digitalis and a few snapdragons in family groups of four or five, Jean shows his precious and lovely `digitalis' to his friend Henri de Réveillon who, we are told, is much interested in botany. However Henri says that its only `digitalea corrunbea' and not worth taking as he has one already. He adds, laughing, that they are common being found everywhere in France, other parts of Europe and in America according to books. The character of Henri is generally taken to be based on a combination of Reynaldo Hahn who shares his initials, but in Proust has Henri reverse, and Bertrand de Fénelon. mispronounce Digitalis and give a species name which does not exist, unless corrunbea is a printer's error for cornubia, Latin for Cornouaille, where in Brittany with Reynaldo he made a visit during the time he was at work on Jean Santeuil. Furtheiiiiore, Henri mistakenly extends the natural range of foxglove to America where it is not native, but he does so with a laugh; perhaps a botanical jest involving Proust's recollection of Hahn who, we might conjecture, did not share the same foxglove-epiphany that Proust experienced when they were both on holiday together. The twenty southern European species in the genus Antirrhinum all have two-lipped corollas which contain nectar at the base of 305

a corolla-tube, the flower remaining closed to insects except bees alone which have sufficient strength to open the lips by inserting their entire body to gain access to both nectar and the pollen. This sort of floral mechanism tends to promote outcrossing and has given the fanciful common name, snapdragon, for the lips are in tension and gently snap together again when a bee departs, see Fig. 4. A. majus is the origin of most of the garden cultivars which vary in height from tall (to 30 cm), large-flowered sorts, to compact (to 12 cm), small-flowered. Although this species is a hardy perennial, the derived cultivars tend to be treated as summer bedding annuals. Other species have also been hybridised with A. majus, such as A. hispanicum and A. molle, to produce more trailing and semi-prostrate, small-flowered cultivars sometimes known as 'rock-garden hybrids.' Snapdragons are gathered from the garden by Mlle de RevellIon (18) as table decorations in the dining-room at the The North American genera Nuttallanthus, Château. Sairocarpus and Maurandella all have species that were once included in Antirrhinum in Proust's time. The bonsai manchineel A further instance of botanical misinformation is where Albertine speaks excitedly to the narrator of miniature landscapes and dwarf Japanese trees (19), but which are still felt to be full-size cedars, oaks, manchineels. She says that if she arranged a few beside water in her room she could create a forest leading to a river. At this point in the novel the narrator suspects Albertine of being duplicitous and, in her enthusiasm to ingratiate herself once more with him, correctly lists cedar, particularly Japanese cedar, as a popular subject for bonsai, also certain oaks. But manchineel is a large, tropical, West Indian

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forest tree, Hippomane mancinella, with poisonous sap and has no connection with the art of bonsai and even less with Japan. Rather, Proust represents it as a two-edged literary symbol of Albertine's superficiality, certainly as regards the plant- world and the vague and poisonous disquiet growing in the narrator's mind about the unknown aspects of her behaviour. The genus Hippomane comprises five tree species from the West Indies and Mexico, one of which, H. mancinella, has a poisonous latex in its tissues. Many of the species in the Euphorbiaceae family, to which manchineel belongs, contain latex of different sorts, such as species in the genera Manihot and Hevea, which are sources of natural rubber. For the sceptic arguing that Proust inadvertantly used manchineel in this passage, there is abundant evidence to show that he was highly selective about the terms and plants he used in his writing as already indicated. Further proof exists in a letter to Mme Arman de Caillavet, written on about 4 July 1912 (20), where Proust declared that when he had an idea he needed exact words with which to express it. When he didn't know the terms he would use books about botany, architecture, or fashion journals and very often they never provided what he wanted. He had mentioned a young Premonville to her who had promised to check some things with his botany master and although he provided some information, it had been of no use at all. The young Premonville was the nephew of Jeanne Pouquet, who was the model for the fictional Gilberte and who became the wife of another of Proust's friends, Gaston Arman, the son of Mme Arman, to whom this letter was written. In another letter to Lucien Daudet (21) seeking information and advice that was sometimes disregarded, Proust wrote in September 1913 about the flowers referred to in the first version 307

of the hawthorns where there were also dog-roses along the same path. Then he had noticed in Bonnier's Flora that dogroses don't flower until later, so that he corrected it in the book. As for the verbena and heliotrope, he thought that the former flowers from June to October and the latter from June to August. He continued that since Bonnier was dealing with wild flowers a horticulturist he had consulted told him that in a garden they could be forced as early as May when the hawthorns are still in blossom. He asked Lucien that if this is impossible in his opinion would mignonette or jasmine be possible, or any others ? Then Proust asks if he knew what the `American oak' looks like? Having sent a draft manuscript he asks to be told if there are mistakes in his new ending as he is not sure. In a collection of essays paying tribute to Proust after he died, Marcel Proust An English Tribute, Stephen Hudson wrote (p.7) that he immersed himself completely in the subject of conversation or inquiry and nothing else existed until it was resolved to his satisfaction. The cedars are conifers related to the pines and belong to the genus Cedrus of which there are four species; C. libani, cedar of Lebanon; C. atlantica, the Algerian Atlantic cedar; C. deodara, the Himalayan deodar and C. brevVolia from Cyprus. The Japanese cedar is not a true cedar being related to the swamp cypresses, Taxodium species. There is only one species of Japanese cedar, Cryptomeria japonica. All of these fine evergreen cedar trees with the possible exception of C. brevifolia which was only introduced into cultivation in 1879, would have been featured in the arboreta of Proust's day, such as that at the Villa Bassaraba and all could have been made into bonsai specimens. 308

Proust's preoccupation with accuracy and precision of expression appears in a letter he wrote, probably in October 1917 to André Gide (22). He wrote that a great writer is like seed which feeds others with the results of what itself has fed on. The vegetable kingdom (as well as humanity) involves a distribution of elements drawn from the earth (and life), which enables germination to occur, feeding the world from the same albumen as that used by the seedling. At another level, Proust is also acknowledging the dependence of all life on plants. The historian of the Fronde

M. Pierre 'the historian of the Fronde' like many experts in their field know a great deal about very little. The period in French history known as 'the Fronde', between 1642 and 1643, was when a series of attempts were made to oust Cardinal Mazarin by the Guise and Lorraine families seeking to prevent the young Louis XIV from becoming king. Proust's name for the historian of the Fronde is of interest because according to Baigent et al., (p. 454, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) an enigmatic Georges Pierre was a correspondent with John Locke in the 1660's, Locke at that time living in France and being a friend of Robert Boyle, then the current Grand-Master of the Prieuré de Sion whose term extended from 1654-1691. Further comments on the Prieuré are made in the Postscript. M. Pierre is amongst the guests watching Mme de Villeparisis at work on one of her paintings (23). Having already made one gaffe M. Pierre says to her that she appears to be painting some cherry blossoms, or perhaps mayflowers. The Duchesse de Guermantes, addressing her aunt, replies that they are in fact apple blossom. The historian agrees with the correction, but thought the season for apple blossom was over. An archivist 309

now corrects the historian by noting that the apple blossom will only peak in two or three weeks time and the Duchesse adds that in Normandy, pointing to the young Due de Chatellerault, at his father's place, the apple trees close to the sea are never really pink until late May. The Duc comments that he never sees them as they give him hay fever at which the historian expresses surprise, never having heard of flowers producing hay fever. The archivist murmurs that it is currently the fashionable complaint. The last comment by the archivist is Proust referring to himself having been appointed to an unpaid post in the Mazarine Library for five years, largely in deference to the wishes of his father, but never appearing for work there due to ill-health. The only character of Proust's to use the name `mayflower' is M. Pierre, all others using the name `hawthorn', more rarely 'thorn'or `may'. Two unnamed shrubs

Being able to share the experiences and pleasures which plants gave him was an important goal which Proust set himself with When the narrator returns to Paris after his reader. convalescence in a sanatorium and registers boredom and indifference when seeing the natural world (24) he feels that if he really had the soul of an artist, he would feel pleasure at the sight of flowers whose petals he could count, but whose colour he sadly could not adequately describe. He reflects that one cannot transmit to the reader a pleasure that one has not felt. Rather than dismiss any plant as simply a weed, a herb, shrub or tree, Proust is careful to provide a name when he knows one, so that the reader may fully share the experience being described. When Proust describes a deliberately unnamed shrub it is something of an occasion, but common enough with plant310

lovers for who has not seen and admired a plant, yet not known its name? There is a flowering shrub with saffron coloured, rose-like flowers which appears in a florist's window in Jean Santeuil (25) and because Proust admitted to being unable to invent fiction, needing to base his ideas firmly on personal experience, we might try to guess which plant had calyces which appear puffed and bursting in bud. Hibiscus does not feature by name elsewhere in his writing and this large shrub in a pot might have been one of the frost-tender, double-flowered subtropical hybrids based on H. roses-sinensfs beginning to appear in horticulture; they have flower buds with such an appearance when about to open. In another instance (26) there is a clearer description of the shape of a flower which may enable a reader to suggest the identity of the plant, even though the narrator has forgotten its name! The narrator remarks about Albertine that she was an accomplished liar, like another of the blossoming girls whose irregular profile, concave here, convex there, reminded him of certain pink flowers the name of which he had forgotten, but which have sinuous concavities. The eight species of Kalmia, belonging to the heather family, Ericaceae, are found only in North America and Cuba, resembling in some ways the Rhododendron which is also in the family. Kalmias are different because the saucer-shaped corollas in these mainly evergreen shrubs, have the anther of each stamen sitting snugly inside a little tailor-made pocket, which gives the outside of the corolla a distinctive angularity. In bud, the protuberances indicate where the pockets and anthers are located inside and, being bright pink in K. 1atfo1ia, look like clusters of sculpted pieces of icing-sugar. Known as the calico bush this species 311

was introduced into European gardens in 1734 from eastern North America, but has never become as popular as the many garden rhododendrons. Terminologies There are a number of instances where Proust uses a botanical teiiii to expand his vocabulary for dramatic effect in his writing, or perhaps simply because he liked the sound of the word. The year following each term signifies when the word was first used according to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1987). The botanical term rugous (1615) meaning wrinkled, appears in Jean Santeuil (27) in a description of spring lilacs which are an annual miracle more remarkable than the bleeding statues of Antiquity, the lilac blossom on its rugous stalks. The word flora generally relates to the goddess of that name (1508), the descriptive manual or catalogue (1777), or the plant life of a region (1778), but Proust gives it a seasonal twist (28) as in a winter flora of the grass and moss which seem to be all that persist at that time of year in the bleak countryside. Returning to springtime in Jean Santeuil (29) is the standard use of the term corolla (1671), first coined for botanists by Linnaeus (1753) in conjunction with the term calyx (1693) and of which calix was a variant (1831). In spring, when life begins again and water-lilies hoist great corollas to the surface, so in his drawing-room an unearthed tea-service once more exhaled its exotic perfume. In this passage either Proust, or the translator describes waterlilies as having floating roots which reach the surface of the pond: this is incorrect as the leaves float, the roots being anchored. 312

The playfully suggestive poem that Proust sent to Louisa de Mornand (30) in April 1904 thanking her for a photograph she had sent him and recalling time spent together in her bedroom, contains a verse about the finely woven calyx of her sleeve falling away to reveal the white stem of her arm as it is raised languidly in an unconscious gesture. It was the German botanist and founder of modem mycology, Heinrich Anton de Bary (1831-1888) who first used the term symbiosis in 1873, so that Proust's use when describing the role of Francoise, the cook, (31) was forward-looking. Françoise was likened to one partner in a symbiotic relationship, the other partner being the family for whom she cooked and who assimilated her by-products. Lichens consist of a fungus and alga living together symbiotically as a single organism, their two different metabolic systems complementing each other, the fungus a heterotroph, the alga an autotroph being able to photosynthesise. When plants are deprived of light they become etiolated, pale and drawn, a word derived from Norman French s 'étieuler, to grow into haulm (1791) and often used in a plant-related context. Pale and drawn is how Proust describes Albertine (32) in black satin, looking like an intense Parisian woman etiolated for want of fresh air. Variegation (1646) describes unusual random, or symmetrical areas of different colour, usually on the leaves of plants, instead of their normal concolorous green appearance. This patterning may be caused by disease, by genetic mutation in perfectly healthy plants, or by a disturbance of normal growth sequences

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in the growing-tip of the shoots where the leaves originate. As used by Proust (33) the word confers for the narrator a sense of uncontrollable, almost pathological change, when the unsettled weather producing variegated days each transformed Albertine into a different creature. After the death of Albertine (34) the narrator, beginning to pick up the threads of existence, realises on going into society once more how futile it seems to decorate his life with a human vegetation, robust, but often parasitic, perhaps alien to all he knows, but which his conceited senility seeks to cultivate. An equally sombre outlook colours the narrator's analogy between micro-organisms and the tensions between France and Germany, or Franroise and Albertine (35). He reflects about the balance between equilibrium and annihilation and how individuals busy themselves with everyday matters without thinking about worlds either too small, or too large to become aware of their potential and cosmic menace. Proust was aware of the difference between a native plant and an alien introduced from elsewhere. He has the narrator refer to the distinction when reflecting on the origins of certain modes of expression (36). Just as diseases seem to appear and then vanish equally quickly, so accidents occur like that which introduced into France certain American weed seeds, perhaps caught in a woollen travelling rig and then falling on a railway embankment and becoming established there. Perhaps one of the plants Proust had in mind was the daisy, golden rod, Solidago canadersis, which originated in North America, was introduced to Europe as a garden plant in 1648, but its plumed 314

fruits were blown from gardens to naturalise this alien species in many places in the 19th century including along railway embankments. The anaemic looking daisy, Conyza canadensis, also has wind-blown fruits, is a native of North America and has also become naturalised on motorway and railway The yellow-flowered evening primrose, embankments. Oenothera erythrosepala, is yet another American introduction to Europe, but the seeds here are not wind-dispersed. The narrator continues wickedly (37) that of all the blown seeds in the world, that to which the best long-distance wings are attached is still a joke. Technicalities

When Proust was writing A la recherche..., Karl Erich Correns (1864-1933) in Germany, William Bateson (1861-1926) in England and Hugo Marie de Vries (1848-1935) in Holland had only in 1900 independently, but simultaneously, rediscovered the neglected 1866 paper of Gregor Mendel on the principles of heredity and confiuiiied the findings by their own experiments on the garden pea. Bateson went on to translate Mendel's work into English (1900) and coined the term 'genetics'. Luther Burbank (1849-1926) in California had published his catalog New Creations in Fruits and Flowers in 1893 using hybridisation to revolutionize horticulture. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that Proust makes little direct reference to genetics which as a discipline had only just been born. However, Proust does avoid making Flaubert's probably intentional error where tomatoes and pumpkins hybridise while growing together in M. Pécuchet's garden!

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Inheritance In Jean Santeuil (38) Proust writes that when new adult passions develop, like buds on a flowering branch, they bear no more resemblance to emotions felt in childhood than the hedgerose resembles any garden rose. The plant-inspired A rombre des jeunes fines en Fleur contains a passage about the little band of girls (39) and their maternal inheritance. Each was like a new variety of rose bred by using first a rose of another species. As he passed each corolla along what seemed a chain of flowers, even in the most perfect bloom it was possible for him to just discern signs which, encouraged by the passage of time, by drying, by fructification of its flesh, would become the immutable and predestined form of an autumnal seed. Alternation of Generations Proust seems to allude, however, to what the eminent plant morphologists Foster and Gifford (40) described as one of the most profound generalizations in plant morphology, the Alternation of Generations which provided the morphological context into which would fit a better understanding of genetics and, after its discovery, the importance of the chromosome. The pioneer of comparative plant morphology, Wilhelm Hofmeister (1824-1877) was a self-taught botanist who became Professor of Botany at Heidelberg in 1863 and at Tubingen in 1872. He studied the different stages of development of organs in cryptogams and conifers, comparing the two. By 1862 his studies showed that in any life cycle there was one generation which alternated with another- a gamete carrying generation (the gametophyte) resulting from a reduction division, meiosis, alternating with a zygote initiated generation (the sporophyte) 316

resulting from fusion, or fertilisation, of gametes. All sexually reproducing land plants repeatedly go through these two phases from one life cycle to the next. His discovery was made about forty years before the realisation that chromosomes carry the heritable material of organisms. Hofineister also showed that the more highly evolved plant groups, the ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms, have the sporophyte as the dominant, most evident generation, while in the simpler mosses and liverworts it is the gametophyte which is the most evident. The evolutionary reason for this difference seems to be due to a progressive suppression of the gametophyte as a free-living phase in terrestrial plants. This makes sense because in mosses, for example, the gametophyte has a total dependence on the sometimes unreliable aqueous medium of the surrounding habitat for the process of fertilisation to take place. By contrast, angiosperms have a gametophyte which has become suppressed to the point of having a dual parasitic existence, the famale only within the ovary and male inside the anther of the flower, thus being protected from some of the vagaries of the external environment during the critical stages of fertilisation. Proust makes cryptic reference to all of the elements of an alternation of generations concept, a primary element, a secondary one, the cryptogams, an ontogeny recapitulating to some degree a phylogeny over which the organism is powerless yet inextricably bound. The narrator observes (41) that we depend on natural laws more than we appreciate with minds pre-programmed, like some cryptogamic plant, with characteristics that we think we are choosing. We recognise the secondary outcomes without being aware of the primary causes. We inherit from our family not only the notions by which we 317

live, but the illness from which we die, like all Papilionaceae take the same form from their seed. Once understood by a student the perspectives discovered by Hofmeister can transform the way in which plants of all types are perceived and perception was at the core of Proust's writing. While Edmund White (42) wrote that Proust gave his attention to flowers, people and paintings, but not theories about botany, psychology or aesthetics, such a generalisation fails to acknowledge Proust's appreciation of theory which, so far as botany is concerned, enabled a robust, intelligent and often witty literary use of technical concepts such as pollination ecology, plant breeding-systems, aspects of plant taxonomy, fruit dispersal mechanisms and plant geography. Indeed, Proust has his narrator draw analogies between love and certain kinds of intellectual curiosity (43). The scientific importance attached to knowing the peculiar desire hiding beneath the pink petals of her cheeks, in eyes as pale as daybreak would, without doubt, subside when he had ceased to love Albertine. For the narrator it becomes a curiosity driven by morbid jealousy even after the death of Albertine, needing to know everything about his mistress's previous life (44). While his life was fully occupied with a love affair, she was dead, but like a cutting grafted on to the heart of another and continuing to carry on a sort of existence even when perished. Another magical discovery in the elementary botany class is how the red dye eosin can be taken up over a period of several hours through the roots, or cut stem of a plant and transported to the vascular tissues of the stem which become beautifully stained and easy to see when sectioned and viewed through a lens. The sap of the petals of white flowers similarly becomes suffused with the dye to make the flower appear pink. Proust 318

must have remembered his own delight, because Jean Santeuil (45) showers Francoise with unusual gifts like the amazingly coloured flowers formed when cut blooms are placed in water to which a dye has been added. Changing the colour of the flowering heads of hydrangeas from their natural dull red to blue is a different more protracted process, involving the application of ground aluminium sulphate crystals which are watered in around the living plants in autumn. The amount of chemical used depends on the size of the shrub, but one with a spread of about LSm requires about 1kg of the powdered crystal. The flowering heads for the next two or three seasons will be blue before gradually returning to the natural colour. Love's lessons Philadeip has If the orchid genus Cattleya symbolises the love between Odette and Charles Swami in A la recherche..., it is the mock orange blossom, Philadeiphus, which features as the leitmotiv in the lesbian love of Albertine and Andrée. Like the orchid flowers of Cattleya species, those of Philadeiphus are heiiiiaphrodite, but because the latter are radially synunetrical and have five, unfused, similarly shaped petals the flowers are considered to be botanically unspecialised and are visited by a wider range of insect pollinators. In contrast, Cattleya flowers are bilaterally symmetrical and have fused perianth segments which create a highly specialised pathway for those insect pollinators able to reach the sources of nectar and pollen in the flower; this is so for most orchids with the genus Apostasia alone having more or less radially symmetrical flowers.

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The use of the name 'syringa' for the mock orange blossom, Philadeiphus, dates from a period when old gardening books were still using the nomenclaturally invalid name coined by the botanist Philip Miller, instead of the valid one published by Linnaeus. There are seventy-five species in this temperate group of shrubs and small trees, being particularly numerous in eastern Asia, but also occurring in North America. Many of the species have attractive white, or purple and white flowers which are often strongly fragrant. The Lemoine Nursery in Nancy, France was responsible for raising numerous fine hybrids and cultivars which are still in cultivation including, cv. Manteau d'Hermine (1899); cv. Conquete (1903); cv. Sybille (1913) and cv. Belle Etoile (1930). Several of the wild species make excellent garden plants such as the tough P. coronarius from Europe, the dainty P. inicrophyllus from south-western North America and P. pu► purascens from western China; certain of the species are frost-tender. Sometimes placed in the Saxifragaceae family, at other times placed in a family of their own, Philadelphaceae, these plants with unspecialised flowers are also related to the Rosaceae. The structure of the Philadeiphus flower probably interested Proust less than its fragrance which is a part of its character and, because Proust chose them yet was so sensitive to any scent, one might speculate that the events which occur between the narrator, Andree and a remote Albertine on a staircase had, in some form, a basis drawn from reality. Another possible reason for its use may be the high regard which Proust then had for Maurice Maeterlinck and his essay on 'Les Parfums' in his L 'Intelligence des fleurs which points out that many insects ignore highly fragrant flowers in favour of others which are unscented, but rich in nectar and, or, pollen. Maeterlinck lived for a time, from 1903, in a house near Grasse, in Provençe, the 320

centre of the French perfume industry and he described how the flowers of rose, jasmine, violet, daffodil, mimosa, mignonette, pink, geranium, orange blossom, lavender, Spanish broom, tuberose, cassia, anemone, gillyflower and hyacinth were harvested. Most of these flowers appear in Proust's writing. In his flower book Maeterlinck described the pollination, or flowering of the waterplants Zostera, Villarsia nyinphoides, Trapa natans and Hydrocharis; of land plants he described Ruta graveolens, Nigella damascena, Salvia, Pedicularis sylvatica, Spartium junceum; of orchids there were Orchis (=Dactylorhiza) maculata, Loroglossum (=Himantoglossum) hircinum, Anacamptis pyramidalis, Cataseturn, Cypripedium, Sarcanthus teretfolius, and Coryanthes macrant ha. Proust used none of these names or examples perhaps because they were thought obscure and might therefore be meaningless for his purposes with a general reader. Andrée

On a first encounter, the narrator considered that Andrée, one of Albertine's best friends, bore the traces of her provincial origin (46). It could be read in her unique appearance like an arch made from the millstone of Senlis, or red sandstone of Strasbourg, or as an axe handle respects the knots of the ashtree. Ash trees belong to the genus Fraxinus, of which there are about seventy species occurring only in the northern hemisphere; they are distantly related to the olive. Most are deciduous trees with a few being almost evergreen. The European ash tree, F. excelsior, grows to become a splendid deciduous tree which produces excellent timber traditionally used where strength and flexibility are required as in hammer handles, oars, wheels, spear shafts, regal thrones, vehicle 321

coachwork still used by the Morgan Motor Company of Malvern and Druid's wands. Ash (nion) is the third consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet (47). In Nordic myth man was created from ash timber and this may be a point of departure for the narrator's observation (48) that we are not like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks. The narrator explains at some length how he interrupts and almost discovers the relationship between Andrée and Albertine (49). Mme de Guetniantes has given him some branches of syringa because she knew he loved them. When he goes upstairs to their flat, Albertine has already returned, but on the staircase he meets Andrée who seems agitated by the smell of the flowers that he holds. He learns from her that she had only just arrived, but as Albertine was writing letters to her aunt was sent away. Andrée adds how much Albertine dislikes strong scents and won't be happy with his syringa, which she will smell even on his clothes as next to tuberoses they have the strongest scent. He resolves to leave the flowers outside with Françoise, but is then told that the servant has gone shopping so that he is effectively locked out, having no latch key. Left on his own he rings the bell and the door is immediately opened by Albertine, but she fumbles for the light switch before quickly retiring inside at the scent of the syringa. With a growing unease the narrator seeks to convince himself of Albertine's innocence in the face of rumours to the contrary (50). His jealousy subsided with the feeling that she was withdrawn and simply unaware of all physical and moral evil, 322

more an inanimate hollowed reed which plays angelic music than human. After the confessions of a laundry-girl about the secret behaviour of Albertine and having seen two paintings of Elstir of nude women (51), the narrator begins to admit the reality of his relationship with her. He was obliged to visualise her with the laundry-girl and friends, like statues of goddesses among the groves of Versailles, or in fountains their nudity caressed and polished by the waters. With a widening rift between Albertine, the narrator (52) remembers earlier assignations he has had with others and the pleasure of ones perhaps still to come in a land of women as much as a land of trees already in full leaf, a springtime in which Albertine's presence now weighed upon him. The news of Albertine's death (53) reaches the narrator from Mme Bontemps, her aunt, who apologises for having to break such dreadful news to him. She explains that Albertine was thrown by her horse against a tree while riding. Only after her death does Andree admit to the narrator what happened on the staircase (54). She confesses that they were both dismayed and to hide their embarrassment both pretended to dread the scent of syringa, but which they really adored. Nobody could ever mention syringa again in her presence without her needing to hide her blushes. The narrator realises what Andree must have meant to Albertine (55) and, by proxy, what Andree had now come to mean to him, like some strange dark flower from beyond the grave, the exhumed incarnate desire of Albertine which was to him as Venus was the desire of Jove. 323

The narrator reflects (56) that inherent in any woman's charm are the elements most calculated to make one unhappy, like the seductive but toxic juice of a venomous flower. Remembering the evening of the syringa, the narrator recalled that about a fortnight later he had asked Albertine whether she had ever had relations with Andree and she had replied, "Oh! never!", but that she adored Andree like a sister. As time went by he admits (57) that the love of women again arose in him, but that nowhere do so many flowers germinate even though they may be called 'forget-me-nots' as in a cemetery. He continues (58) that forgetfullness had devoured his love, he struggled to recall the image of Albertine and all that remained was a mannish-looking girl from whose fading features there appeared, like a sprouting seed, the profile of Mme Bontemps. Jupien

The episode in Sodome et Gomorrhe published in 1921 dealing with what Proust called inversion and the meeting of Jupien and Charlus, is a darker, richer, more multilayered piece of writing compared with the luminous and simpler narrative of the Cattleya encounters of Du cote de chez Swann published in 1913. The later writing differs in utilising topics drawn from pollination ecology, plant breeding sytems, floral morphology and the process of fertilisation together with the use of several different and diverse plant genera to illustrate the writing. The following three broad themes are employed by Proust. l.The pollination ecology of hermaphrodite orchid flowers plays an important symbolic role in describing the encounter 324

between Jupien and the Baron, with Maeterlinck being credited as the source of Proust's information on orchid pollination (59), yet Proust uses none of the orchid examples named by Maeterlinck who modestly defers to botanists such as Christian Konrad Sprengel, Charles Darwin, Robert Brown and others for his information. Proust does, however, use the same anthropomorphic approach of Maeterlinck in the description of pollination mechanisms. 2. No less importantly, Proust also expands on the topic of floral polymorphism in hermaphrodite flowers other than orchids as it might be imagined to relate to different forms of inversion, citing examples in the plant genera Lythruin and Primula and the floral mechanism seen in many flowers belonging to the Compositae family, all of which information Proust attributes to Darwin. 3. Proust begins with a digression on the problems facing plants with unisexual flowers, where the male and female flowers are borne on different plants (dioecy), or borne on different parts of the same plant (monoecy). This enables him to draw parallels with the problems faced by the invert. Proust understood the importance of cross-pollination in plants and how self-pollination in outcrossing species can lead to a loss of vigour, but moreover saw literary potential in the phenomenon (60), having drawn from the stratagems of flowers conclusions that had relevance to some aspects of literary endeavour. He did sometimes confuse 'pollination', the physical transfer of pollen from stamen to stigma, with 'fertilisation', the process which occurs inside the egg-cell inside the ovary after successful pollination, but then so did Darwin whose terminology Proust followed. The Abbe Mugnier (1853-1944) described Proust (61) as a honey bee of 325

heraldic flowers, a reference to his early interest in the French aristocracy. The loyal Céleste Albaret (62) said much the same except that he unerringly alighted on the correct flowers! Unisexuality

When male and female flowers are borne on different plants there is, of course, little chance of self-pollination provided that it occurs at all whether by wind, insect, or other means. In a happy exchange between the narrator, Princesse de Parme, the Duchesse de Guermantes and M. de Bréauté in the Guermantes town house (63), the nature of pollination in an imagined plant with unisexual flowers is explained through the expectation of a visit by a bumble-bee to the Duchesse's plant on her window sill, a theme which extends over more than 100 pages interwoven with the Jupien-Charlus encounter in the courtyard below, beneath the window sill seen only by the narrator. How very different is this treatment of a plant in a window from that of Dickens where, in Nicholas Nickleby, Tim Linkinwater extolls to Nicholas the inner city virtues of mignonette, double wallflowers and hyacinths grown in old boot-blacking bottles. When the Princesse comments on the pretty flower on the window ledge, the narrator recognises it as one which he had watched Elstir painting. The Duchesse responds that although she is fond of their purple velvet collars, they have a ugly name and an awful smell. She continues that it's a plant where the ladies and the gentlemen grow separately and she has to find a husband for her flower if it is not to die. That is why the plant is placed at the open window in the hope that the necessary insect will arrive. The fine tree in the courtyard belonging to a very rare species is in contrast, she adds, wind pollinated, but the adjacent wall is a little high. M. de Bréauté can only agree 326

that a couple of inches off the top of the wall would suffice to facilitate wind pollination.. one of the tricks of the trade he confides. In nature there may be incomplete monoecism or dioecism found in certain species. Similarly, other species with predominantly hermaphrodite flowers may have the capacity to produce unisexual ones on a regular basis, or from time to time! It would have been satisfying to be able to identify the plant with smelly dioecious flowers looking like purple velvet collars and requiring pollination each year, the one that Elstir painted. Harold E. Moore told the fascinating tale of the hybrid origins of the gloxinia of horticulture, Sinningia speciosa, involving French, Belgian German and other growers in the nineteenth century, but these plants have a perennating tuber, not needing to be pollinated for propagation to occur, nor are their hermaphrodite flowers smelly. Elstir might have found it attractive. As the stamens wither some time before the stigmas become receptive to pollen, they do require an act of deliberate pollination to obtain seed in cultivation. Of the insects referred to, smelly flowers (e.g. aroids) tend to be visited by flies rather than bees. However, it seems on this occasion that Proust is less interested in the identity of a particular plant and more in the reproductive processes of which different plants are capable as they might relate to this episode. Proust has M. de Breaute then discuss the artificial pollination of vanilla flowers which introduces the topics of hemiaphrodity and orchids. This discussion has already been covered at the end of Chapter 4 in relation to the Baron Charlus. Although a voyeur of the meeting between Jupien and the Baron (64) the narrator ostensibly maintains his vigil on the Duchesse's pot plant, likening himself to a botanist awaiting an 327

insect visit to a female flower. Proust's deliberately ambiguous use of heterosexual floral terms in an homosexual encounter, while being logically inconsistent, heightens the tragi-comic exoticism of the scene as the narrator continues that he sensed a gathering floral expectancy no more passive in the male flower, with stamens spontaneously curved so that an insect might more easily receive their donation; while the female flower, with coquettishly arched 'styles' for the insect to more effectively penetrate, imperceptibly advanced like a hypocritical and ardent grisette. The described posturing of floral organs is not a literary device, but a reality in many dichogamous hermaphrodite flowers where the stamens and stigmas mature at different times to help promote cross pollination. Hermaphrodity Proust now shifts his treatment of the pollination theme from the Duchesse's unisexual plant to that of orchids, which are hermaphrodite and which have evolved an almost bewildering array of mechanisms to help avoid self-pollination (65). Jupien had shed his usual deferential expression and, in a state of equivalence with the Baron, had thrown back his head, placing a hand on his hip and stuck out his behind with the coquetry that an orchid might have adopted at the arrival of a bee. M. de Charlus disappeared humming like a great bumble-bee while another, a real one, flew into the courtyard. The narrator wonders if it might be the providential one that will bring the pollen to the orchid given that another equally miraculous conjunction has been possible. Jupien the tailor, who cares only for older men, has been encountered by M. de Charlus. Without his claiming that there is any scientific relationship between 328

botanical laws and homosexuality these events were food for thought for the narrator. He later reflects (66) that the pantomime between Jupien and M. de Charlus was as odd as the seduction of insects by composite flowers, explained by Darwin, in which the erect florets of their capitula may be seen from a distance with, not unlike heterostyled flowers, the bending back of older stamens to provide access for the insect. Part One of Sodome et Gomorrhe concludes rather coyly (67) with the narrator declaring that by being engrossed in the Jupien-Charlus conjunction he had perhaps missed seeing the fertilisation by a bumble-bee of the blossom on the window sill of the Duchesse de Guermantes. The botanical laws which Proust must have had in mind are those myriad pollination mechanisms so ably described by Darwin where particular orchid species have evolved amazingly contrived flowers which, against the odds, attract particular sorts of insect to help bring about cross pollination. Both editions of Darwin's The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects (1862 and 1882) would have been available in translation for Proust, a book as fascinating now as it would have been then. One can understand why Maeterlinck would have wished to popularise certain aspects of the work more than forty years after Darwin had published them. The orchid flower has been engineered by evolution so that an insect is attracted by the nectar, or the scent, not necessarily a fragrance as we know it. In the activity of entering the flower, the body of the insect touches, or rubs against flower parts which are shaped so that this will happen. Only on reaching the nectar does the insect simultaneously dislodge adjacent sticky 329

pollen masses and fly away with them decorating its body, usually the head. Attracted to another flower of the same orchid species, the insect introduces the pollen of the first flower into that of the second and in the process of foraging, brings the pollen into contact with the stigma and achieves cross pollination. The same ambiguity of a plant attracting and using an animal for its own botanical purpose may have appealed to Proust for he wrote (68) that he had seen an exquisite blue girandole like a mauve orchid of the sea. Guy de Maupassant who died in 1893 had likened jellyfish to flowers of the sea in his short story called 'One Evening' set in a harbour at Kabyle in the Gulf of Bougie (now Bejaia), Algeria. The narrator continues that it is important for certain people to be able to encounter and exchange the only pleasure they can know and impart, their music, their fragrance, their flame, like the plant which produces vanilla but remains sterile unless hummingbirds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen, or man pollinates them by some artificial means. Proust had clearly researched vanilla as he mentions hummingbirds in the same context, both being found only in the American tropics and the birds being important pollen vectors for flowering plants there. There are orchids, several different Mediterranean Ophrys species, which have flowers that mimic the females of several different bee species both visually and with tactile stimulae to attract spurious mates which pseudo-copulate with the flower, detach the pollinia and on visiting another pseudo-mate, bring about the pollination of the orchid. The males of the bees hatch out before the females and in this way the orchids exploit the mating urge of the insects. Darwin described and illustrated Ophrys apfera, bee orchid flowers noting, paradoxically, that

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the flower had a sophisticated resemblance to a bee, but the orchid habitually self-pollinated! Proust elaborated on this mimicry, which was not described by Maeterlinck, in a passage concerning M. and Mme de Vaugoubert (69). It was said that the husband wore the petticoats and the wife the trousers for Mme de Vaugoubert really was a man, whether having always been, or grown to be one! The human kingdom in this way resembles the plant kingdom and that mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract. In another reference to mimicry (70), for Proust himself was fond of the activity and had personal experience, the narrator notes that Morel's clever way of imitating the voice of Bergotte was lost when Morel tried to put it in writing, oral fertilisation being so rare and the flowers produced always being sterile. Unlike his character Morel, Proust was more than able to mimic the utterances of his contemporaries in writing resulting in subtle and very amusing character studies which sometimes got him into trouble. The orchids are a remarkable group of 735 genera and 20,000 species of herbaceous flowering plants most numerous in the tropics, but by no means absent from temperate regions where they are almost all terrestrial. in the tropics many of the species are epiphytes, they grow on other plants, largely to secure an adequate supply of light in overcrowded, luxuriant growing A few orchids lack chlorophyll and live conditions. saprophytically, converting dead organic matter into nutrients often through the agency of intermediary mycorrhizal fungi growing in the tissues of the orchid. There is great diversity to be seen in the evolutionary adaptations which have occurred to orchid roots, stems and 331

leaves to accommodate life on the boughs of tropical trees, in the baked soils of savanna woodland, or in a temperate watermeadow. No less diverse and often complex floral adaptations have occurred in orchids to ensure pollination in habitats where the individual plants of a particular species may be situated far from one another, often high in the forest canopy. These adaptations include longevity, where the unpollinated flower may last for nine months, or more, waiting for the pollinator. The capsular fruits, when formed, because vegetative reproduction is an insurance policy that orchids also possess, contain immense numbers of tiny, windblown seed well adapted to dispersal onto any new site where germination is possible. Even when germination occurs, many terrestrial orchids require the presence of mycorrhizal fungi to assist the young seedling in a subterranean existence which may last for several years before the first green leaf emerges. While Proust named the genera Cattleya and Vanilla, other genera he may have seen in conservatories, or at social gatherings would have included the slipper orchids Cypripedium, Epidendrum, Cymbidium, Odontoglossum and Oncidium in the former setting and in the latter Dendrobium, Brassia, Vanda and Phalaenopsis, many of which are mentioned as winter-garden plants by William Robinson. Polymorphic flowers Charles Darwin pioneered an understanding of floral polymorphism largely through his own painstaking experiments and observations over many years, publishing the results in his book The different forms of flowers on plants of the same species. Found in Lythrum and Primula amongst other genera, 332

this is another mechanism which has evidently evolved to help promote cross-pollination between plants with hermaphrodite flowers to assist the maintenance of genetic variation in populations of a particular species. Desmond and Moore wrote (71) that for years Danvin had been breeding purple loosestrifes, Lythrum salicaria, to investigate their triple sexuality because this Lythrum species has three kinds of flower. The female stigma may be borne on either a long, medium or short-style and whatever the length, two sets of six male stamens are arranged at a different height inside the flower. Thus, if the stigma is tall, the stamens will be medium and short-size, or if the stigma is short, the stamens will be long and medium-size. Nobody before Darwin had asked why or thought about the functional significance. Darwin induced the eighteen possible pollination combinations, brushing pollen from each possible stamina! position on to each possible stigmatic position, collected the resulting fruits, counted the seeds and grew them on in dozens of pots to test their fertility. Only six pollination combinations proved 'legitimate' and in each case the stamens and styles proved to be the same height. His results clearly revealed that the greater the disparity in height, the greater the 'illegitimacy' and frequency of sterility. It was one of nature's mechanisms to ensure cross-pollination. Darwin gave lectures about his experiments and when asked by a Mrs Becker for something informative for her ladies literary society, he suggested the topic On the Sexual Relations of the Three Forms of Lythrum salicaria'. He told them that nature has ordained the complex marriage-arrangement of a triple union between three hermaphrodites, each hermaphrodite being in its female organ quite distinct from the other two hermaphrodites and partially distinct in its male organs and each 333

furnished with two sets of males: a diverting notion for the good ladies in the mid-1860's. Lythrum comprises thirty five species of herb which occur in many parts of the world. Belonging to the Lythraceae family they are cousins of the crape myrtles, Lagerstroemia and the cigar plant, Cuphea. The red or purple wands of flower of purple loosestrife are a familiar sight in moist situations in summer in many parts of western Europe, see Fig. 25.

On further elaboration of the subtleties of pollination mechanisms in plants and, by extension, people Proust examines (72) the ageing subvariety of invert who is only attracted by men much older than themself by a correspondence, he suggests, similar to that governing fertilisation in heterostyle trimorphous flowers like Lythrum salicaria. He adds that there are others which may be rarely observed by any human herbalist, or moral botanist, the young man awaiting a quinquagenarian, as indifferent to other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers of the short-styled Primula veris are to the pollen of other short-styled Primula veris, whereas they embrace the pollen of the long-styled. This Primula is the common cowslip, the short-style flowers are known as thrum-eye, the long-style flowers as pin-eye. In discussing the infidelities of the violinist, Charles Morel as a partner of M. de Charlus (73), the narrator points out that they completely disappear when Morel falls in love with a woman. In the flowering of the human species as among flowers, he says, the interplay of different laws which Darwin first brought to light governs the different modes of fertilisation, opposing one successively to another. Again, Proust uses and refers clearly to Darwin's elucidation of the nature of floral polymorphism. 334

Plant collections Where Francoise might have delighted in the first primroses of spring in a hedgerow, Charles Swann enjoyed an extensive country estate at Tansonville and the tree plantings made by his forebears. The narrator was, however, less impressed with Swann's townhouse (74) because he could see in Swarm's little garden-plot only two trees. The house was situated on the Quai d'Orleans in the constricted site of the Ile St Louis in Paris. It was partly thanks to rich, private garden owners, not forgetting their often skilled head-gardeners, that the long tradition of plant introduction from the wild continued into the 20th century. Enthusiastic and often knowledgeable garden owners were sometimes glad to finance plant exploration trips to remote parts of the world in order to purchase a share of the collected seeds, or bulbs, of hitherto uncultivated herbs, shrubs, or trees. Some of these introductions were of species unknown to science, required scientific description, so that garden introductions indirectly advanced understanding of the richness of the world's flora such as in the Himalaya and western China. It is equally true that collectors of certain plant groups, such as orchids, cacti and bromeliads, contributed to some species becoming endangered in nature. Over a period of several centuries from when the first botanical institutions were founded, a knowledge has been developed of the ornamental flowering plants of the world, many of which are now familiar garden plants. This knowledge was gained, in part, by the role of enthusiastic amateur growers and the plant collections they assembled, some of which were known to Proust. On the first page of Jean Santeuil (75) is the statement that one may be surprised to meet in the flesh what is thought an abstraction: the gardener who loves his flowers and can 335

commune with and interpret them. Proust discoursed the owners of gardens with as much facility as those who worked in them, not always on horticultural or botanical topics. Did not Jean comment (76) on a well informed gardener who, when work was done, would read the fiction of Montepin and historical works of Imbed and Saint-Armand? The Prince de Brancovan owned the Villa Bassaraba at Amphion, near Evian on Lake Geneva and Proust went there on visits. The attached arboretum was begun in 1876 (77) and was award winning, the gardener receiving the Palme d'Or for the collection which had tender plants under glass as well as the trees. An account of the collection in 1903 by ArdouinDumazet, which I have not seen, lists the tree genera Abies, Acer, Catalpa (C. bungei then a rare plant), Cedrus, Crataegus, Pines and Sorbus. Of these plants only Sorbus went unused by Proust; there were probably many more plants in the garden inventory. Proust used the Villa as a model for his fictional garden of Feteme (78) owned by Mme de Cambremer, who says on one occasion to the narrator that they have a rose garden almost too near the house so that there are days when it makes her head ache. On hearing this the narrator turns to her daughter-in-law saying, to gratify her taste for the modem, that it is just like Pellet's, the scent of roses so strong in the score that, as he suffered from rose-fever, it set him sneezing whenever he listened to that scene. While coincidental no doubt, there is in this passage an association between Maeterlinck and 'scent' once more as the Belgian wrote an essay with that title (1907) and was also responsible for the play Pelleas et Melisande (1892) which Debussy made into an opera (1902). This part

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also has the narrator admitting that he shares Proust's health problem. Proust writes about the civic plant collections in and around Paris at length and with affection, including the Bois de Boulogne without knowing how to portray the depth of this love (79). In its role as an arboretum (80) the young narrator recalls that he would lead Francoise to the Bois where one sees an assemblage of flora and contrasting landscapes, hills, a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a marsh, a multitude of little worlds. The plantation of redwood trees and American oaks was like an experimental forest in Virginia, with a fir-wood by the lake. He continues that the complexity of the Bois which makes it an artificial place and garden struck him once on his way to Trianon early in November. The Bois had that temporary, unfinished look of a nursery garden, or park in which either for botanical display, or festival preparation there are planted among the more common established trees a few rare specimens with amazing foliage. Robinson wrote that the Bois was what a true botanic garden should look like. Touching on the antiquity of the Bois (81) the narrator comments how nature is never far away, the Grand Lac like a real lake, birds flying swiftly over the Bois as over a real wood and, with shrill cries, perching one after another on the great oaks, their Druidical canopy and Dodonian majesty seeming to proclaim the emptiness of an abandoned forest. Graves wrote (82) that an oak cult existed in western Europe as early as between 1600 and 1400 BC. The Dodonaean oracle of ancient Greece was situated in a grove of oaks, sacred to Zeus, whence black doves flew. The shrine at Dodona still exists, but very few of the oaks (Brayne, personal communication).

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Proust visited a number of parks and gardens in and around Paris during his life. They include the gardens of the Tuileries where in the winter of 1891 he had spent happy times with Robert de Billy and Edgar Aubert, a friend of Billy's who had died of appendicitis in 18 September 1892. Writing to Billy on 26 (?) January 1893 (83), Proust said that he remembered a lunch with him, the allee a la Paume in the Tuileries and his speaking English at the Finalys. He also visited the Jardin des Plantes, founded in 1635 as the Jardin du Roi and renamed after the Revolution. William Robinson could not bear the place. Writing to Reynaldo Hahn early in September 1896 (84), Proust told him that he had gone to the Jardin des Plantes with Mme Arman, but that the menagerie was closed, really a Paradise Lost. He felt that the whole park was so exotic and Parisian, breathing a sadness only enhanced by the ravages of a recent hurricane for, on 26 July of that year, trees had been uprooted by high winds in many parts of Paris. Writing to Comte Louis Gautier-Vignal (1888-1982) on 7 July 1915 (85) Proust commented that they had said that they would go and see the Bagatelle gardens, but he had since read in the Figaro that they were closing in a week's time. Consequently he suggested a trip there rather than Versailles, but he never knew in advance if he would be well enough to go. The Luxembourg Palace (1615-20) was designed by Salomon de Brosse (1565-1626) and its gardens were a favourite haunt of the rococo painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) as Proust pointed out (86), because the garden was not kept so spruce as other royal domains.

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Chapter 8 Time...and time again Reading the letters of Proust one realises that plants were an intrinsic part of his everyday existence and way of thinking, not simply a device employed while engaged in creative writing. For example in March 1897 when he wrote to Edouard Rod (1857-1910) to compliment this author on a new novel La-Haut, Proust' declared that he liked the references to the rhododendrons and the paradisias, not that the book was an herbarium, more a picture. He thought that the sentences undulate, corollas grow between the lines and he would like to pick flowers from the pages. The genus Paradisea comprises only two species in the lily family; they occur wild in the mountains of Europe, east into those of Tibet. They have a quiet beauty with small, starry white flowers. In his letter to Rod, Proust mis-spells the name of the plant when referring to these alpine flowers, but we know what he means. Anna de Noailles Proust wrote a great deal to the poet and writer Comtesse AnnaElisabeth de Noailles, the sister of Constantin de Brancovan, who on 18 August 1897 had married Vicomte Mathieu de Noailles. She for her part was a great supporter of Proust. He2 wrote to her probably on May Day 1901, thanking her for two poems she had sent, La Conscience' and 'Paroles a la lune' shortly to be included in her book Le Coeur innombrable (1901) saying that what springs from her brain would always be precious, just as the scent of hawthorn blossom would always be delicate. Proust had already used the Comtesse as a model for the poet he created in Jean Santeuil as explained by Tadie.

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Not long after, on 7 (?) May 1901, Proust again wrote to her (4) expressing disappointment in not having seen her at a soirée held to celebrate publication of her book, but at which her husband deputised. Proust wrote, we may imagine with one of his melting gazes, that her indisposition was inseparably bound to her tempestuous creative powers adding that spring can manifest itself in mosquito bites as well as the scent of roses, a reference to his own susceptibility for suffering rose fever. In a letter to Mme de Noailles written on 28 June 1902 (5), Proust thanked her for her next collection of poems called L 'Ombre des jours with the comment that he felt she had reached new heights, like a tree puts out a new branch so too it was her way of growing. On New Year's Eve 1903, Proust sent her an art nouveau glass vase which he had commissioned Emile Galle to make featuring an engraved design of an intertwined fern frond inspired by a literary image she used in the short-story `L'Exhortation' (6). She replied to Proust on 8 January 1904 (7) thanking him and saying that the dear ferns on the glass vase had made a pattern on her heart, a pattern of their outstretched grassy bodies and her friendship for him. Gall& who had had a botanical training, was based in Nancy and had by 1874 developed his own glass workshop as well as managing his father's pottery. The distinctive glass designs he presented at the Paris Exposition of 1889 helped create his international reputation. Proust's reply to her letter of thanks written on 9 January (8), while trivial, but also showing their friendship, has a resonance with what I now write about Proust 107 years after his prediction made in respect of Mme de Noailles! He wrote brightly that he forgot to tell her how much he enjoyed her comments on the fern and to have provoked what will enable a scholarly edition of 340

`L'Exhortation' (of the kind he was preparing for The Bible of Amiens) to include a note on the word `fem'.* *Cf. By the same author. One of the few references that Proust made to rhubarb occurs in a letter to Anna de Noailles (9) dated 24 (?) January 1904, where he asked her about a quotation from one of her poems involving the blue rhubarb, tender veins and the watering-can. Kolb said that the poem in question is `Dechirement' published in La Revue des deux mondes in June 1903. There are fifty subtropical and temperate Asian herbaceous species in the genus Rheum, with the fruit/vegetable being R. rhaponticum and the medicinal rhubarb being R. officinale; some species make attractive foliage plants in the garden. The second novel of Anna de Noailles, Le Visage emerveille (1904) prompted two letters of delight from Proust when he received his copy from her on 11 June (10). In the first he called her the genius who reveals the secret essence of all things, for whom the flower of the pansy has on its velvet petals a yellow stain, vibrant and glossy, as though a wren's egg had fallen there from a tree and broken. He found it impossible to choose between the delights of daisies thickly bunched like camomiles, or the little potted fir-trees that release their pungent, crackling scent at noon. Proust continued that he would ever remember her phrases about autumnal birds which smell of berberis, the chaplain's eucalyptus leaves and Sister Colette's bird-like, hedgerow face. He also said he loved her litany of the cherries, plums, medlars, pears and apricots, each of them a triumph. Kolb pointed out the similarity of this litany with that of Paris street-vendor cries which Proust created in La prisonniere as will be described shortly.

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The daisies referred to are probably not Bell/s perennis which when bunched would be too diminutive to resemble camomile, but are perhaps the common European ox-eye daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare, having larger white flowers borne on longer stems. They are cousins to the marguerite, L. maximum, which has even larger flowers. There are thirty-five species of Leucanthemum found in temperate Europe and extending east into northern Asia. Belonging to the myrtle family, the genus Eucalyptus comprises about 100 species of Australian gum tree variously known there, depending on the species concerned, as stringybarks, white mahoganies, peppermints, scribbly gums, snow gums and ashes. Another 300 species occur in the genus Symphyomyrtus, commonly known as gums, boxes, ironbarks, red mahoganies and mallees. In Corymbia, the bloodwoods and spotted gums, can be found a further thirty-five species. Until about twenty years ago all of these species were included in a sprawling, widely defined 'Eucalyptus' genus. Although concentrated in Australia the eucalypts also occur wild in New Guinea, the Moluccas and the southern Philippines. The world's second tallest tree, after Sequoia sempervirens, the giant redwood from western North America, is the Australian E. regnans. Only a few eucalypts are hardy enough to withstand European winters, chiefly those from the mountains of Tasmania and the Australian Alps, with introduction to gardens in Europe beginning from about 1829. The attractive evergreen, or everblueish-grey foliage, and often handsome bark of the hardy species made them sought after and it became fashionable for a time to have pot-grown specimens severly pruned to induce a flush of new silvery-grey juvenile foliage, used as spot-plants in colourful, formal, summer bedding displays in late 19th century 342

gardens. Proust only refers to eucalyptus on this single occasion. The barberry genus referred to by Proust, Berberis, comprises 450 species which are wild throughout Eurasia, into parts of North Africa and also found in North and South America. They are mainly spiny shrubs, usually with clusters of yellow, or orange flowers, which are followed by often ornamental, red, Sometimes the purple, or black berries rich in vitamin C. foliage of certain species has wonderful autumn colour, but others are evergreen. The twigs of many species will be seen to have yellow wood when snapped. While the flowers are a more visual treat than strongly scented this does not detract from Mine de Noailles imagery. The medlar, Mespilus germanica, is a long lived often gnarled tree which grows wild in south-eastern Europe and on into Central Asia. Its fruits are only edible when fully ripe and are small, leathery fare. The species is perhaps best regarded for its spring flowers and autumn foliage colour. There is only one species in the genus which is a cousin of Crataegus and with which it can be hybridised. There is one reference to bamboo by Proust and it is in a second letter, written on 15 June 1904 (11), in which he again praises her new novel about Sister Sophie, a nun who falls in love. Also recalling some of her poems he expressed his delight about one describing the hazy effulgence of the sun, the houses as white as Algiers and the bamboo shoes of the morning. Although there are more than forty genera and several hundred species of bamboo they are, as a group, usually easily identifiable because they look like grasses, but have woody stems. This feature makes certain of the species an important and versatile building and manufacturing raw material in the 343

tropics where most bamboos are found. There are, however, a number of temperate bamboos and these sometime feature in European gardens, including species in the genera Arundinaria and Phyllostachys many of which are natives of eastern Asia. Flattering Mme de Noailles, as ever, in a letter to her written sometime in October 1909 (12) Proust discussed her book of poems called Les Eblouissements, which had been published in 1907. He said that he had tried out her Eblouissements on some young people and great loves for her had sprung up in their hearts. She would laugh to hear a mathematics student say that he saw on the golf course "fiery butterflies which seemed like winged jasmine blossoms." In their hearts, he said, her statue stood above that of Victor Hugo. Beckett's dry comment at this sort of exchange (Proust, p.63) was `Saperlipopette' meaning, if my interpretation is correct, one who was well read of the little darling! As Tadie (13) pointed out Mme de Noailles trusted Proust and had sent him a pre-publication copy of the poems for him to review in Le Figaro. The review appeared on 15 June 1907 in the literary supplement. Her trust was not misplaced for Proust chose the theme of gardens in his article, finding imagined literary connections in the gardens of Ruskin, Maeterlinck, Regnier, Jammes and Monet; she thought the article divine. But for Proust, as Tadie observed, the gardens were forerunners of those at Combray. Balzac Proust was fascinated by what might be called Balzac's eccentric similes which he had discovered in his youth, enjoyed with his mother and used in his own work to illustrate his essay 344

on Sainte-Beuve and Balzac (14). He writes that however eccentric or unlikely a simile may be it always seems apt, such as M. du Chatelet being like a melon that ripens from green to yellow in a single night, or it was impossible not to compare M. X to a frozen viper. The melon is derived from Cucumis inelo, one of twenty five species in this genus which also includes the cucumber, C. sativus. Most of the species in the genus are native to Africa. One is also reminded of the recurring plant similes and metaphors in George Eliot such as the description of Mrs Meyrick and her daughters in Daniel Deronda (1876) p. 167, whose faces seemed full of speech as if their minds had been shelled like horse-chestnuts and become brightly visible. As early as in Proust's writing for Jean Santeuil (15) the comments made by Mme de Thianges with her deliberate intention for Mme Marmet to overhear are described as being the wind which carries the pollen of the male sycamore to the ovary of the female. A similar but more involved literary experiment is made a little later (16) when Madame Lawrence gathered from the projecting stamens of Jean's gaze the pollen of an eager sensibility. The theme concludes (17) with the epigrammatic truism that the grain of pollen finding its way into the ovary never knows that it is the destiny of every grain of pollen to find its ovary. He enjoyed finding this literary device in other writers, such as in the poetry of Jules Renard (18) where he quoted a line from 'The Butterfly', a love-letter folded in half looking for the address of a flower, because that is the impression the butterfly gives flitting tentatively from flower to flower. Writing about what he called sexual inversion in 'A race accursed' (19) Proust draws parallels between human sexuality and that in other organisms using a Maeterlinck-like 345

anthropomorphism which anticipates the cartoon world of Walt Disney. He observes that certain animals and flowers have the mechanisms of love so poorly conceived that they can derive little pleasure from the act. The same approach appears in A la recherche. ..(20) where personality is conferred onto plants, in this case the hawthorn blossom on the altar in the church at Combray. On the altar a flower or two had opened with careless grace its bunch of stamens veiling each corolla like, he imagined, a thoughtless and provocative glance from the contracted pupils of a young girl in vivacious white. Before the altar he became aware of the scent of almonds coming from the hawthorn-blossom and noticed on the flowers little patches of a creamier colour where the petals had begun to age. He imagined that the scent must lie concealed like the taste of an almond cake beneath the burned parts, or like Mile Vinteuil's cheeks beneath the freckles. Proust also uses the reverse logic of giving humans phytological tendencies, such as the little band of girls (21). As in a nursery where the flowers mature at different times, he had seen in the form of old ladies on the Balbec beach the shrivelled seed-pods and flabby tubers which his new friends would one day become. But for the present it was their flowering time. To digress briefly, Nattiez (22) considered that there are strong parallels between the structure of Wagner's opera Pars!fal and A la recherche... with the 'blossoming girls' of the little band equivalent to Wagner's flower maidens. Proust was fond of Wagner's music, but it was a source of ongoing disagreement with Hahn who disliked it. Perhaps a difference of opinion is detectable in the little sketch entitled `Oranthe' in Les Plaisirs... (23) where Proust wryly delineates the soul of a bourgeois dilettante who would be an artist, 346

(himself ?) who can only listen to Wagner with the smell of burning cinnamon. The peeled bark of the twigs of the Sri Lankan species Cinnarnornum zeylanicum is the spice cinnamon. It is one of about 250 species in the genus which An occur wild from eastern Asia into Indo-Malaysia. alternative with a stronger flavour comes from the species C. cassia which is a native of China, Indochina and Indonesia. Commenting on the nature of the invert (24) the narrator explains that it is in vain that he try to keep back the admission from his mistress (if she is not an inhabitant of Gomorrah) because with the obstinacy of a climbing plant, the unconscious woman in him will seek the masculine organ. We have already encountered another and celebrated example of the eccentric simile/metaphor (25) where the narrator sees Jupien with I\'I. de Charlus like an orchid exciting a bumble-bee. Street cries

It only requires the return of Albertine to Paris from the Norman coast (26) for the narrator to experience mild disappointment in her. She no longer swayed before the horizon of the sea, but was motionless in the room with him and seemed a very poor specimen of a rose with this or that blemish on its petals. He acknowledges the compensations of a physical presence, however, such as when Albertine visits the home of his parents (27). She asks for an orange drink to be made and the narrator is able to taste, together with her kisses, how much more refreshing it is than the Princesse de Guermantes' orangeade. Accompanying Albertine in the Bois de Boulogne (28), but thinking of his meeting there with Mme de Stermaria the next day, the narrator comments that she spoke hardly at all sensing 347

that his mind was elsewhere. In the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove sheltered a little from the rain, he trod underfoot dead leaves like seashells on the sand and poked with a stick some fallen chestnuts, prickly as sea-urchins. The sweet, or Spanish chestnut, Castanea sativa, has edible nuts which are roasted, or candied as marrons glace. It is a deciduous tree with a rounded crown, attractive foliage and, in summertime, copious yellow-green catkins of male and female flowers having a distinctive odour. Castanea with twelve northern temperate species, like the oaks, Quercus, belongs to the beech family Fagaceae. Instead of the oak cupule in which the seed, or acorn, sits the chestnut seeds, or nuts, sit in a four-valved spiny structure looking like a sea-urchin. The Romans seem to have introduced the sweet chestnut into north-western Europe as it is native in the Mediterranean region and Asia Minor and needs a long, hot summer to fruit satisfactorily. Albertine painted from times spent with Elstir. Discussing Impressionism with her (29) the narrator enthuses that if she looked at some of the recently built houses, they seem to rend the hot midday air of July with a shout as sharp as the smell of cherries waiting for the meal in a darkened dining-room. Although Albertine responds that she thinks him wonderful and if she ever became clever it would be entirely due to him, one also imagines a suppressed smile on her lips as she thinks, "He'll use that description again on page 418! " (30). 1 don't know if this was deliberate repetition by Proust, or an oversight in proofreading. In the dining-room of the boarding-house known as Maison Vauquer in Old Goriot, Balzac has its boarders mimic Paris street cries not all of them about vegetables or fruit at the end of 348

a boisterous meal (31). Proust uses similar street sounds, but in a larger tapestry woven of plant images, eating experiences and the uncertainties of love in the privacy of the bedroom shared with Albertine in La prisonniere. To the narrator (32), the cries of the street-vendors suggest plainchant, a costermonger pushing her hand-cart using in her litany the Gregorian division: tichokes. Ar The globe artichoke, Cynara scolymus, is a large herbaceous daisy, the young involucral bracts beneath and around the flower buds being a delicious vegetable when steamed and served with butter, or an appropriate sauce, or eaten raw when very young. Robinson (33) noted the cultivar Artichaut de Laon as popular in the neighbourhood of Paris, especially Aubervilliers, while the cultivar Camus de Bretagne was eaten as a salad. The cardoon, C. cardunculus, is closely related, but here the young leaves are blanched and eaten. The cultivar Cardon de Tours was prickly, but important in the Paris trade while Cardon Pleine Inerme and Cardon Puvis were popular in La Bresse and the Lyon districts. There are fourteen species in the genus and they occur wild in an area extending from the Mediterranean region into western Asia. Certain of the species are ornamental with large and spectacular flower heads, but they have wind-blown seeds and can become a weed problem. Awakening to the sounds of the street (34) they hear about lovely cos lettuce out for a walk, which Albertine agrees to forego on condition that he would buy, in a few day's time, the Argenteuil asparagus. There were Valencia oranges, humble leeks, cabbages and onions at threepence a rope. The carrots were only tuppence a bunch and Albertine decides that Francoise should go out and buy some to make a dish of 349

creamed carrots, all the shouts heared being transformed into a dinner. She adds that it will be two more months before they hear the cry for fresh green beans just as she liked them, soft as soft, dripping with oil and vinegar. And then, she continues, the water-grapes, Chasselas grapes from Fontainebleau. The narrator meanwhile thinks to himself with dismay of the time that he will have to spend with her before the water-grapes come into season! Robinson (35) devotes a section of his book to the cultivation of the Chasselas grape grown on walls at Thomery and Fontainebleau. This sweet dessert grape was also grown in England as Royal Muscadine. The cultivar bears fruit which keeps for a relatively long time on the vine, thus extending the market season. There are many different sorts of bean involving several different genera all of which are legumes. The edible part may be the seed, or the whole fruit normally used as a vegetable, although in Chinese cooking they may be a dessert. Proust refers to the scent of field or broad bean, Vicia faba, in a passage on perfumes (36). Probably originating in the Mediterranean region, the broad bean was certainly grown in Europe in pre-historic times on the basis of archaeological remains and is one of the 150 species in the genus. However, Albertine refers to the French kidney or dwarf bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, which has its origins in the Americas and was first introduced to Europe in 1597. It is one of more than 200 species in the genus which also includes the scarlet runner bean, P. coccineus, a native of Mexico. The carrot, Daucus carota, is a European umbellifer which is biennial, its thickened tap-root having been selected to develop the vegetable we know today. Robinson (37) listed the 350

following varieties grown near Paris in 1878: Carotte trèscouPe a chassis, Carotte rouge courte, Carotte rouge dernilongue pointue, Carotte rouge demi-longue obtuse, and Carotte rouge demi-longue Nantaise. There are sixty species of Daucus which occur wild in Europe, Asia, Africa and America. The leek, A ilium porrum, is grown for its sheathing leaf-bases and probably originated in southern Europe. It is one of the 450 species in Allium which include the onion, A. cepa, probably a native of Iran, the shallot, A. ascalonicum, a native of Syria and introduced to Europe in 1546 and garlic, A. sai'ivum, the origin of which is uncertain, but is now in widespread cultivation around the world. All of these species are valued for their bulbs. Lettuce, Lactuca sativa, is really a sort of daisy as anyone will know who has seen its flowering heads. It is thought to be derived from the species L. scariola, of western Europe and has the curious habit of orientating the edges of its leaves north and south to help avoid sun-damage in exposed situations; it is thus a compass-plant. There are about 100 species of Lactuca in Eurasia and Africa. Robinson (38) listed the following sorts of lettuce grown in the Paris region; Petit Noir, Verte Maraichère, Gotte, Laitue de la Passion, Gotte a Bord Rouge, Blonde d'Etd, Blonde de Versailles, Batavia Blonde, Palatine, Morine, Grosse Brune Paresseuse, Crêpe, Romaine verte d'hiver, and Romaine blonde maraIchère Love-apples Albert Block's rich great-uncle, Nissirn Bernard (39), keeps a waiter forty years his junior who it was M. Nissim Bernard's delight to follow with appreciative eyes round the restaurant, 351

even as far as the more remote parts where beneath her palm the cashier sat enthroned. On the platform at Balbec railway station (40) Albertine and the narrator notice M. Nissim Bernard with a black eye. He had forsaken the chorister from Handel's oratorio `Athalia' for a waiter at the farmhouse called the `Cherry Orchard'. This redfaced youth with blunt features appeared to have a tomato instead of a head, like his twin brother who also worked at the restaurant. It was as if nature had become momentarily industrialised, turning out identical products. Unfortunately for M. Nissim Bernard Tomato No. 2 catered exclusively for ladies, while Tomato No. 1 would comply with the tastes of gentlemen. M. Bernard being short-sighted, not that this was a prerequisite to mistake them, unwittingly playing Amphitryon, would accost a twin brother about meeting him somewhere that evening only to receive a thorough `hiding'. It could even be repeated in the course of a single meal. This resulted by association of ideas to quite put him off tomatoes, even of the edible variety. While delicious cooked, as in bruschetta, or in a salad, one occasionally meets someone with an irrational fear of tomatoes which they avoid; my maternal grandmother was about twenty years younger than Proust and recalled a suspicion of the vegetable in her family when she was a child. Lycopersicon esculentum, the tomato, or love-apple is one of seven species which are wild in an area from western South America into the Galapagos Islands; it was introduced to Europe in 1595. The tomato belongs to the same family as the potato, capsicum and tobacco, the Solanaceae, in which alkaloids are frequently present. As a brief digression having mentioned bruschetta, basil, or tulsi sacred to the Hindu religion, is Ocimum basilicum, one of 150 species in the genus which belongs to the 352

sage family Labiatae. Tadie (41) quotes correspondence from 29 March 1908 in which basil is mentioned, but I have not seen the reference.

The Great War One of the themes in Le temps retrouve is the way in which the passage of time changes the things to which we have become accustomed and sometimes throws new light on long held assumptions showing them to be ill-informed. Always interested in a sense of scale, Proust has the narrator focus on the microcosm (42) when he observes that the mind can, in a fit of laziness, for an instant focus vividly on the most insignificant thing, like trembling blades of grass on a railway embankment seen from the carriage window when the train stops briefly. Is there a single passenger who has used a railway who has not had a similar experience? In another setting (43) the narrator reflects that a blade of grass a few inches in front of our eyes as we lie on a hillside, may be able to conceal the summit of a mountain several miles away. Having fallen out of love with Albertine (44) the narrator finds himself free to contemplate that the Meseglise and Guermantes ways had laid the foundations of his taste for the countryside and the chaiin to be found in an old church, cornflowers and buttercups. He would have recalled the dark old church at Combray (45) and its stained glass windows through which the early spring sun would console him by bringing into blossom, as in a springtime among the heirs of Saint Louis, a dazzling carpet of forget-me-nots projected and refracted from the glass. After the trauma of the loss of Albertine in a horse-riding accident (46), the narrator renews acquaintance at Tansonville 353

with his childhood love, Gilberte now unhappily married to his old friend Robert de Saint-Loup. Two miles south of Combray is the Château de Tansonville, the Swarm country estate. A walk in the surrounding countryside rather than any garden, is the setting in which the narrator finally discovers, many years too late, how Gilberte had been attracted to him and how he had misinterpreted her attentions. Before descending into a valley carpeted with moonlight they stopped for a moment like two insects on the rim of the blue calyx of a flower. Opening his heart to her he said how much he had loved her then, only to learn that she had no idea, but had loved him also. In his bedroom at Tansonville (47) the narrator notices the old wall-paper design on which every rose was so distinct that you could have picked it. How very different, he thought, from those bedroom decorations where on a silver background the apple-trees of Not ixiandy are displayed in a Japanese style to hallucinate one in bed. From his room he could see the greenery of the park, the lilacs at the entrance and, over the leaves of the tall trees by the lake sparkling in the sun, the forest of Meséglise. The notion of picking roses from wallpaper is reminiscent of Ruskin's comments about gathering hawthorn blossom from the carved stone porch of Bourges Cathedral in The Stones of Venice. Sometime in September 1914 Gilberte writes to the narrator that she has been obliged to accomodate in her home at Tansonville, headquarters staff of the German forces currently occupying the district (48). She praised the staff-officers and even soldiers who had asked her for permission to pick a few forget-me-nots from near the pond. The billeting of troops of an invasion force also occurs as a theme elaborated by the gardener of Mme de Cambremer (49), already referred to. But in a different war, the 354

same as that referred to by Robinson in which Bismarck was quartered at Ferrières, the seat of Baron Rothschild, the invading troops were ordered to touch nothing on the estate. Describing an unchanging Mme Verdurin, whose words and actions often tend to be at variance (50), the narrator refers to this charming woman who talks with enthusiasm of the Normandy in which they once lived, the fragrance of woodlands that Lawrence might have painted and crumpled sulphur-roses cascading over a cottage-door, above which two entwined peartrees had the effect of a decorative sign over a shop, or the arabesque of a flowery branch of a bronze candle-bracket by Gouthière. The sulphur rose is Rosa hernisphaerica which grows wild in western Asia, but was introduced to cultivation in Europe sometime prior to 1625; it gets its name from the sulphur yellow colour of the flowers. Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was famed for his portraits rather than landscapes so that the narrator may have been referring to another artist. The timeless playing of a fountain is central to a passage reflecting on the past, while weaving the reality of Proust's friendship with Anna de Noailles into that of his creation. The narrator (51) says that M. de Guermantes had not impressed him as the model of youthful grace which his grandmother so wished she had known and which she set before him, in the Memoirs of Mme de Beausergent. But then Basin was only seven years old and that writer was his aunt. The narrator continues that in a delightful poem, Sainte-Beuve describes beside a fountain a little ten year old girl blessed with every gift and grace, the young Mlle de Champlâtreux. In spite of all the respect which the poet, the Comtesse de Noailles, bore for her husband's mother, the Duchesse de Noailles née Champlâtreux, had she reason to portray her one wonders whether the result 355

might not have been in stark contrast with the portrait drawn by Sainte-Beuve fifty years earlier. Not only did Proust lose Alfred Agostinelli in 1914, when he crashed the aeroplane he was piloting solo for the first time on 30 May, but the First World War began in August and Bertrand de Fenelon died in action on 17 December. Proust was thrown into deep depression. Furthermore, Tadie explained (52) the year 1915 was one of stalemate on the battlefront just seventy kilometres away and Proust's wealth was reduced by a third partly due to his whimsical approach to investments, partly due to the international financial climate which saw the franc drop 17% between 1914 and 1915. By 1922, when Proust died, the franc had a third of its 1914 value. Lionel Hauser (1868-1958) had known Proust from childhood and as a banker, being the Warburgs' representative in Paris, had become his financial adviser on the death of Proust's parents. Hauser provided sound advice which was frequently ignored. Tadie (53) quotes part of a letter from Hauser to Proust from about this time and it is instructive to combine Hauser's comments with the portrait which Proust painted of Jean Santeuil, given earlier. Hauser told Proust that he lived as an idealist and although grown up, remained a child who did not allow himself to be scolded even when disobedient. He had largely eliminated all those who had the courage to criticise him when being naughty. From 1916 Proust never again left Paris. Writing to Antoine Bibesco on or about New Year's Day 1916 (54) Proust lamented that 1916 will have its violets and apple-blossoms and its frost-flowers, but never Bertrand again. Returning in 1916 after spending time in a sanatorium (55), the narrator finds the wartime Paris a much changed place. As if by the growth of a tiny quantity of yeast of apparently spontaneous generation, 356

young women had appeared wearing tall cylindrical turbans, as a contemporary of Mme Tallien's might have done. Others patriotically wore Egyptian tunics, dark and very 'war' over short skirts and thonged footwear recalling the buskin as worn by Talma, or gaiters like those of the boys at the front. Yeasts are single-celled plants which were first observed in 1680 by the Dutchman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) using microscopes which he invented. It was not until 1859 that Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) demonstrated that yeasts were living organisms and caused fermentation to occur. Baker (56) pointed out that the details of the yeast life-cycle only became fully understood in 1943. There are many species of yeast and some are specialised in their mode of activity; brewer's yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, while wine yeast is S. ellipsoideus. The bloom on certain fruits partly consists of yeast cells of other species. Given warmth and a supply of nutrients, yeasts multiply very rapidly over a short period of time by a process of cell budding until all of the nutrient is used up, or until a buildup of yeast waste-product, such as alcohol, reaches a toxic concentration which stops the growth of the cells. Notwithstanding changes in fashion (57) the narrator comments that people who have an interior life usually pay scant regard to important events. He gives the examples of the song of a bird in the park at Montboissier and a breeze carrying the scent of mignonette which inspired Chateaubriand in his Alemoires d'Outre-tombe during the time of the Revolution and the Empire. While Proust also wrote passages of great beauty he took a close interest in the progress of the war never doubting, it would seem, the final outcome. Mignonette is Reseda odorata, a modest herb which is beautifully fragrant, one of the sixty species in the genus which occur in the Mediterranean region 357

and further east into Central Asia. Resedaceae has only seventy species.

The entire family

Describing an air-raid in Paris (58) brings to mind, of all things, garden fountains as the narrator exclaims that the beams of the anti-aircraft searchlights travelled through the sky like luminous jets of water. The appearance of a Gotha on a bombing mission over Paris, with the resulting black-out, has unforeseen consequences (59) with the darkness enveloping everything, irresistibly tempting for certain people. There are unseen hands, lips, and bodies going into action, adding extra pleasure to having bitten into the fruit without asking permission. In this metamorphosed Paris the narrator catches sight of an equally transformed Baron de Charlus in a cab with Jupien in the Champs-Elysées (60), a hunched man with staring eyes placed rather than seated in the back, a straw hat failing to conceal his unruly forest of white hair. Charlus was not the only person to have been changed almost beyond recognition (61) for the narrator realises that to fit a name to the faces before him he had been obliged to follow the years back to their source. M. d'Argencourt is a revelation, just as the sight of some strange dwarf tree or giant baobab tells that we have arrived in a new latitude. The patches of white in beards and moustaches lent a melancholy note to the human landscape, as do the first yellow leaves seen on trees when still in summer. The baobab tree, Adansonia digitata, occurs wild in subtropical Africa and the genus comemorates the pioneering and somewhat eccentric French taxonomic botanist Michel Adanson (1727-1806) who spent four years in Senegal which helped him develop his new system of plant classification. All parts of this odd tree have been found useful in the local rural economy, the 358

timber, fibre, leaves as a vegetable and seeds as a source of vitamin C. The trunk of the tree is remarkably thick in relation to its height, up to 9m diameter for a tree 12m tall, due to the water storage tissues inside the trunk. Growing in habitats with a sometimes long dry season, the foliage is deciduous and the irregularly branched, stumpy boughs are often decorated with the remains of large, woody, pendulous, German sausage-like fruits. Radiocarbon dating shows that some of these trees may live for more than 1000 years. Another reflection on the changing appearance of acquaintances (62) concerns Mme de Guermantes who, the narrator notes is so little changed, yet composite like a bar of nougat. He could distinguish traces of verdigris, a small pink patch of shell-work, a little growth of an uncertain character, smaller than a mistletoe berry. In contrast the narrator cites Odette who, now Mine de Forcheville since the death of Swann (63) was so miraculous with all her carmines and russets, that she seemed to have blossomed for a second time. She might have been the principal attraction of a flower show because as she had not changed she seemed scarcely to be alive. She looked like a sterilised rose. He greeted her and her eyes uselessly searched for a name until he told her who he was. With the spell broken at the sound of his name, he had lost the look of an arbutus tree or a kangaroo and she recognised him. In full fruit, which often occurs when the tree is also in full flower, species of the strawberry tree, Arbutus, do display as odd an assemblage of attributes as the hopping herbivore. There are twenty species of Arbutus which belongs to the heather family, Ericaceae. These evergreen trees, some having very attractive bark, have clusters of white or pink heatherflowers which are followed by colourful strawberry-like fruit 359

taking a year to mature, but when ripe are virtually tasteless; this does not stop them from being the chief ingredient of the Portuguese alcoholic drink medronho. Sometimes seen in parks and arboreta, the commonest species is A. unedo, see Fig. 5. It grows wild in Spain, other parts of the Mediterranean region, Asia Minor and into western France and south-western Ireland, where it is a relic of the flora which existed in that part of Europe before the last Ice Age; the glaciation did not reach this part of Ireland. At the same reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes where he meets Odette (64), the narrator also meets her daughter Gilberte his childhood sweetheart. He thought that not only had Gilberte's remark about him taking her for her mother been true*, but that their similarity could only be flattering to the daughter. Gilberte was not the only guest in whom family features had emerged which hitherto had remained as hidden as the coiled parts of a seed which one day burst into growth in a manner impossible to foretell. (* This is a well known chronological slip in the novel, as the narrator does not recognise the now stouter Gilberte until page 1029.) Having spoken to Gilberte the narrator thinks (65) that she was like most human beings, resembling one of those cross-roads in a forest where routes converge, in a forest as in life, from disparate quarters. Many were the roads which led him to Mlle de Saint-Loup. The young lady being referred to is, of course, the daughter of Gilberte and Robert de Saint-Loup. Another old acquaintance met by the narrator at the same party is the Princesse de Nassau (66). Her pressure on his hand became a squeeze for she had a notion that in her carriage one evening, dropping him at his door after a party at the Duchesse de Guermantes', there might have been an embrace. To be on 360

the safe side she alluded to something that had never happened, but this was easy for her since a strawberry tart could send her into an ecstasy. The uncertainty of what had passed between them became resolved in her gaze which signified that it was so long ago, where the shadows of her other husbands, the men who had kept her and two wars still lingered. The narrator enquires of a now elderly Duchesse de Guermantes the name of another elegant guest (67). Her pose was set off by the brilliance of an Empire dress in flame-red silk before which even the reddest of fuchsias would have paled and beneath the surface of which emblems and flowers seemed to have been imprinted in some distant past. She was the Marquise de SaintEuverte. The red fuchsias of her silk dress gave an autumnal flowering to the name of Saint-Euverte and the Empire style. Tadie indicated (68) that Proust's health had further deteriorated, probably from 1911, with additional problems including emphysema, associated pulmonary heart condition and difficulty with reading. Yet 1917 was a year when Proust resumed a more active social life, when he entertained such old friends as still remained in Paris and when he made a variety of new ones, often at dinner parties at the Ritz where he became a regular patron. He was able once again to acquire his favoured role in a triangular friendship with Princess Helene Soutzo (1879-1975) at that time estranged from her husband, they divorced in 1924, and Paul Morand (1888-1976) with whom she lived until her death. The Princess lived at the Ritz during the war and this no doubt had a bearing on Proust's use of that hotel and particularly as she gave lively dinner parties there with interesting guests which provided material for his writing. At the same time the urgency to proceed with his novel and the prospect of his own mortality haunted him. Not very far from 361

the end of A la recherche... (69) the narrator deliberates that it was precisely when the thought of death was a matter of indifference to him that he began to fear its impact on the completion of his book. People die, he thought, so that over their heads may grow the grass not of oblivion, but of eternal life through a true work of art. This is not exactly the sort of death which the distinguished writer Bergotte experienced (70), suffering as he was from mild uraemia. Having eaten potatoes, presumably at lunch, before visiting an exhibition of Dutch painting which includes Vermeer's View of Delft on loan from The Hague, while studying the painting he feels dizzy and, seated, tells himself that it was nothing, a touch of indigestion from potatoes which were under-cooked. Then another attack strikes and he rolls from the settee to the floor with visitors and attendants hurrying to help, but he is dead. Proust had gone to see this painting again, having previously seen it in Holland in an exhibition in Paris at the Jeu de Paume in late May 1921 accompanied by his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. But Tadie (71) made it clear that Bergotte's death at the exhibition preceded Proust's visit, although gained certain elaboration from it at a later date. The practicalities of ill-health Proust touched on in Jean Santeuil (72) where M. Silvain Bastelle, a celebrated author and member of the Academie francaise had wealth and social standing, but had lost the sensibility which had once set him dreaming at the sight of a branch of almond blossom in a florist's window. The sight of massed flowers along an avenue now left him untouched. One of Proust's earliest portrayals of death, with a hint of the Symbolist which he later rejected and far removed from the style of that of Bergotte, is that of the Viscount of Sylvania, 362

Baldassare Silvande (73) in Les Plaisirs... who recalls his last meeting with a cherished, but platonic Oliviane. The setting sun lit only the canopy of a row of poplars, like hanging garlands of light, the trunks being already plunged in shadow. He saw the tall linden tree under which he had become betrothed and recalled the day, when his betrothal had been broken, that only his mother knew how to comfort him. The popularity of the linden tree, Tilia, with the love-poets of Germany and northern France is attributed by Graves (74) to the tree being a lowland substitute for the more upland heather which was associated in ancient times with the Roman and Sicilian love goddess Venus Erycina and in ancient Gaul, Uroica. There are fifty species of linden, or lime tree, largely northern temperate in distribution, but also extending in range into Mexico and Indo-China. The European species tolerate heavy pruning and for this reason have often been used in the creation of pleached alleys, palisades and other clipped hedges in formal gardens. Species such as T. tomentosa and T. oliveri have leaves which are dark green above and silvery-white beneath making an attractive feature when disturbed by the breeze; neither of these species attract the aphids which so often cover the foliage of other lindens and the ground beneath with honey-dew. The suicide of Emmanuel Bibesco in London on 22 August 1917 was not entirely unanticipated by Proust according to Tadie (75), but was no less shocking. The intensification of German bombing raids on Paris in January 1918 were, if anything, used by Proust as a means of gathering new material for his novel. Regard for his personal safety seems to have been swept away by the exhilaration and aesthetic awe of the moment which he captured in his writing as shown in examples already quoted. The German offensive in May and June was 363

only finally held on the Mare on 17 July, before the victorious counter-offensive began. Proust continued to dine regularly at the Ritz meeting acquaintances old and new, one of the older ones being Jean Cocteau. Proust had an uneasy relationship with Cocteau as Tadie explained (76). A little before 25 December 1910 Proust had written him a letter (77) gently criticising his approach to life. He told him that he skimmed through life with the lack of appetite of someone paying New Year visits all day long and eating too many marrons glaces. This, he added, was the stumbling-block to be feared for his marvellous, but sterilized gifts. Proust then concludes the short letter with a rhyme about whether they love each other and advising that Cocteau can expect to be sent some mistletoe for Christmas. A telescope fixed on time The armistice had created a peace of sorts, but in mid-January Proust learnt that his aunt, who owned the building, had sold 102 boulevard Haussmann for office development by the private Banque M.Varin-Bernier et Cie and that as he resided there without a lease, he would have to find another home. His cork-lined room eventually became the boardroom of the bank. In March 1919 he had a recurrence of a speech problem so that he had difficulty articulating words. As an interim move having to vacate by 31 May, he accepted the fourth floor furnished apartment in the house of the actress Rejane at 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichat near the Porte Dauphine on 26 May, but had to vacate it by early September. On the positive side on 21 June Proust had three titles on sale, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en flews, Du Cote de chez Swann and 364

Pastiches et mélanges, with proofs of Le Cote de Guermantes being corrected in his temporary new abode. In late September he signed the lease on his new fifth floor, unfurnished apartment at 44 rue Hamelin; it had no lift. He moved in on 1 October 1919. On 10 December Proust won the Prix Goncourt awarded by the Academie Goncourt; it was not a popular award with some sections of the literary community. Leon Daudet was a member of the Academie who had voted for the award and had had a long and affectionate association with Proust. Tadie (78) told of Proust writing with warmth to Daudet's wife saying how, in a church in Normandy he had seen a wild rose flowering all over the porch on the foundations of which eglantine roses were carved and concluded by the comment that certain very French writers had discovered this Guirlande de Julie before arranging the spray of Le Lys dans la vallee; Proust the author of A l'onibre des felines filles en fleurs sending his own literary bouquet with those of de Montausier (1610-1690) and Balzac, respectively. When his health permitted, Proust continued to go out to dine and meet people. Amongst the new acquaintances were Sydney Schiff (1868-1944), the author whose pen-name was Stephen Hudson and his wife Violet Beddington (1875-1962), both of whom had Sodome et Gomorrhe II dedicated to them by Proust when it was published. Tadie (79) related how Schiff started translating Proust into English in 1919, but how only 1300 copies of his translation of Time Regained (1931) were printed by Chatto and Windus. Schiff was critical of the Scott Moncrieff translation. Tadie also pointed out how Proust, wishing to outdo an adoring husband, wrote that Violet was a retiring and fragrant flower whose peduncle and efflorescence 365

Leonardo da Vinci had drawn so carefully in the study that they may have seen in the Ambrosian Library in Venice. Tadie noted that this library is in Milan, not Venice. Furthermore, Proust may rather have recalled the celebrated study of violets held in the Institut de France, Paris, Manuscript B, Folio 14 recto, showing three flowering and leaf bearing shoots of violet (80), which are closer to an `efflorescence' than the four disconnected violet flowers in the study held in the Museo Accademia, which is in Venice (now apparently attributed to Leonardo's student, Francesco Melzi). The Codex Atlanticus in the Ambrosian Library in Milan would appear to contain no violet drawings by Leonardo (81). To digress yet again, the identity of the three violet shoots in the Manuscript B pen and ink study was as unresolved for me in 1979 when I implicitly settled for `Viola species' on the caption to the plate showing the study, as now because Leonardo had shown no basal leaves and gave no indication of what sort of style and stigma the flowers had. These are critical characters for violet identification. I reported the identification of Baldacci, V. tricolor, together with identifications of Emboden, V. odorata (left and right shoots) and V canina (centre shoot) without further comment. But then, as now, the left-hand shoot has differently shaped stipules from the centre shoot and the right-hand shoot is the only one shown with a bract inserted high on the flower stalk, all useful characters. V. odorata does not bear its flowers on leafy shoots, the flowers and leaves arising directly from the rootstock, but V. canina does, its flowers and leaves being borne on short stems which arise from the rootstock. The point of origin of the flowers and leaves on the violet plant is one of the subsectional generic taxonomic differences between subsect. Uncinatae (including V. odorata) and subsect. Rostratae (including V. canina). All of the 366

flowering shoots in the Manuscript B study are leaf bearing and therefore none seem to represent V. odorata. The irregularly gnawed edges to the petals of the central flower might relate to a cultivated violet of some sort, but doubling of the flower is a more commonly encountered trait in violet cultivars. However, any attempt to accurately identify these violets in our time is incidental to the demonstration of the detail of Leonardo's drawings compared with those of his contemporaries. They are the work of a close observer of plants and uniquely innovative visionary. It matters little if the violets remain unnamed for they are forever beautiful, miraculous in Proust's words. We know that Leonardo's studies of certain other plants allow complete identification to the subspecies level such as in Sparganium erecturn ssp. microcarpum, the branched burr-reed, a study in red chalk held at Windsor, Folio 12430 recto. In a comparable way adjusting Proust's 'telescope fixed on time', the identification of plants used by Proust in his writing only serves to demonstrate the versatility and extent of his plant knowledge as a part of his artistic creativity. On 27 September Proust was awarded the rank of chevalier of the Legion d'honneur. Le Cote de Guermantes I went on sale on 22 October 1920, the month that Proust's asthma attacks were so bad that for the first time he was given morphine injections; as Tadie put it (82) while he had previously often said that he was ill he was now sure that he was soon to die. Yet he continued, in the evenings, to go out meeting people who would provide ideas for his writing, as well as others influential in literary circles who might help promote better understanding and greater acceptance of his work with the reading public. The Ritz was still very much Proust's centre of operations for the dinner parties he held. He continued to make corrections to the 367

proofs of Le Cote de Guermantes II which were completed towards the end of the year. The proofs were returned to the publisher on 20 January 1921 together with the typescript of Sodome et Gomorrhe I; they were published on 2 May. The last two years of Proust's life and his increasing debilitation were interspersed with 'good evenings' when he was able to go out. The method and the speed with which he composed the later sections of his novel and the practicalities of publication of the large text are inseparably linked with its structure. The directions that Proust finally gave to the publisher when it became apparent that he would not live to see completion also influenced what was included, especially in Albertine disparue in the posthumously published final three volumes of his novel. Tadie's knowledge of these matters as editor of the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade edition ofA la recherche... (1987-89) is unparalleled and one needs to read his detailed and moving account of this period (83). Involuntary memory

Beckett's essay of 1931 on the roles of time, habit and memory in Proust's writing remains illuminating. The engagement of 'involuntary memory' by apparently trivial events is a phenomenon which had its origins in Contre Sainte-Beuve (84), but was later developed by Proust in A la recherche... He writes that one snowy evening his old cook made him a cup of tea, something he never drank. She also brought him some slices of dry toast which he dipped in the cup of tea. As soon as he put it in his mouth, softening and flavoured with tea, he sensed the smell of geraniums and orange blossom and felt an extraordinary happiness. The partitions in his memory seemed to collapse and he remembered the summers of childhood when 368

he would go to his grandfather, not yet risen in his bedroom and be given a rusk soaked in tea. That same taste now conjured a childhood garden, until then only dim, with its forgotten walks and urns with their flowers all in the little cup of tea, like those Japanese flowers which only open when dropped into water. In the same way he had once re-experienced days in Venice when crossing a courtyard among uneven paving-stones, feeling the same sensation underfoot he had felt on the slightly uneven pavement of the baptistry of Saint Mark's. Proust continues that at lunch, not long ago, he let a spoon fall on his plate and it made the same noise as the hammer of the linesmen tapping on the wheels of a train at a railway station. When that noise rang out all of the unconscious poetry of that day was resurrected, all except those items consciously retained such as the country churchyard, the light in the trees and the Baizacian flowers. How often during walks had not his friends known him to halt at the turning-off of an avenue, or by a clump of trees and left him alone for a while. Elusively, he could not tell where he had seen them before, but he knew their shapes and groupings, their outline seeming to tremble in his heart. Louis de Robert (1871-1937) was a writer with whom Proust confided as he valued his judgement and, like Proust, was an invalid. In one of Proust's letters (85) written sometime in July 1913 he tries to convey the process which conjures involuntary memory, about which he is currently writing. It was something imperceptible and how the taste of tea enables him to rediscover the gardens of Combray, but not through a process of minutely observed detail, rather a whole theory of memory and perception not formulated in logical terms. In the postscript to 369

this letter, Proust offers prospective titles for volumes of A la recherche..., including Jardins daps une tasse de the! Writing to Rene Blum on 5,6 or 7 November 1913 (86) Proust again relates how he is exploring involuntary memory. He explains that one section of the book is about a forgotten part of his life that he suddenly recaptures while eating a piece of madeleine dipped in tea, a taste that engages him before recognising it as one experienced every morning many years before. The whole of his life at that period is resuscitated just as in the Japanese game in which little pieces of paper dipped in a bowl of water turn into people, or flowers. All of the people and gardens of that time of his life emerge from that cup of tea. Proust uses different ingredients in the recipe to initially engage involuntary memory in A la recherche.. .(87). Describing his aunt Leonie the narrator comments that when she felt `upset' she would ask for her tisane. It would be his duty to shake out the required measure from the chemist's package of limeblossom for infusion in boiling water. The dry stems had twisted into a fantastic trellis interlacing the pale flowers, leaves having lost, or altered in their original appearance and now resembling the most disparate things, like the transparent wing of a fly, a blank label, the petal of a rose, all piled together and interwoven like materials for a nest. Such details gave him the pleasure of knowing that these were once pieces of real limetrees like those seen coming from the train in the Avenue de la Gare. In the little grey balls he recognised green buds plucked prematurely. The blossoms perfuming the evening air among the frail stems hanging like little golden roses showed that these were the origin of the half-extinguished petals which filled the 370

chemist's bag, the twilight of a flower. Presently his aunt would dip a little madeleine in the infusion tasting of dead leaves, or faded blossom which she so enjoyed, handing him a piece when sufficiently soft. The lime-tree here is probably Tilia x europaea, see Fig. 48, a natural hybrid between T. cordata and T platyphyllos. It was one of the most commonly planted limes and bees love its flowers which appear in June and July in Europe. The 'leaves' referred to in the dried material are elongated bracts attached to the clusters of flowers, found in all species of Ti/ia. Writing about the character of the music of Vinteuil (88) the narrator explains that some phrases of Vinteuil's music gave him the same peculiar pleasure felt at other moments, as when he tasted a certain cup of tea. Like the cup of tea the sensation that Vinteuil generated in his imagination too rapidly for him to properly apprehend, was something that might be compared to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. Proust's great affection for the work of Chateaubriand appears in Le temps retrouvé (89) in the narrator's recognition that it is from an experience similar to that of the madeleine that Chateaubriand describes the loveliest episode in the Memo ires d'Outre-tombe. Walking alone one evening Chateaubriand was roused from his reflections by a thrush perched high on the branch of a birch tree. The magical song caused his father's estate to re-appear before his eyes and he forgot the recent catastrophies of which he had been a witness. Transported suddenly into the past he saw again those country scenes in which he had so often heard the notes of the thrush.

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When Andre Gide wrote to Proust on 10 or 11 January 1914 (90) apologising for the rejection of the manuscript of Du Cote de chez Swann by La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise he was probably very sincere in his motives, claiming that it had to be the gravest mistake ever made by the NRF and one of the regrets of his life. But in referring to the episode in the work dealing with the 'cup of camomile tea' rather than lime-flower, Gide erred on a detail of pivotal importance in the novel even in this apology. Proust made no comment on the error in his reply to Gide on 12 or 13 January. Although on cordial terms their differences outweighed their similarities and it seems that they were never close friends. Celeste Albaret recalled of Proust (91) that before she left him she took a silver tray away from his bedside and replaced it with a lacquer one for the night, with lime blossoms, a bottle of Evian water and his cup and sugar bowl in case he felt in need of some lime-blossom tea using his electric-kettle during the night, but he never did. In eight years she never cleared away a single opened bottle of Evian water. Perhaps the lime-blossoms by his bedside were more important to him as a symbol from the past. Epiphanies

There are a number of instances where the artist finds himself obliged, there seems no alternative, to contemplate a 'hidden meaning', or an `innerness' beyond the actual object being viewed. Proust progressed in stages towards expressing these epiphanies. In one instance from Jean Santeuil it is only hinted at (92) where Jean compares the complexity of man-made objects like the garden-path in the Jardin des Oublis with the apparent simplicity of the natural. He says that the massed 372

flowers have a balanced symmetry put there for the sole purpose of wakening deep delight in human hearts, while the forget-me-nots trace a thin blue line beside the red gillyflowers carefully paired as in some meaningful design. The hidden meaning has a presence when Jean walks the country roads surrounding Revelllon (93) encountering apple-trees bearing their enormous fans of leaves and fruit, destined to spend the night in intimate colloquy with the dark sky. He left the trees addressing the heavens in their language of immense gestures. The commentary on certain inner processes is more explicit later in the novel (94). The latent life of all things seemed to be displayed in bud and blossom, the shower of sparks from silent convulsions of the fire, the fall of an iris petal, the oil soaking through a lamp's long wick, all marking a secret germination as when the ripe fruit bursts its sheath with a faint sound, an urgency of movement forced through days of endless waiting. In Contre Sainte-Beuve there is the description of an epiphany (95). Standing in front of this tree he tries to recapture what it was he felt just now when walking through the public garden and it caught his eye, in its grass-plot, covered with white blossoms as though countless pellets of snow were still clinging after a thaw. What he searches for is something beyond the actual tree since he no longer feels it, but suddenly feels it afresh, cannot fathom it and is at a loss. Meanwhile the unconscious and infallible architectural mind called the double cherry continued to dispose its little white blossoms, lightly crisped and ruffled, wafting fragrance through the tree's complexity. 373

Alfred Mellerio's book L'Idealisme en Peinture (1889) dealing with the artistic movements of his era, published three years after the birth of Symbolism, contains a commentary on visual art which closely parallels what Proust seems to have been describing. Mellerio stated that direct contact with nature arouses feelings which are recalled by Memory and connected and, thus, recreated by the Imagination, placing us in an involuntary emotional state not governed by the will. Then the Idea forms in the mind... The artist struggles to express that Idea in all its intensity, an aim which is best achieved by rejecting all detail, and concentrating on its essential characteristics. Then ideally, the artist and viewer are brought to the same emotional state which is the aim of all Art. The points of emphasis are those of Mellerio from a translation in The Symbolists (1977) by Philippe Jullian. As Mosley stated (96) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) was a key figure in the development of philosophical studies on plant life, the search for an archetype - die Urpflanze and evidence for a divine force at work in nature. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was much influenced by Goethe's writing and also admired the work of John Ruskin whose interpretation of plant life had the broadest of applications. Maurice Maeterlinck was inspired by Schopenhauer's On the Will in Nature (1836), as well as the German Romantics and their English-speaking followers, Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). All of these authors with their various views on the plant-world had been read by and made an impression on Proust, with the exception of Maeterlinck's L 'Intelligence des fleurs (1907), by the time that he had set aside his Jean Santeuil manuscript. It is therefore possible that in his epiphanies Proust was alluding to the contemplation of an unverifiable force 374

linking all organisms in some sort of 'universal communion', the meaning of life. Robert Ranke Graves (1895-1985) approached the relationship between words and plants from the different direction of study of their use and significance in ritualistic and religious ceremony (97). Proust had died more than twenty years before Graves's work was published in 1946, but perhaps there is some parallel between what Graves sought to describe and the epiphany of Proust. Graves's thesis, in what he freely admitted to be a very queer book which should be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired, or rigidly scientific mind, rests upon the importance of different plants simultaneously representing the different letters of an orally transmitted, pre-Arabic alphabet and the religious deities being worshipped at particular times of the year. Graves wrote that he thought the function of poetry is a religious invocation of the Muse. Its use is the experience of a mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. The language of poetic myth, the basis of his study realised in The White Goddess, was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess or Muse, some dating from the Old Stone Age and that this remains the language of unimprovable original poetry. Proust's wide reading made him familiar with classical and preclassical deities together with many of their associated plants, some of which he listed in a passage on perfumes already quoted, others having been noted by me whenever they relate to the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet described by Graves. One might speculate that Proust's epiphanies have some correspondence with the notion of the 'poetic myth' of Graves who, however, sensed cultural rather than biological engagement with fleeting

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fragments of languages now forgotten, veiled by the passage of nine millenia. Déjà-vu

The passage in A 1 'oinbre des jeunes lilies en fleurs where the narrator is perplexed by the image of three trees (98) seems to be neither an instance of involuntary memory, nor one of hidden meaning - the epiphany, but more a case of déjà-vu. Enjoying the drive with Mme de Villeparisis in her carriage towards Hudimesnil near Balbec the narrator observes that he had just noticed, a little way from the hog's-back road along which we were travelling, three trees forming a pattern which he had seen before. He could not reconstruct the place from which they were detached, but felt that it had been somewhere familiar. He felt that they were concealing something, perhaps a landscape from his youth now entirely obliterated from memory, or perhaps he had never seen them before. He chose to believe that they were companions of childhood, their passionate gesticulation suggesting the anguish of a loved one who has lost the power of speech. As he watched the trees recede their despairing arms seemed to say that what you fail to learn from us today, you will never know and a part of yourself which we were bringing you will vanish forever. When he turned his back on them and ceased to see them because of the nature of the road, Mme de Villeparisis asked what he was dreaming about. He felt as wretched as if he had lost a friend, or had broken faith with the dead. What child has not shared a similar despair on finally and inadvertantly treading on a crack between paving slabs being obsessively avoided in a walking game along a pavement? 376

Surely the narrator was struggling to remember a walk he took with his grandfather (99), the one in Du Cote de chez Swann ? Being given a lift in Dr Percepied's carriage and seeing the twin steeples of Martinville-le-Sec joined by that of Vieuxvicq near Combray in a gliding contramotion as their vehicle passed, he should have remembered writing his first literary creation in the jolting carriage. They had left Martinville some little time when, on the horizon to watch their departure, its twin steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved sun-bathed pinnacles once more in a farewell. He caught sight of them for the last time, far away and seeming no more than three flowers painted on the sky above the line of the fields. Feeling so entirely relieved of his mind's obsession with the steeples and the mystery behind them on completing his composition, he felt like a hen having just laid an egg and began to sing at the top of his voice! The narrator then adds that he never thought again of this page...

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Postscript

During the process of examining Proust's writing about plants I became aware of certain references, sometimes obscure, about matters which could relate to a secret society known as the Prieuré de Sion. While I know of no connection between Proust and the Prieuré, several of his friends belonged to families which did apparently have such a link so that I have recorded these references and placed them in some sort of context. To dispassionate readers of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail

(1996), the account by its three authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln is at once unexpected, fantastic, yet apparently corroborated by historic documents and events, or other circumstantial evidence. Even these authors' wrote that they were aware of being confronted by a multitude of fragments from several different jig-saw puzzles, all of which seemed to reflect a pattern. The question was were they ultimately simply random coincidences, or did they indeed reflect a pattern and one that was meaningful? The still unexplained events which occurred at Rennes-leChâteau when, in June 1885, the cure Berenger Saunière became the new priest of the then remote village in the eastern foothills of the Pyrenees was the initial subject of their enquiry. This quickly escalated to an ever widening field of study involving the Knights Templar extending back to the beginning of the Christian religion and its subsequent development. The evidence presented by these authors suggests that the Knights Templar was a public front for a secret society formed in the Holy Land in 1090 and called the Prieuré de Sion. With the loss of Jerusalem to the Saracens in 1187, the Prieuré regrouped in Europe where its objective became the reinstatement of the Merovingian royal bloodline after its 379

usurpation by Rome and Pepin III in 751. Only in 1956 was the existence of the Prieure publicly acknowledged, revealing a list of alleged Grand-Masters beginning in 1188 and continuing since then to the present day and, remarkably, including amongst others Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. The late Anthony Burgess is quoted as thinking that Baigent et al. provided a marvellous basis for a novel which, possibly to the detriment of their original intent, Dan Brown wrote with great commercial success. To attempt to summarise the iconoclastic findings of the authors almost reads as a parody, but a summary is needed to help show how Marcel Proust may have been at least aware of the Prieure and its connection with Rennes-le-Château from his writing. The family of Proust's mother, the Weil family, originated in Wurttemberg, Germany, but moved to Paris early in the time of the First Empire, from 1804-1814, according to Proust's biographer Tadie2 and they were Jewish. The family of Proust's father was Roman Catholic. Thus, Proust's origins symbolised the dynamic which is at the heart of the work of the Prieure, the tension between the Roman Church and the traditional Kings of France the blood ancestors of Jesus, the Kings of Judah. Furthermore, the brother-in-law of Proust's maternal great grandfather Adolphe Cremieux was, according to Tadie3 not only a Minister in the Provisional Governments of the Second and Third Republics, but also a Grand-Master of the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite. This form of freemasonry dating from 1725 and probably devised by Charles Radclyffe, a GrandMaster of the Prieure from 1727-1746 according to Baigent et al.(4), offered higher degrees of initiation than those offered by other masonic systems at the time. It was his wife, Amelie 380

Cremieux, in whose salon were entertained writers such as Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Merimee and Alexander Dumas (fils) all of whom had an early influence on Proust's reading. Maurice Barres was another influence on Proust. In early life Barres was involved in a Rose-Croix circle with Victor Hugo, a Grand-Master of the Prieure from 1844-1885, immediately prior to the term served by Claude Debussy according to Baigent et al.(5). Barres' novel of 1912, La Colline inspiree, is set in a Lorraine village being the old pilgrimage centre of Sion and was regarded by some as a thinly disguised allegory about the cure Berenger Sauniere and Rennes-le-Château according to Baigent et al. Between 1896 and 1917 when Sauniere died, an immense expenditure was lavished on the church in the tiny village from financial sources still unknown. Proust had written an unsolicited review of Barres novel for the editor of Le Temps, Adrien Hebrard, but the review never appeared because Proust withdrew it for some reason which he promised to explain to his friend Reynaldo Hahn on 26 July 1913 (6). He asked Hahn in confidence if it would be easy for him to retrieve the review about La Colline inspiree he had sent to Hebrard, not to get it published, but so that he, Proust, could again have it in his possession. Proust's explanation about the review given to Lucien Daudet in early September (7) seems less candid in stating that Hebrard had refused it and hadn't even replied. Tadie (8) wrote that it was Marcel Prevost who turned down this article. Proust recalled the three early Merovingian kings of the 6111 century, Chilperic, Clothair and Childebert in his writing for Contre Sainte-Beuve ( 9) and his celebrated description of a stained glass Tree of Jesse church window makes reference to the houses of Luxembourg, Orleans and Wurttemberg all of 381

which were associated with anti-Bourbon sentiment and being supportive of the objects of the Prieure. In an affectionate letter to Hahn, who had recently enlisted and was stationed at Albi in Languedoc, written on 21 November 1914 (10) Proust bid goodbye to his little Albigensian and encouraged him to remain one. This comment could, perhaps, allude to the brutally repressive Albigensian Crusade which lasted for almost forty years and was, according to Baigent et al.(11), directed against the Cathars, or Albigensians named after Albi. The crusade began in 1209 and extended during the papacies of Innocent III, Honorius III and Gregory IX. Its success reasserted the authority of the Roman Church and effectively extinguished what was, for the time, a surprisingly cultured and tolerant brotherhood which was not to be seen again until the Renaissance. To Rome the Cathars were theologically flawed. Tadie wrote (12) that Emile Male had considered that the statues of the kings of France represented the kings of Judah, the blood ancestors of Jesus, this being a clear reference to the Merovingian dynasty and that Proust had transferred these statues to the porch of the church at Balbec, putting Male's notion into the mouth of Elstir. Tadie also noted that on 31 January 1913 Proust had visited what had once been the house of Nicolas Flamel, at 51 rue de Montmorency in Paris. The Grand-Master of the Prieure from 1398-1418 was Nicolas Flamel. Proust referred to the Bois, the Tuileries and Champs-Elysées on many occasions in his writing, but the Buttes-Chaumont is used only once in A la recherche_ (13), being a very particular place with its lakeside caves where the narrator is concerned that Andree will take Albertine for purposes other than platonic. 382

Albertine tells the narrator that she believed Andree wanted to take her to the Buttes-Chaumont where she had never visited. Having his suspicions about the real relationship between these women, one his mistress, the narrator favoured a more public place such as Saint-Cloud. Robinson (14) devotes Chapter 4 of his book to the relandscaped quarry site with its artificial lakes and caves. Andree already knew the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with its intimate ivy-clad grottos and declivities. At a Merovingian level the Chaumont family has a particular significance for the Prieure according to Baigent et al. (15). The first three of the Grand-Masters were Jean de Gisors (11881220), Marie de Saint-Clair (1220-1266) and Guillaume de Gisors (1266-1307) all being related to the Lords of Gisors, the Chaumont family. Jean, with lineal descent from Dagobert II and the Merovingian kings through the Plantard family of his father and Idoine de Gisors his mother, married into the Chaumonts to Marie de Saint-Clair; her grandmother had married into the same family. Guillaume was the grandson of Jean and had a sister who married back into the Plantard family; he married into the Bar family which also had its own connection with the Merovingian bloodline. The Plantard family crest from the time of at least the 12 th century had the motto Et in Arcadia Ego which came to have great symbolic meaning for the Prieure. Proust's admiration of the writing of Chateaubriand, Balzac, Gautier and Nerval would almost certainly have acquainted him with the esoteric and Hermetic tradition, themes which these authors incorporated into their writing according to Baigent et al. (16). Chateaubriand apparently made pilgrimage to the tomb of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) in Rome, the painter having been in communication with the Fouquet family at the time of 383

Louis XIV becoming the King of France. Poussin was born in Les Andelys which is only a few miles away from Gisors; Baigent et al.(17). In 1624 Poussin moved to Rome where he spent most of his life except, significantly, for a short period spent in Paris from 1640-42 during which time he created his painting Les Bergers d'Arcadie. He had already completed his painting Et in Arcadia Ego in about 1630, the title being the same as the Plantard family motto. As already mentioned Proust's name for the historian of the Fronde, M. Pierre (18) is curious because according to Baigent et al. (19), Georges Pierre was a correspondent with John Locke in the 1660's, Locke at that time living in France and being a friend of Robert Boyle, then the current Grand-Master of the Prieuré de Sion; his teitit extended from 1654-1691. Nicolas Fouquet was both rich and influential and was appointed Superintendent of Finances to Louis XIV in 1653, but he also had a mother and brothers who were associated with the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement which was a façade for the work of the Prieuré. Baigent et al.(20) relate how the brother of Nicolas, the Abbé Louis Fouquet, visited Poussin in Rome in 1656 and later described the meeting in a letter to his brother Nicolas, part of which includes the cryptic passage that they discussed certain things, which he would with ease be able to explain in detail, things which will confer, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have difficulty to extract from him and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will discover in centuries to come, things so difficult of discovery that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune, nor their equal. On 11 July 1659 the Plantard family home, the Château Barberie near Nevers in the Nivernais region, was destroyed by 384

fire together with, subsequently, almost all record of its very existence, some evidence suggesting that it was at the instigation of Mazarin. Not long after, in 1661, Louis XIV ordered the arrest of Nicolas Fouquet and after a long trial Fouquet was given life imprisonment in 1665, being kept strictly incommunicado. The king personally scrutinised all of Fouquet's correspondence and after an initial lack of success, finally secured Poussin's painting, Les Bergers d' Arcadie, which was kept in his private apartments at Versailles. The painting depicts three shepherds and a shepherdess examining an antique tomb which bears the inscription in stone Et in Arcadia Ego', the Plantard family motto. It was only in 1718 that the grandson of Nicolas Fouquet, the Marquis de Belle-lie, agreed to cede that fortified island to the crown, but only in return for amongst other concessions, the Gisors property, the historic centre for the Prieure; Baigent et al.(21). In the late summer of 1895 Proust and Reynaldo Hahn made pilgrimage to Belle-Ile, to visit Sarah Bernhardt who had a property there. Proust makes an oblique reference in A la recherche...(22) linking the name Poussin to financial misdemeanors, which is what Louis XIV alleged of Fouquet. Living a life of comparative retirement in Combray within the walls of a large garden, Mme Poussin could never find anything soft enough for her liking. Her son-in-law, whose name the narrator had forgotten, having been notary public in Combray ran off with the contents of the safe. However, most of the inhabitants were on such friendly terms with the rest of the family that no odium ensued and people were rather sorry for Mme Poussin, who never entertained, but when people passed her railings they stopped to admire the shade of her trees.

385

Claude Debussy was Grand-Master of the Prieure from 18851918, Baigent et al. (23) and was known by Proust, but only at a social level. For his part Debussy is said to have distrusted Proust, finding him rather long-winded, precious and a bit of an old woman according to Painter (24). Although Proust admired the music of Debussy, the composer knew that Proust's close friend, Hahn, disliked his compositions. Proust told Hahn (25) in a letter dated 21 February 1911 that after hearing Pelleas et Melisande from the Opera-Comique by means of subscription Theatrophone and thinking of Debussy's physical person he was surprised that Debussy wrote it. Jean Cocteau was Grand-Master of the Prieure from 1918-1963 and Proust knew him more closely than Debussy, yet in July 1913 Proust wrote to Cocteau (26) that one needs to resign oneself to accepting that you are not a real friend and we have all been merely candidates, insufficiently qualified for your friendship. Proust had close friendship with members of each of the Fenelon, Montesquiou and Noailles families, all of whom had a traditional involvement with the objectives of the Prieure according to Baigent et al. Proust was an intimate friend of Bertrand, Vicomte de Salignac-Fenelon (1878-1914) until his death in the Great War. Comte Robert de MontesquiouFezensac (1855-1911) was a lifelong friend and important early artistic influence on Proust. The Comtesse Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was an ardent supporter of Proust as well as being a sponsor of the young Cocteau. Painter observed (27) that Anna de Noailles' novel, Le Visage emerveille, which Proust had praised highly, bore more than a passing similarity with her own life when at one time Maurice Barres had been her lover.

386

Taken individually any one of these coincidences is, perhaps, unremarkable enough, but placed together in the context of the Prieuré they seem to provide evidence to suggest that Proust was aware of its existence, or the historical circumstances associated with it and incorporated hidden references in his writing. Proust died in 1922, but the existence of the Prieuré was not publicly acknowledged until thirty four years later according to Baigent et al.

387

Illustrated Appendix Here are some of Proust's plants, each species listed alphabetically by Latin name followed by common name. These period wood engravings made largely from the drawings of W.H.Fitch in the mid-nineteenth century show his ability to simultaneously convey the character of a particular plant species and its botanical details in a carefully arranged artistic composition. The images have been carefully computer enhanced to repair what appears to be faulty printing of some of the originals. It was not unusual for line drawings such as these to be later hand-coloured by the owner of the book.

389

Fig. 1 Adiantum capillus-veneris Maidenhair Fern

Fig. 2 Agrimonia eupatoria Agrimony

391

Fig. 3 Anemone nemorosa Wood Anemone

Fig. 4 Antirrhinum majus Snapdragon

392

Fig. 5 Arbutus unedo Strawberry Tree

Fig. 6 Asparagus officinalis Asparagus

393

Fig. 7 Buxus sempervirens Box

Fig. 8 Calluna vulgaris Ling

394

Fig. 9 Calystegia sepium Greater Bindweed

Fig. 10 Centaurea cyanus Cornflower

395

Fig. 11 Chamaemelum no bile Camomile

Fig. 12 Clematis vitalba Traveller's Joy

396

Fig. 13 Coiylus ave/lana Hazel

Fig. 14 Cuscuta eur•opaea Dodder

397

Fig. 15 Cyclamen hederifolium Sowbread

Fig. 16 Digitalis purpurea Foxglove

398

Fig. 17 Erica cinerea Bell Heather

Fig. 18 Fagus sylvatica Beech

399

Fig. 19 Filipendula ulmaria Meadowsweet

Fig. 20 Fragaria vesca Strawberry

400

Fig. 21 Gentiana verna Spring Gentian

Fig. 22 Geranium pratense Meadow Cranesbill

401

Fig. 23 Hedera helix Ivy

Fig. 24 Hyacinthoides non-scripta Bluebell

402

Fig. 25 Lythrum salicaria Purple Loosestrife

Fig. 26 Mahis sylvestris Crab Apple

403

Fig. 27 Malva sylvestris Common Mallow

Fig. 28 Matthiola sinuata Sea Stock

404

Fig. 29 Medicago saliva Lucerne

Fig. 30 Mimulus x robertsii Monkey Flower

405

Fig. 31 Myosotis sylvatica Wood Forget-me-not

Fig. 32 Onolnychis viciifolia Sainfoin

406

Fig. 33 Papaver so

ntte

Opium Poppy

Fig. 34 Primula vulgaris Primrose

407

Fig. 35 Prunus spinosa Sloe

Fig. 36 Pteridium aquilinum Bracken

408

Fig. 37 Pyrus comniunis Pear

Fig. 38 Ranunculus acris Buttercup

409

Fig. 39 Ranunculus aquatilis Water Crowfoot

Fig. 40 Reseda luteola Weld

410

Fig. 41 Ribes sativum Red Currant

Fig. 42 Rosa canina Dog Rose

411

Fig. 43 Rubusfruticosus Blackberry

Fig. 44 Sal ix viminalis Osier

412

Fig. 45 Sedum acre Wallpepper

Fig. 46 Taraxacum officinale Dandelion

413

Fig. 47 Taxus baccata Yew

Fig. 48 Tilia x ewvpaea Common Lime

414

Fig. 49 Trifolium repens White Clover

Fig. 50 Ulmus glabra Wych Elm

415

Fig. 51 Urtica dioica Stinging Nettle

Fig. 52 Valeriana officinalis Valerian

416

Fig. 53 Viburnum opulus Guelder Rose

Fig. 54 Vinca major Periwinkle

417

Fig. 55 Viola odorata Sweet Violet

Fig. 56 Viscum album Mistletoe

418

List of Abbreviations In the Notes to the Introduction, the Chapters and Postscript the abbreviations refer to the following primary sources, the full bibliographical details of which are given in the Bibliography. ALR - A la recherche du temps perdu, Vols. 1-3, page number. The three volume work used was based on the Pléiade text of 1954 with Terence Kilmartin revising and incorporating new material into the C.K. Scott Moncrieff English translation. I have retained Proust's original book titles throughout and which were published as follows. Volume One contains Du cote de chez Swann (1913) and A / ' ombre des feunes filles enfleurs (1919). Volume Two contains Le cote de Guermantes, I and II (1920 and 1921) and Sodome et Gornorrhe, I and 11 (1921 and 1922). Volume Three contains La prisonnière (1923), A/be rtine disparue (1925) and Le temps retrouvé (1927). CSB - Contre Sainte-Beuve page number. The translation by Sylvia Townsend Warner contains an additional twenty-seven miscellaneous essays by Proust which are here included under CSB. - The Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of DG Gardening, page number. JS - Jean Santeuil, page number.

LAU - A un ami: Correspondence inédite, 1903-1922: Preface de G. de Lauris, page number. LP - Les Plaisirs et les Jours, page number. 419

ORR - On Reading Ruskin, includes La Bible d'Arniens and Sesame et les lys, page number. Proust, Corn- Selected Letters, V ols. I-III, page number. BLL - The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, page number. Notes Botanical and horticultural details have been sourced from a number of standard works without citation, but the most commonly consulted were, Airy Shaw, H.K. 1966. A Dictionary of the Flowering and Ferns. Ed.vii. Cambridge: University Press. Heywood, V.H.(ed.). 1978. Flowering Plants of the World. Oxford: University Press.

The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs. 1993. Ed. vi. Newton Abbott: David and Charles Morley, B.D., and H. Toelken (eds.). 1983. Flowering Plants in Australia. Adelaide: Rigby Publishers.

420

Note to Preface

I Maims & Bowe, 106 Notes to Introduction 1 Tadié (1996, tr.2000)

17 ALR,3: 761

2 Painter (1989)

18 ALR,3: 935-6

3 Tadié, 50

19 Proust, Con., III, 205

4 Proust, Con., XX, 223

20 Albaret, 156

5 Tadié, 151

21 CSB, 271

6 Proust, Le Figaro, 16 August,1904

22 ALR, 1: 201 23 ALR,1: 942

7 Nattiez (1984,tr. 1989), 115-7

24 Tadié, 313 25 Tadié, xxii

8 Matoré & Mecz (1972) in Nattiez,1 9 Tadié , 282

Notes to Chapter 1

10 Proust, Con., 11,41

1 Tadié, 30

ii Shattuck, 12

2 LP,119-20

12 Shattuck, 24-5

3 Tadié, 2

13 Proust, Con., III, 366

4 JS,723-5

14 Beckett (1931)

5 JS,486-7

15 Henry (1981 & 1983)

6 Tadié, 7

16 Tadié,204

7 CSB,261 8 Painter, 17 421

9 LP, 31-7

33 LP,37

10 JS, 89-96 & 122-39

34 JS,88

11 ALR 1: 789

35 JS,154

12 Painter, 23-4

36 Baker, 113-5

13 LAU,49

37 Painter, 17

14 ALR 2: 7

38 JS,102

15 ORR,107

39 JS,134

16 JS,122

40 JS, 111

17 Hayman,8

41 Proust, Con. I: 176

18 ALR 3:287

42 ALR 1: 13

19 JS, 128-30

43 ALR 3:714-5

20 JS, 129

44 ALR 1: 171-2

21 JS, 130

45 Hayman, 23

22 JS, 128

46 Proust,Corr. II: 208

23 JS, 153

47 Hayman, 497

24 JS, 128-9

48 CSB,24

25 LP, 114

49 LP, 34

26 ALR 1: 67-8

50 Proust,Corr. I:28-9

27 JS,131

51 JS,94

28 ORR,107-8

52 JS,127

29 Robinson, 472

53 JS,135

30 JS, 136-7

54 ALR 1: 682-3

31 Painter,24

55 Graves,175

32 Tadié,326,note 2

56 LP,170 422

57 JS,119

81 ORR,101

58 JS,137

82 JS,743

59 ALR 1: 15

83 LP,35-6

60 ALR 1: 149-53

84 JS,94

61 ALR 1: 158-9

85 JS,609

62 CSB,186-90

86 ORR,100

63 ALR 1: 200-1

87 CSB,23

64 ALR 1: 983-4

88 ALR 1: 181-2

65 ALR 1: 457

89 Blunt, 233-4

66 Graves, 176

90 JS,84-5

67 ALR 3: 778

91 JS,90-1

68 JS,112

92 JS,132

69 JS,122

93 JS,141

70 JS,127-8

94 ALR 1: 131

71 ALR 1: 77

95 JS,94

72 Sansom,33-4

96 JS,404-5

73 JS,84

97 JS,93-4

74 JS,237

98 ALR 1: 199

75 ALR 2: 159-60

99 JS,131

76 Albaret, 375

100 JS,91

77 Stearn in DG, 2040

101 ALR 1: 149

78 JS,137

102 ALR 1: 184-5

79 JS,113

103 JS,607-8

80 JS,132-3

104 ALR 1: 182 423

105 CSB,25-6

129 JS,102

106 JS,90

130 JS,l 18

107 Graves, 245

131 JS,123

108 JS,93

132 JS,124

109 JS,106-7

133 ALR 1: 165-6

110 JS,90

134 ORR, 104

111 Painter,24

135 JS,90

112 ORR,107-8

136 JS,104

113 ORR,113

137 CSB,28

114 Graves, 181

138 JS,43

115 JS,131

139 ORR, 135

116 Painter, 36

140 ALR 1: 95

117 JS,120

141 Robinson viii

118JS,124

1420RR,100

119 JS,289

143 JS,104

120 JS,246

144 Tadië,43

121 JS,90

145 ORR, 104-5

122 JS,144

146 Tadié, 293

123 Robinson,504

147 Tadié,43

124 ALR 1: 153

148 ALR 1:427-8

125 JS, 124& 126

149 JS,46

126 JS,120

150 ALR 1:432

127 LP, 34

151 ALR 1:442

128 JS, 145

152 ALR 1:430 424

153 Robinson, 184-92

177 CSB, 25

154 CSB, 57-8

178 JS,67

155 ALR 1: 529

179 JS,101

156 ALR 1:531-2

180 JS,106

157 ALR 2:313

181JS,153

158 CSB, 292

182 JS,604

159 Painter, 45

183 JS,160

160 ALR 1:431

184 JS,163

161 Painter, 43

185 LP, 195

162 ALR 1:439

186 JS,228

163 JS,605

187 Morley, 18-26

164 JS,710

188 Davis & Heywood,26

165 JS,708

189 Tadié, 57

166 Albaret, 135

190 Desmond & Moore, 355

167 Painter,44

191 Tadié, 21

168 ALR 1:456-9

192 Tadié, 67

169 Painter, 11

193 Proust,Con.I: 11

170 Albaret, 52

194 Tadié, 74

171 ALR 2: 10 172 CSB, 40

Notes to Chapter 2

173 ALR 2: 23

1 JS,715

174 ALR 2: 26

2 Tadié, 82

175 ALR 2: 606-7

3 Proust, Corn 111:332

176 ALR 2: 680-1 425

4

28 ALR 1:459

ORR, 57

5 CSB,33

29 Graves, 57 & 250

6 ALR 1:717-8

30 ALR I:452

7 LP, 53

31 Proust, Corr. III: 75

8 LP, 148

32 CSB, 59

9 LP, 153

33 Proust, Corr. III: 38

10 LP, 164

34 ALR 2:320-1

11 LP, 122

35 Sansom, 117

12 LP, 75-6

36 ALR 1:631

13 LP, 34-40

37 ALR 1:452

14 LP, 63

38 ALR 1: 458

15 LP, 117

39 Robinson, 60

16 LP, 151-2

40 Turrill, 179

17 ALR 1: 76

41 ALR 1: 418

18 ALR 2:20

42 ALR 1: 434

19 ALR 2: 754

43 ALR 1: 567

20 ALR 1:495

44 ALR 1: 622

21 JS, 35-6

45 ALR 1: 638-9

22 ALR 1: 194

46 ALR 1: 640

23 CSB,43

47 ALR 1: 653

24 ALR 1: 137

48 ALR 1:460-1

25 LP, 113

49 ALR 1: 689-90

26 LP, 114

50 JS, 44

27 LP, 116

51 ALR 1: 147-8 426

52 Proust, Corr. III:173-4

76 ALR 1: 142

53 ALR 1: 90

77 Proust, Con. II: 202

54 JS, 110

78 ALR 1: 768-9

55 JS, 124

79 Graves, 183-4

56 ALR 1: 457

80 ALR 1: 709

57 ALR 1: 15

81 Graves, 174

58 JS, 155

82 ALR 2: 813

59 Doxat, 11

83 ALR 2: 1186-7

60 Doxat, 57

84 Graves, 176

61 Doxat, 235

85 ALR 2: 813

62 Tadie, 62-3

86 Painter, 405

63 JS, 35

87 Graves,193

64 LP, 132

88 JS, 380

65 Graves, 179

89 JS, 389

66 Proust, Con. III: 201

90 ALR 1: 740-1

67 ALR 1: 712

91 ALR 2: 1135

68 ALR 2: 1147

92 ALR 1: 965

69 ALR 1: 757

93 Steam in DG,148

70 ALR 1: 8-9

94 CSB, 173

71 ALR 1: 724

95 Tadie, 326

72 ALR 1: 750

96 ALR 1: 865-6

73 ALR 1: 758-9

97 ALR 1: 870-1

74 ALR 1: 777

98 Sansom, 115

75 ALR 2: 800

99 ALR 3: 62 427

100 ALR 2: 808

124 Robinson, 269

101 ALR 1: 883

125 CSB, 34

102 ALR 1:914

126 ALR 3: 418

103 ALR 1: 1016-7

127 Robinson, 325

104 ALR 1: 856

128 ALR 1: 942

105 ALR 1: 1007

129 ALR 2: 377-9

106 ALR 1: 949

130 ALR 1: 1010

107 ALR 1: 966

131 ALR 3: 63-5

108 ALR 1: 971-2

132 ALR 3: 108-9

109 ALR 2: 868

133 ALR 3: 394

110 ALR 2: 869

134 ALR 2: 644-5

111 ALR 1: 977-8

135 LP, 192

112 ALR 1: 1008

136 ALR 2: 374

113 ALR 1: 972

137 ALR 2: 1118-9

114 ALR 1: 907

138 Albaret, 78

115 ALR 1: 982

139 ALR 2: 1163

116 Hayman, 272

140 LP, 156-9

117 Sansom, 82 118 ALR 1: 893

Notes on Chapter 3

119 ALR 1: 892

1 Albaret, 148

120 Robinson, 260

2 Tadie, 118

121 ALR 3: 135

3 Proust, Corr. I: 45

122 ALR 1: 929

4 Proust, Corr. I: 44

123 CSB, 244

5 ALR 2: 199 428

6 Tadie, 121

30 Sporne,68

7 Painter, 80

31 Graves, 180

8 ALR 2: 1031

32 Graves, 165-6

9 ALR 3:732

33 ALR 3: 253

10 ALR 2: 925

34 LP, 179

11 ALR 2: 934-5

35 Graves, 193

12 ALR 2: 841

36 ALR 3:334-5

13 ALR 2: 948

37 ALR 1:459

14 Dawson inDG, 175

38 ALR 2: 1008

15 ALR 2: 976

39 ALR 2: 1029-30

16 ALR 2: 997

40 ALR 2: 1034

17 ALR 3: 729

41 ALR 2:948

18 ALR 3: 731

42 LP, 115

19 ALR 3: 732

43 CSB,267

20 ALR 3: 287-8

44 ALR 2: 793-5

21 ALR 2: 974-5

45 Tadié, 326

22 ALR 3:733-4

46 Robinson, 369

23 ALR 2: 971

47 ALR 2: 841

24 ALR 1: 648

48 Proust, Con. 1: 77

25 ALR 3: 730

49 Tadié, 226

26 ALR 2:961-3

50 Painter, 161

27 Graves, 165

51 JS, 264

28 ALR 2: 964

52 JS, 18

29 Sporne, 25

53 JS, 195 429

54 Tadié, 154

78 Proust, Corr. I: 188

55 JS,245-6

79 JS, 464

56 JS, 417

80 JS, 182

57 JS, 208-9

81 JS, 480

58 JS, 268

82 JS, 461

59 JS, 261

83 JS, 265

60 JS, 431

84 JS, 266

61 LP,166-7

85 Albaret, 152

62 JS, 460

86 Tadié, 153-6

63 JS, 428-9

87 ALR2: 1039

64 JS, 479-80

88 Painter, 161

65 JS, 252

89 Thomas, 85

66 JS, 459

90 JS, 120

67 JS, 243

91 Thomas, 30&85

68 JS, 265

92 LP, 10

69 Proust, Corr. I: 251

93 JS, 264-5

70 JS, 556-7

94 JS, 248

71 JS, 534

95 Proust, Con. 1: 353

72 JS, 474

96 Griffiths, 146

73 74 75

is, 512 is, 179 is, 700-1

97 Proust, Corr. II: 222 98 Tadié, 193 99 LP, 165-6

76 JS, 702

100 ALR 3: 733

77 Baker, 155

101 Graves, 113 430

102 Tadié, 219

Notes to Chapter 4

103 Proust, Corn 1: 101

I Albaret, 142

104 JS, 371

2 JS, 624-5

105 LAU, 63

3 JS, 650

106 LP, 17

4 JS, 663

107 JS, 84

5 Proust, Corr. I: 163

108 CSB, 34-5

6 Proust, Corr. 111: 92

109 ALR 1: 760

7 Proust, Corr. 1: 115

110 ALR 2: 808

8 Proust, Con. I: 120

111 ALR 2: 1046

9 Proust, Corn I: 121

112 Proust, Corn III: 74

10 Painter, 371

113 Proust, Corn III: 70

11 LAU,88

114 Robinson, 286

12 Painter, 476

115 Proust, Corr. II: 364

13 Painter, 532

116 Proust, Corr. 11:382-3

14 Proust. Con. III: 311

117 JS, 372-4

15 LP, 25

118 Graves, 182-3

16 ALR 1: 648-9

119 Graves, 192

17 Albaret, 57

120 JS, 363

18 Painter, 272

121 Proust, Corr. 11:313-4

19 Proust, Corr. I: 40

122 JS, 429

20 Proust, Con. 1: 361

123 CSB, 175-6

21 Proust, Con. I: 22

124 JS, 367

22 Proust, Corn I: 39

125 Proust. Con. 1:138

23 ALR 1: 239 431

24 ALR I: 240

48 ALR 1: 662

25 ALR I: 241

49 ALR 1: 664-5

26 Cox, 59-64

50 Painter, 205

27 Tadie, 277

51 Proust, Corr.I: 31

28 Tadie, 299

52 ALR 1: 591

29 ALR 1: 253-5

53 ALR 1: 585

30 ALR 1: 297

54 Proust, Corr.III: 301

31 ALR 1: 237

55 CSB, 157

32 ALR 1: 262

56 CSB, 172

33 ALR 1: 215

57 ALR 2: 454

34 ALR 1: 920

58 CSB, 182

35 ALR 3: 202

59 CSB, 211

36 Painter, 136

60 ALR 2: 8

37 Darwin, 143-8

61 ALR 2: 455

38 ALR 1: 453-4

62 ALR 1: 764

39 ALR 1: 461

63 ALR 2: 193

40 ALR 1: 555-6

64 ALR 2: 209

41 ALR 1: 376

65 ALR 2: 210-1

42 ALR 1: 391

66 ALR 3: 36

43 ALR 1: 573

67 ALR 2: 219

44 ALR 1: 573-4

68 ALR 2: 221

45 ALR 1: 461

69 ALR 2: 229

46 ALR 1: 641

70 CSB, 147

47 ALR 1: 653

71 ALR 1: 841 432

72 ALR 2: 237

96 ALR 2: 683-4

73 ALR 2: 389

97 ALR 2: 746

74 ALR 2: 439

98 Painter, 480

75 ALR 2: 565

99 Albaret, 305

76 ALR 2: 545

100 Sansom, 99

77 CSB, 145 & 148

101 ALR 2: 755

78 CSB, 144

102 ALR 3: 977

79 ALR 2: 238

103 ALR 2: 1180

80 ALR 2: 453

104 ALR 1: 337

81 ALR 3: 594

105 Albaret, 77

82 ALR 2: 384-5

106 ALR 1: 421

83 ALR 2: 540

107 ALR 2: 442-3

84 Proust, Corr.III: 343

108 Albaret, 141

85 ALR 2: 594

109 Painter, 680

86 ALR 3: 661

110 ALR 2: 473

87 ALR 2: 768

111 Tadie, 194 & 979

88 ALR 2: 657

112 ALR 2: 454

89 ALR 3: 1102

113 ALR 2: 546

90 Baker, 65-72

114 ALR 2: 566

91 ALR 2: 120

115 Proust, Coal: 48

92 ALR 2: 37

116 Tadie, 161

93 ALR 2: 680-1

117 Painter, 411

94 ALR 2: 683

118 CSB, 174-5

95 ALR 2: 668

119 ALR 2: 295 433

120 ALR 2: 892

144 Proust, Corr.I: 329

121 Tadié, 182

145 CSB, 293

122 Painter, 121

146 ALR 2: 576

123 JS, 133

147 ALR 2: 1018

124 ALR 1: 807

148 ALR 3: 276

125 Proust, Corr.II: 287

149 Proust,Corr.II: 337

126 Doxat, 95

150 Tadié, 186

127 JS, 350

151 Tadié, 325

128 ALR 2: 777-8

152LP, 115

129 Tadié, 517

153 Proust, Corr.II: 426

130 Sansorn, 32

154 Painter, 487

131 ALR 2: 589

155 Sadie, 201

132 ALR 2: 393

156 Proust, Corr.III: 41

133 Painter, 126

157 Proust, Corr.III: 59

134 Proust, Corr.II: 18

158 Proust, Corr.II1: 65

135 Proust, Corr.II: 295

159 Proust, Corr.III: 70

136 ALR 3: 126

160 ALR 2: 650

137 Proust, Corr.II: 238

161 ALR 2: 536

138 Proust, Corr.II: 271

162 Darwin, 90

139 LP, 74 140 CSB, 175

Notes to Chapter 5

141 CSB, 260

I Tadié, 93-4

142 Proust, Corr.I: 50

2 Tadié, 97-8

143 ALR 1:822

3 JS, 433 434

4 JS, 443

28 Proust,Corr.III: 201

5 JS, 471

29 JS, 173-4

6 JS, 693-4

30 JS, 617

7 JS, 262

31 JS, 617-8

8 JS, 695

32 Robinson, 539

9 ALR 2: 67

33 JS, 534-5

10 ALR 2: 81-2

34 LP, 51

11 ALR 2: 87

35 ALR 1: 352-3

12 ALR 2: 123

36 JS, 639

13 ALR 2: 173

37 ALR 3: 213

14 Proust, Corr.I: 355-6

38 Proust,Corr.II: 17

15 ALR 2: 157

39 Proust,Corr.II: 65-6

16 ALR 2: 160

40 Proust,Corr.II: 426

17 ALR 2: 162-3

41 Proust,Corr.II: 440-1

18 ALR 1: 968

42 Proust,Corr.II: 400

19 JS, 84

43 Doxat, 109

20 ALR 2: 157-8

44 CSB, 215

21 ALR 2: 1043

45 ALR 2: 40

22 Robinson, 345

46 ALR 3: 252

23 ALR 2: 279-80

47 ALR 3: 388-9

24 ALR 1: 21

48 ALR 1: 89

25 ALR 2: 733

49 Tadie, 638-9

26 LP, 44

50 Proust,Corr.III: 53

27 LP, 58

51 Proust,Corr.III: 174 435

52 Tadie, 584

76 ALR 3: 638

53 LP, 115-6

77 Albaret, 22

54 JS, 126

78 Albaret, 71

55 Proust,Corr.II: 227

79 JS, 88

56 Proust,Corr.II: 231

80 ORR, 101

57 Proust,Corr.II: 234

81 JS, 101

58 ALR 3: 129

82 JS, 91

59 ALR 1: 457-8

83 JS, 228-9

60 ALR 2: 400

84 CSB, 30

61 ALR 1: 419-23

85 JS, 354-5

62 ALR 2: 150

86 CSB, 47

63 Proust,Corr.III: 56

87 CSB, 52

64 Proust,Corr.III: 69

88 Baker,111

65 JS, 648

89 Albaret, 12

66 ALR 3: 1036

90 Proust,Corr.II: 439

67 CSB, 59

91 ALR 1: 493-4

68 ALR 3: 757-8

92 Albaret, 79

69 ALR 2: 144

93 Bersani, 36

70 Tadie, 299-306

94 ALR I: 183

71 JS, 324

95 ALR 1: 437-8

72 JS, 351

96 ALR 1: 996

73 ALR 2: 194

97 Albaret, 47

74 Tadie, 579-80

98 ALR 2: 74

75 CSB, 27

99 ALR 2: 19 436

100 ALR 2: 754

124 ALR 2: 156-7

101 ALR 1: 63

125 ALR 2: 912

102 ALR 1: 135

126 Tadié, 332

103 ALR 1: 131

127 Painter, 226

104 Proust,Corr.II: 465

128 ALR 2: 150

105 ALR 2:519 & 522-3

129 Proust,Corr.I: 164

106 Proust,Corr.II1: 217

130 Proust,Corrj: 168

107 Orienti, 113& 117

131 JS, 395

108 ALR 2: 532-3

132 JS, 429-30

109 Painter, 88

133 CSB, 261

110 Wise, 326

134 Painter, 201

111 CSB, 38

135 Tadié, 326 note 2

112 ALR 3: 419

136 Graves, 167

113 ALR 2: 1029-30

137 ALR 3:420

114 ALR 2: 1046

138 Proust,Corr.I: 227-8

115 ALR 3: 173

139 Bowles, 62-5

116 CSB, 174

140 ALR 2: 823

117 Proust,Corr.I: 81

141 Proust,Corr.II: 405

118 LP, 117-8

142 Proust,Corr.I1: 210

119 Proust,Corr.I: 89

143 LP, 43-4

120 Proust,Corr.I: 133

144 Proust,Corr.II: 402

121 LP, 136-8

145 Proust,CorrJlI: 5

122 Proust,Corr.I: 147

146 Tadié, 545

123 LP, 68-9

147 Proust,Corr.1II: 16-7 437

14 Proust,Corr. III: 166-7

148 ALR 2: 84 ('Tr

(\13

14v Lr, tot

1

150 CSB, 223

16 ORR, 15

151 Steam, 472

17 ORR, 16-7

152 ALR 3: 119

18 ORR, 86

153 LP, 169-70

19 Pevsner, 38 & 41

154 JS, 15

20 ORR, 86-7

155 CSB, 193

21 Graves I: 122

156 Maeterlinck, 3-4

22 ALR 3. 264

i. .i

C)A

I

23 ORR, 27 Notes to Chapter 6

24 ORR, 24

I ORR, 58-9

25 ORR, 18-9

2 Proust,Corr. I: 188

26 ORR, 34

3 Proust,Corr. 1: 212

27 Blunt, 231-2

4 Proust,Corr. I: 353

28 Blunt, 233

5 Proust,Corr. I: 348

29 JS, 106

6 Proust,Corr. II: 18

30 ORR, Ii

7 Proust,Corr. II: 39

31 ORR, xvii

8 ALR 1:51

32 ORR, 55-6

9 Proust,Corr. II: 24

33 ORR, 56

10 Proust,Corr. II: 20

34 Proust,Corr. II: 339

11 Proust,Corr. II: 21

35 ORR, xlv

12 Proust,Corr. II: 79

36

13 Tadié, 400

37 ORR, 143-4 438

Tadié, 429-37

38 ORR, 118

62 CSB, 266-7

39 Tadié, 393

63 Proust,Corr. II: 334-5

40 ORR, 128

64 Painter, 415

41 ORR, 113

65 CSB, 260

42 ORR, 115

66 CSB, 275

43 ORR, 150

67 ALR 3:958-9

44 Proust,Corr. II: 133

68 CSB, 194

45 ALR 3:862

69 Proust,Corr. II: 183

46 CSB,178-9

70 CSB, 101-2

47 ALR 2:563-4

71 CSB, 114-5

48 Blunt, 234

72 CSB, 195-6

49 ALR 1: 542 50 Blunt, 234

Notes to Chapter 7

51 JS, 628

1 Tadié,531 and 594

52 JS, 472-4

2 Bersani, 206-7

53 CSB, 257

3 ALR 3: 1040

54 CSB, 246

4 ALR 2:849

55 JS, 373

5 ALR 2:552

56 ALR 1:762

6 ALR 3:292

57 ALR 2: 219

7 Steam, 209

58 ALR 2: 283-4

8 ALR 3:335

59 ALR 1: 906

9 CSB, 73

60 ALR 2:838-41

10 CSB, 75

61 CSB, 138

11 Painter, 206 439

12 ALR 2: 284

36 ALR 2: 243

13 Proust, Corr. 11: 195

37 ALR 2: 246

14 ALR 2: 1039-43

38 JS, 582

15 Robinson, 423

39 ALR 1: 952

16 ALR 2: 171

40 Foster and Gifford, 8

17 JS, 262-3

41 ALR 1: 953

18 JS, 243-4

42 White, 7

19 ALR 3: 126

43 ALR 3: 665

20 Proust, Corr. III: 78

44 ALR 3: 534

21 Proust, Corr. III: 201

45 JS, 650

22 Proust, Corr. III: 404

46 ALR 1: 971

23 ALR 2: 219

47 Graves, 203

24 ALR 3: 885

48 ALR 1: 968

25 JS, 625

49 ALR 3: 48-9

26 ALR 3: 190

50 ALR 3: 109

27 JS, 349

51 ALR 3: 358

28 JS, 481

52 ALR 3: 411

29 JS, 648-9

53 ALR 3: 485

30 Proust, Corr. II: 37

54 ALR 3: 613-4

31 ALR 2: 13

55 ALR 3: 557

32 ALR 3: 97

56 ALR 3: 624-5

33 ALR 3: 497

57 ALR 3: 572

34 ALR 3: 607

58 ALR 3: 658

35 ALR 3: 795-6

59 Tadie, 485 440

60 ALR 2: 625

83 Proust, Corn I: 44

61 Painter, 595

84 Proust, Corr. I: 141

62 Albaret, 145

85 Proust, Conn: 317

63 ALR 2: 535-7

86 CSB, 241

64 ALR 2: 623-4 65 ALR 2: 626-9

Notes to Chapter 8

66 ALR 2: 653

1 Proust,Corr. I: 160

67 ALR 2: 656

2 Proust,Corr. I: 219

68 ALR 2: 650

3 Tadie, 330

69 ALR 2: 669-70

4 Proust,Corr. I: 221

70 ALR 3: 792

5 Proust,Corr. I: 247

71 Desmond and Moore, 519-20

6 Proust,Corr.II: 3

72 ALR 2: 652

8 Proust,Corr.II: 9

73 ALR 3: 806

9 Proust,Corr.II: 16

74 ALR 1:566

10 Proust,Corr.II: 49-51

75 JS, 3

11 Proust,Corr.II: 52

76 JS, 134

12 Proust,Corr.II: 452-3

77 Tadie, 326

13 Tadie, 483-5

78 ALR 2: 841-2

14 CSB, 129

79 Tadie, 526

15 JS, 524

80 ALR 1: 452-6

16 JS, 529

81 ALR 1: 462

17 JS, 603

82 Graves, 179

18 CSB, 288

7 Proust,ComII: 7

441

19 CSB, 164 20

43 ALR 3: 507

LR T. 121 -12r 123

44 ALR 3: 564

21 ALR I: 952

45 ALR 1:94

22 Nattiez, 31

46 ALR 3: 711

23 LP, 70

47 ALR 3: 715-6

24 ALR 2: 644

48 ALR 3: 773-4

25 ALR 2: 654

49 ALR 2: 948

26 ALR 2: 364

50 ALR 3: 732

27 ALR 2: 765

51 ALR 3: 741

28 ALR 2: 403-4

52 Tadie, 631-2

29 ALR 3: 165

53 Tadie, 641

30 ALR 3: 418

54 Proust,Corr.III: 330

31 Balzac, 200-1

55 ALR 3: 743

32 ALR 3: 113-4

56 Baker, 120

33 Robinson, 502

57 ALR 3: 748-9

34 ALR 3: 121-4

58 ALR 3: 829-30

35 Robinson, 378-89

59 ALR 3: 864

36 ALR 2: 869

60 ALR 3: 891

37 Robinson, 491-3

61 ALR 3: 966-7

38 Robinson, 484-7

62 ALR 3: 980

39 ALR 2: 872-3

63 ALR 3: 992-3

40 ALR 2: 883-4

64 ALR 3: 993-4

41 Tadie, 293

65 ALR 3: 1084-5

42 ALR 3: 144

66 ALR 3: 1028 442

67 ALR 3: 1078-9

91 Albaret, 47

68 Tadie, 653

92 JS, 123

69 ALR 3: 1095

93 JS, 430

70 ALR 3: 185

94 JS, 649

71 Tadie, 745

95 CSB, 229

72 3S, 717

96 Mosley, xv-xx

73 LP, 17 & 30

97 Graves, 9-10 & 14

74 Graves, 192-3

98 ALR 1: 770-3

75 Tadie, 659

99 ALR 1: 198-9

76 Tadie, 549-52 77 Proust,Corr.III: 26

Notes to Postscript

78 Tadie, 721

1 BLL,15

79 Tadie, 693

2 Tadie,13

80 Morley, 556

3 Tadie,15

81 Emboden, 208-9

4 BLL,149

82 Tadie, 728

5 BLL,161

83 Tadie, 731-79

6 Proust,Corr. III:193

84 CSB, 17-20

7 Proust,Corr. 111:202

85 Proust,Corr.III: 191-2

8 Tadie,579

86 Proust,Corr.III: 208

9 CSB,182-3

87 ALR 1: 55-6

10 Proust,Corr.III:290

88 ALR 3: 381 & 388

11 BLL,42-9

89 ALR 3: 958

12 Tadie,582

90 Proust,Corr.III: 225

13 ALR, 3: 11 443

14 Robinson, 66-78

22

ALR, 2: 799

15 BLL,441-3

23

BL L,464-5

16 BLL,156

24

Painter, 274

17 BLL,187

25

Proust,Corr.III:30-1

18

ALR, 2: 193

26

Proust,Corr.III:I89

19

BLL,454

27

Painter, 342

20

BLL,38

21

BLL,185-6

444

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453

Indices Index to plant names, terms and topics, scientific and vernacular, those in bold mentioned by Proust Abies, 133, 336

Agrimonia eupatoria, 33

Absinthe, 94

Agrimony, 33

Acacia, 20

Agrostemma, 24

Acacia dealbata, 90

Aizoaceae, 234

Acacia, False, 20, 89

Alder, 130

Acer, 336

Algae, 157

Acer pseudoplatanus, 145

Alhagi, 108 Alhagi maurorum, 108

Acorn, 270, 348

Allium, 351

Adansonia digitata, 358

Allium ascalonicum, 351

Adiantum, 143

Allium cepa, 351

Aegilops, 194

Aaiun': port-um, 351

Aegilops speltoides, 194

Allium sativum, 351

Aegilops squarrosa, 194

Almond, 268, 346, 362

Aesculus hippocastanum, 93

Alnus, 130 Alnus glutinosa, 131

Aesculus pavia, 93

Alnus incana, 131

Aesculus x carnea, 93

Alnus viridis, 131

Agave, 188, 290

Aloe, 188, 250

Agave americana, 189

Alpen-rose, 85 455

Anemone fulgens, 80

Alternanthera, 183 125

Anemone horlensis, 80

Althaea rosea, 84, 125

Anemone nemorosa, 80

Amaranth, 183

Anemone pavonina, 80

Amaranthaceae, 183

Anemone vitifolia, 105

Amaranthus caudatus, 183

Anemone x hybrida, 105

4 7.1-

till flaeLi Lypc-tficitta,

Anemone, Japanese, 105

Amaryllid, 269, 270

Amaryllidaceae, 147, 270

Anemone, Wood, 80, 81 65,

Angiosperm, 261 Anise, 94

Amaryllis, 271

Aniseed, 94

Amomuin, 83

Antirrhinum, 305

Ampelopsis, 35, 54, 141, 232

Antirrhinum hispanicum, 306

Ampelopsis veitchii, 141

Antirrhinum majus, 306

Anacamptis pyramidalis, 321

Antirrhinum molle, 306

Ananas comosus, 133

Apostasia, 319

Anchusa azurea, 134

Apple, 7, 9, 34, 43, 50, 101, 115, 128, 139, 157, 158, 159, 185, 219, 220, 237, 309, 310, 354, 356, 373

Anemone, 80, 107 Anemone coronaria, 80 Anemone cv. Giant French, 80

Apricot, 112

Aquilegia, 78

Anemone cv. St Brigid, 80 456

Artichoke, 81, 349

Aquilegia canadensis, 79

Arum lily, 169

Aquilegia chrysantha, 79

Arundinaria, 344 Arundo, 26

Aquilegia forrnosa, 79

Ash, 128, 321

Aquilegia longissima, 79

Ash, European, 321

Aquilegia vulgaris, 79

Ash, Manna, 108

Aquilegia x hybrida, 79

Asparagus, 16, 21, 22, 50, 186, 243, 244, 245, 246, 349

Araceae, 169

Araucaria, 121 Araucaria 121

Asparagus cultivars, 22

araucana,

Asparagus officinalis, 22

Araucaria heterophylla, 121

Aspen, 103 Asphodel, 269

Arbor-vitae, 249

Asphodeline, 270

Arbour, 16, 51, 111

Asphodeline lutea, 270

Arbutus, 359

Asphodelus, 270

Arbutus unedo, 360

Asphodelus albus, 270

Areca, 173

Asteraceae (=Compositae), 179

Argemone, 275 Aroid, 169, 229

Atropa belladonna, 259

Artemisia absinthium, 94

Bacteria, 107, 130 Balsam, 265

Artemisia dracunculus, 221

Balsam resin, 108, 109 457

Bamboo, 79, 343

Benzoin, 109

Baobab, 358

Beroeth, 341

Barberry, 343

Beta vulgaris, 164, 243

Barley, 79, 299

Betel-nut, 173

Basil, 352

Betula, 130

Bay laurel, 64

Betula pendula, 131

Bean, 350

Betula pubescens, 131

Bean Tree, Indian, 23

Betula utilis jacguemontii, 250

Bean, Broad, 291, 350

var.

Bindweed, 20

Bean, French, 350

Birch, 128, 130, 131, 371

Bean, Scarlet Runner, 350

Blackberry, 160, 161, 224

Beech, 96, 106, 154, 155, 348

Blackcurrant, 28, 123, 189

Bees!, 19, 24, 113, 161, 212, 281, 306, 330, 371

Blackthorn, 48

Beetroot, 243 Begonia, 111, 120, 121, 201

Bleeding hearts, 277

Begonia semperforens, 121

Boehmeria, 156

Bluebell, 179, 180 Bonsai, 202, 205, 206, 306, 307, 308

Begonia x tuberhybrida, 121

Borage, 69, 134

Belladonna, 259

Boraginaceae, 134

Bellis perennis, 179, 342

Boston ivy, 141 458

Burr-reed, 367

Boswellia carteri, 108 Botany, vi, 1, 2, 9, 42, 72, 88, 157, 176, 212, 285, 296, 297, 299, 302, 305, 307, 318

Branched,

Burseraceae, 108 Buttercup, 9, 17, 47, 78, 139, 221, 236, 242, 251, 353

Box, 56, 128, 252 Boxwood, 56, 60, 230

Buttercup from the Indies, 105

Bracken, 160, 161

Buxus sempervirens, 56

Bramble, 160, 161, 163, 249

Cabbage, 53, 128, 131, 186, 277, 349

Brassia, 332

Cabbage tree, 155

Brass/ca oleracea, 131

Cacao, 25

Bread wheat, 194

Cactus, 199, 234, 335

Broccoli, 131

Cactus, Christmas, 199

Bromeliaceae, 133

Calico bush, 311

Bromeliad, 133, 335

Calluna vulgaris, 265

Broom, 163

Calodendrum capensis, 250

Broom, Spanish, 321 Broom-rape, 299

Calystegia sepium, 20

Brunfelsia, 299 Brussel's sprout, 131

Camellia, 23, 109, 117, 169

Bugloss, 134

Camellia japonica, 23

Bugloss, Field, 134

Camellia reticulata, 23

Bugloss, Viper's, 134

Camellia sasanqua, 23 459

Castanea saliva, 93, 348

Camellia sinensis, 23, 225 Camomile, 342, 372

Catalpa bignonloides, 23

120, 122,

Catalpa hungei, 24, 336

Campanula, 163

Catalpa ovata, 24

Campsis radicans, 54

Catasetwn, 321

Cannabidaceae, 259

Catha edulis, 225

Cannabis saliva, 259, 298

Cattleya, 173, 176, 319, 324, 332

Caparrosa, 225

Cauliflower, 131

Caper, False, 45

Cecropia, 156

Capsicum, 25, 352

Cedar, 116, 205, 308

Cardamom, 83

Cedar of Lebanon, 308

Cardoon, 81

Cedar, Atlantic, 308

Carduus nutans, 144, 162

Cedar, Japanese, 119, 306, 308

Carex, 271

Cedrus, 116, 308, 336

Carlina vulgaris, 162

Cedrus atlantica, 308

Carnation, 110, 123, 134, 143, 181, 199, 200, 202, 217, 222, 229, 232, 260, 268, 284

Cedrus brevifolia, 308 Cedrus deodara, 250, 308 Cedrus libani, 308

Carpinus betulus, 51, 106 Carrot, 241, 349, 350

Celosia argentea cv. Cristata, 184

Cassia, 321

Centaurea cyanus, 24 460

Centranthus ruber, 260

Chestnut, 348

Chamaecyparis, 248

Sweet, 93,

Chamaedorea, 173

Chick-pea, 299

Chamaemelum nobile, 122

Chocho, 81

Chamaerops, 188

Chocolatl, 25

Chamaerops 172

Chromosome, 177, 194, 255, 261, 316

Chocolate, 24, 25, 87

humilis,

Cheiranthus cheiri, 277

'Chrysanthema', 127

Chenopodiaceae, 243

Chrysanthemum, 105, 126, 127, 137, 172, 173, 174, 178, 180, 210

Cherry, 68, 81, 94, 218, 219, 309, 373

Chrysanthemum indicum, 127, 174

Cherry brandy, 94 Cherry groups, 202 Cherry laurel, 64

Chrysanthemum grandiflorum, 127, 174

Cherry pie, 69

Chusan palm, 172

Cherry, Flowering, 202, 205

Cigar, 145

Cigar plant, 334

Cherry, Wild, 68

Cigarette, 51, 68, 78, 82, 218

Chestnut, 16, 93, 97, 142, 146, 221, 233, 243 Chestnut, Horse, 134, 141, 228

Cinchona calisaya var. ledgeriana, 236

93,

Cineraria, 204, 217

Chestnut, Pink Horse, 93

461

202, 203,

Cinnamomtun 347

cassia,

Clove, 284 Clove oil, 213

Cinnamomum zeylanicum, 347

Clover, 50, 139, 196, 281

Cinnamon, 347

Clover, Red, 24, 248

Cirsium vulgare, 162

Clover, White, 24

Cissus antarctica, 54

Club moss, 130

Cistus, 272

Coal, 128, 129, 239, 275

Citrus aurantiifolia, 20

Cocoa, 25

Citrus aurantium var. aurantium, 19

Coconut, 25, 26

aurantium Citrus var.bergemia, 19

Coffea arabica, 240

Citrus ichangensis, 112

Coffee, 115, 196, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241

Cocos nuqfera, 26

Citrus limon, 112

Coffin Tree, 119

Citrus nobilis, 19

Columbine, 78, 79

Citrus paradisi, 19 Citrus reticulata, 146

Commiphora, 108

19,

Compositae, 135, 179, 325

Citrus sinensis, 19

Conifer, 87, 116, 206, 248, 261, 308, 316

Classification of plants, 70, 71, 72, 155, 297, 299, 358

Convallaria majalis, 272

Clematis, 19, 20, 59

Convolvulus, 20, 114

Clermontia, 290

Convolvulus arvensis, 21 462

Convolvulus tricolor, 21

Cowslip, 142, 334

Conyza canadensis, 315

Crab-apple, 159

Cordyline australis, 155

Crab-apple, 159

Coreopsis, 134 Coreopsis 135

Siberian,

Crape myrtle, 334

auriculata,

Crassulaceae, 122 Crataegus, 254, 343

Coreopsis grandiflora, 135

Crataegus laevigata, 20, 32

Cork, 96, 258, 364

Crataegus laevigata cv. Plena, 20

Cork oak, 96, 258 Corn, 92, 139, 247, 270, 291

Crataegus laevigata cv. Punicea, 44

Corn-cockle, 24

Crataegus laevigata Rosea, 20

Cornflower, 9, 24, 47, 83, 139, 179, 184, 185, 247, 248, 353

Crataegus laevigata cv. Rosea Flore Pleno, 20

Cornus capitata, 250

Crataegus monogyna, 20, 31, 185, 254

Cortaderia, 26, 188 Coiyanthes macrantha, 321

Crataegus monogyna cv. Biflora, 35

Coty/us, 82

Crinum, 271

Cotylus avellana, 22

Crocus, 80, 272

Cotylus maxima, 22

Crocus sativus, 255

Corymbia, 342

Crown Imperial, 269, 271

Cotton, 126 463

Cruciferae, 46

'Currant, Wild', 27

Cryptogam, 107, 316, 317

Cuscuta, 83 Cycad, 261

Cryptomeria, 119

Cycas, 173

Cryptomeria japonica var. japonica, 119, 308

Cyclamen, 257

113, 182,

Cryptomeria japonica var. japonica cv. Elegans, 119

Cyclamen coum, 182

Cryptomeria japonica var. sinensis, 119

Cyclamen hederifoliwn, 182

Cucumber, 81, 273, 345

Cyclamen persicum, 182

Cucumis melo, 345

Cyclamen purpurascens, 182

Cyclamen cilicium, 182

Cucumis sativus, 345

Cyclamen repandum, 182

Cucurbita pepo, 81 Cucurbitaceae, 81, 273

Cymbidium, 332

Cunninghamia, 119

Cynara cardunculus, 81, 349

Cuphea, 334 Cupid's paintbrush, 144

Cynara cultivars, 349 Cynara scolymus, 81, 349

Cupressaceae, 248

Cyperus papyrus, 271

Cupressus sempervirens, 248

Cypress, 248

Currant, Flowering, 28

Cypress, Swamp, 119, 308

Currant, Red, 28, 123, 144 464

Cypripedium, 321, 332

Daucus carota, 350

Cytisus scoparius, 163

Daucus cultivars, 351

Dactylorhiza maculata, 321

Dendrobium, 332 Deodar, 308

Daffodil, 42, 65, 146, 147, 223, 270, 272, 321

Dianthus barbatus, 222 Dianthus caryophyllus, 124, 222

Dahlia, 120, 135, 210, 289

Dianthus gratianopolitanus, 284

Dahlia coccinea, 135 Dahlia pinnata, 135

Dianthus monspessulanus, 284

Daisy, 24, 53, 81, 91, 94, 122, 135, 136, 143, 144, 162, 174, 179, 203, 221, 224, 314, 315, 349, 351

Dianthus plumarius, 124, 222, 284 Dianthus sinensis, 124 Dianthus x allwoodii, 124

Daisy, Easter, 83 Daisy, Michaelmas, 83

Dicksonia antarctica, 155

Daisy, Ox-eye, 342 Damson, 48 Dandelion, 47, 163, 223

'Digitalea corrunbea', 305

Daphne mezereum, 31

Digitalis, 216, 305

Daphne odora, 31

Digitalis grandflora, 253

Darnel, 299

Digitalis purpurea, 253

Date, 173

Digitalis x mertonensis, 253

Datura, 258 465

Dodder, 83, 299

Euphorbiaceae, 307

Dracaena, 188

Evening Primrose, 315

Dyer's greenweed, 139

Evolution of plants, 2, 129, 193, 317, 329, 331

Dyer's weed, 139

Fagaceae, 96, 348

Dyer's weld, 139

Fagus, 106

Echium vulgare, 134

Fagus sylvatica, 155

Eglantine, 33, 44, 148, 150, 365

Fennel Flower, 284 Fern, 102, 107, 128, 129, 130, 161, 299, 317, 340, 341

Einkorn wheat, 194

Elaeis, 173 Elder, 131

Fern, Maidenhair, 120, 143, 185

Elm, 17, 99, 100

Emilia coccinea, 144

Fertilisation, 160, 177, 224, 261, 317, 324, 325, 329, 331, 334

Emmer wheat, 194

Endymion, 180

Ficus, 136

Epidendrum, 332

Ficus carica, 136

Epidermis, 98, 131

Fig, 135, 268, 299

Erica cinerea, 104

Filbert, 22

Ericaceae, 311

Filipendula ulmaria, 52

Erythrina caffra, 250

Fir, 133, 134, 337, 341

Eschscholzia, 275

Fir, Chinese, 119

Espalier, 157, 219, 220

Flax, 57

Eucalyptus, 26, 342

Fleur-de-lys, 269

Eucalyptus regnans, 342 466

Flies!, 229

335, 339, 346, 361, 362, 369, 370, 373, 377

Flora, 62, 71, 298, 300, 312, 335, 337

Flower, Balzacian, 369

Flora of Balbec, 107

Flower, Frost, 356

Flora, Balzacian, 83

Flower, Wind, 81

Floral polymorphism, 325, 332, 334

Flower-maidens, 187, 188

Florilegium, 300

Forget-me-not, 16, 29, 33, 123, 179, 204, 209, 324, 353, 354, 373

Florist, 90, 127, 158, 174, 181, 185, 189, 190, 197, 210, 223, 311, 362

Foxglove, 8, 253, 305 Fragaria Ananassa, 40

Flower, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 40, 44, 45, 46, 49, 55, 57, 60, 65, 68, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 91, 97, 99, 101, 104, 107, 110, 116, 120, 125, 127, 135, 136, 138, 143, 146, 150, 152, 157, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 190, 201, 202, 205, 208, 211, 212, 217, 219, 226, 228, 230, 232, 233, 258, 259, 260, 264, 265, 266, 273, 274, 275, 282, 285, 286, 287, 292, 299, 302, 307, 308, 310, 311, 316, 319, 322, 324, 325, 329, 331, 334,

Fragaria chiloensis, 39 Fragaria vesca semperflorens, 39

var.

Fragaria vesca vesca, 39

var.

Fragaria virginiana, 39 Frankincense, 108 Fraxinus excelsior, 321 Fraxinus ornus, 108 Freycinetia, 128 Fritillaria 269, 271 Fruit, 68, 73, 98, 101, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 467

133, 139, 157, 159, 193, 198, 211, 212, 233, 238, 242, 244, 251, 255, 261, 273, 373

183, 219, 246, 358,

Genetics, 44, 315, 316 Gentian, 202 Gentiana lutea, 203 Gentiana verna, 203

Fuchsia, 21, 147, 299, 361

Fuchsia 147

Gentiane, 203 Geranium, 18, 21, 82, 229, 321, 368, 371

arborescens,

Fuchsia coccinea, 147

Gillyflower, 124, 321, 373

Fuchsia fulgens, 147

Ginger, 83

Fuchsia magellanica, 147

Gingili, 279 Ginkgo, 261

Fungus, 2, 82, 107, 183, 313, 331, 332

Gloxinia, 327 Golden rod, 314

Furze, 160, 161, 162, 163

Gomphrena 183

Galanthus, 65, 270

Gooseberry, 28

Galanthus nivalis, 65

Gorse, 144, 161

Gamete, 177, 261, 316

Gourd, 273

Gametophyte, 130, 261, 262, 316, 317

Gourd, Bottle, 273 Grain, Enchanted, 279

Gardenia, 196 Gardenia 197

globosa,

Grape, 55, 94, 98, 110, 115, 198, 225, 226, 227, 228, 238, 240, 253, 287, 292, 350

jasminoides,

Garlic, 299, 351 Gean, 68, 202 468

Grape, Verjuice, 115

Heather, 160, 162, 265

Grapefruit, 19

Heather, Bell, 104

Grape-vine, 54, 227

Heather, Scot's, 104

Grass, 26, 42, 62, 77,

Hedara helix, 62, 100,

79, 98, 103, 107, 116,

273

120, 139, 142, 147, 184,

Helianthus annuus, 53

190, 216, 217, 242, 250,

Heliotrope, 69, 84, 182,

275, 285, 312, 353, 362, 373

291, 308

Grass of Paradise, 285

Heliotropium arborescens, 69

Greengage, 210

Heliotropium

Groundsel, 144

corymbosum, 69

Guelder rose, 30, 83

Hemlock, 299

Gum tree, 342

Hemp, Indian,

258,

259, 298

Gymnosperm, 132, 261, 317

Henbane, 259

Hamarnelis, 31

Herb tea, 122

Haw, 32

Herbal, 287, 298, 299, 334

Hawthorn, 7, 9, 16, 20, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 44,

Herbarium,

50, 60, 76, 101, 139,

56, 285,

296, 299, 300, 339

211, 212, 232, 245, 268,

Hermaphrodite,

269, 308, 346, 354

319,

324, 325, 328, 333, 334

Hawthorn, Pink, 19, 34, 40, 44

Hevea, 307

Hazel, 16, 22, 23, 48, 50

Hibiscus, 1.26

Heart's ease, 41 469

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, 311

Hyacinthus, 180

Hibiscus syriacus, 272

Hyacinthus orientalis, 51

Himantoglossum hircinum, 321

Hydrangea, 30, 119, 206, 207, 290, 319

Hippeastrum, 271 Hippomane, 188

Hydrangea arborescens, 206

Hippomane mancinella, 307

Hydrangea hortensis, 206

Holly, 86, 128, 130

Hydrangea macrophylla subsp. macrophylla, 206

Hollyhock, 84, 125, 193, 253

Hydrangea macrophylla subsp. normalis, 207

Honeysuckle, 110, 229

Hydrangea serrata, 207

Hop, 259

Hydrocharis, 321

Hornbeam, 51, 106

Hyoscyamus, 259

Horsetail, 130

Hypericum, 281

Hortensia, 78, 206 Houseleek, 122

Hypericum calycinum, 272

Huniulus lupulus, 259

Hyphaene, 292

Hyacinth, 8, 51, 143, 223, 225, 235, 326

Ilex aquifoliurn, 130 Ilex paraguariensis, 130, 225

Hyacinthoides hispanica, 180 Hyacinthoides scripta, 180

Illicium verum, 38

non-

Impatiens balsamina, 265 470

Jasminum azoricum, 126

Impatiens glandulifera, 266 Impatiens 266

170

Jasminum disperminn, 126

i-tangere,

Jastninum huniile, 126

Impatiens sultanii, 266 Impatiens 266

Jasminum nudiflorum, 126

walleriana,

Jasminum 126

Impatiens x holstanii, 266

offic a e,

Jasminum polyanthum, 126

Incense, 84, 108, 109

Jasminum suavissimum, 126

Iresine, 183 Irid, 269

Jonquil, 233, 234

Iris, 16, 33, 43, 49, 58, 67, 91, 123, 146, 182, 205, 221, 373

Juglans regia, 54 Juncus, 269, 271

Iris florentina, 27

Juniperus, 249

Iris germanica, 27

Kale, 131

Iris pallida, 27

Kalmia latifolia, 311

Iris pseudacorus, 27

Khat, 225

Iris reticulata, 67

Khus-khus, 98

Isatis tinctoria, 139

Kohlrabi, 131

Ivy, 62, 86, 95, 99, 100, 130, 141, 249, 273, 280, 383

Labiatae, 353 Laburnum, 51 Lactuca cultivars, 351

Jasmine, 53, 88, 126, 225, 308, 321, 344

Lactuca saliva, 351 471

Lactuca scariola, 351

Legume, 24, 45, 50, 51, 89, 92, 108, 163, 350

Lagenaria siceraria, 273

Lemon, 98, 111, 112, 205

Lagerstroemia, 334 Larch, 116

Lettuce, 349, 351

Larix decidua, 116

Leucanthemum maximum, 342

Larix laricina, 116 Larix potaninii, 116 Lathyrus odoratus, 45

Leucanthemum vulgare, 342

Laurel, 60, 62, 63, 64

Leucojum, 270

Laurel, Portuguese, 64

Leycesteria 250

Laurus nobilis, 64

. for osa,

Lichen, 85, 182, 183, 197, 204

Lavandula angustifolia, 56

Lilac, 9, 19, 29, 36, 51, 62, 67, 69, 84, 88, 92, 93, 115, 134, 169, 203, 223, 312, 354

Lavandula stoechas, 56 Lavatera arborea, 125 Lavender, 56, 257, 321

Lilac, Persian, 37, 38, 105

Leaf, 49, 56, 79, 85, 93, 95, 100, 113, 114, 131, 132, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 157, 158, 178, 209, 218, 226, 232, 249, 253, 260, 273, 274, 275, 286, 287, 323, 341, 348, 354, 358, 370, 371, 373

Lilium candidum, 269, 270 Lilium regale, 270 Lilium tigrinum, 270 Lily, 51, 83, 138, 180, 186, 187, 200, 229, 233, 268, 269, 282, 283, 284

Ledum palustre, 225 Leek, 349, 351

472

Lily of Annunciation, 269

Lonicera japonica, 111

the

Lily of the field, 269

Lonicera periclyrnenum, 111

Lily of the valley, 110, 272

Lonicera standishii, 31, 158

Lily, Madonna, 270, 282

Loofah, 81

Lily, Regal, 270

Loosestrife, Purple, 333, 334

Lily, Tiger, 270

Loroglossum, 321

Lime flowers, 370, 372

Lotus, 115, 190, 201

Lime tree, 20, 77, 363, 370

Lotus, Sacred, 191

Linden, 14, 363

Love-apple, 352

Linen, 45, 57, 60, 110

Love-in-a-mist, 284

Ling, 265

283,

Love-lies-bleeding, 183

Linseed, 57

Love-vine, 83

Linum grandflorum, 57

Lucerne, 50

Linum usitatissimum, 57

Lycopersicon esculentum, 352

Liquidambar, 26 Liquidambar orientalis, 109

Lycopsis arvensis, 134 Lythraceae, 334

Liverwort, 317

Lythrum, 325, 332, 334

Lobelia, Tree, 290

Lythrum salicaria, 333, 334

Lonicera etrusca, 111 Lonicera fragrantissima, 31

Magnolia, 38, 243, 252 473

Mahogany, 57, 87, 97

Mangold-wurzle, 243

Mahonia, 31

Manihot, 307

Maize, 25, 79, 248

Manna, 97, 108

Malcolmia maritima, 53

Marguerite, 342

Mallow, 84, 125, 126

Marigold, African, 143, 284

Mallow, Marsh, 125

Marigold, French, 144, 284

Mallow, Tree, 125 Malope, 126 Malus baccata, 159

Marrons glace, 364

Malus cv 'Cherry Pippin', 160

Marrow, 81

Malus Pippen, 159

348,

Mate, 130

cv.Wyken

Matthiola incana, 53

Malus domestica, 159

Matthiola sinuata, 53

Malus prumf blia, 159

Maurandella, 306

Malus sylvestris, 159

May, 310

Malva neglecta, 125

Mayflower, 309, 310 Mazzard, 202

Malva sylvestris, 125 Malvaceae, 84, 125

Meadow-sweet, 52

Manchineel, 188, 306, 307

Meconopsis, 275

Mandarin, 19

Medlar, 32, 341

Mandragora, 259

Melianthus major, 250

Mandrake, 259

Melon, 345

Medicago sativa, 50

474

Myriophyllum, 46

Mesembryanthemum, 234

Myrrh, 108

Mespilus gertnanica, 32, 343

Myrtle, 123, 124

Myrtus cornmunis, 124

Metasequoia, 119

Narcissus, 233

Metroxylon, 173

Narcissus jonquilla, 233

Mignonette, 139, 308, 321, 326, 357

Narcissus pseudonarcissus, 147

Mimosa, 90, 146, 187, 264, 321

Narcissus tazetta, 147, 269

Mimulus, 8

Nasturtium officinale, 46

Mimulus guttatus, 8

Nasturtium, Garden, 45, 46, 67, 123, 147, 236

Mimulus luteus, 8 Mimulus moschatus, 8

Nectarine, 126

Mistletoe, 69, 85, 86, 96, 359, 364

Neea theifera, 225 Nelumbo nucifera, 191

Mock orange blossom, 36, 319, 320

Nelumbo pentapetala, 191

Monkey flower, 8

Nerine, 271

Monkey-puzzle tree, 121

Nerium oleander, 208

Morning glory, 21

Nettle, 47, 156

Moss, 46, 57, 102, 107, 197, 204, 312, 317

Nicotiana otophora, 145

Musa, 155

Nicotiana rustica, 145

Myosotis, 29, 209

Nicotiana sylvestris, 145 Nicotiana tabacum, 145 475

Nicotine, 146

Oak, White, 96

Nigelia damascena, 284, 321

Oat, 79 Ocimum basilicum, 352

Nigella hispanica, 284

Odontoglossum, 332

Nigella saliva, 284 Nightshade, Deadly, 259

Oenothera etythrosepala, 315

Nothofagus, 155

Oleaceae, 36, 126

Nuphar, 47

Oleander, 208, 272

Nuttallanthus, 306

Olive, 36, 126, 321

Nymphaea, 47

Onagraceae, 147

Nymphaea lotus, 191

Oncidium, 332

Nymphaeaceae, 47

Onion, 349

Nyssa, 26

Onobrychis viciifolia, 50

Oak, 48, 96, 104, 122, 205, 228, 269, 274, 306, 337

Onopordon acanthium, 162 Ophtys apifera, 330

'Oak, American', 96, 308, 337

Opium, 258, 259

Oak, Holm, 96

Orange, 13, 19, 58, 60, 78, 193, 209, 216, 321, 347, 349, 368

Oak, Pin, 96

Orange, Bergamot, 19

Oak, Red, 96

Orange, Seville, 19

Oak, Scarlet, 96

Orange, Sweet, 19

Oak, Sessile, 104

Orangeade, 246

Oak, Burr, 96

Oak, Turkey, 96 476

67, 144,

Orchid, 78, 90, 136, 173, 176, 188, 207, 212, 213, 319, 321, 324, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 335, 347

Papaver somniferum, 259

Orchid, Slipper, 332

Papyrus, 271

Orchis, 321

Paradisea, 339

Ornithogalum umbellatum, 285

Parthenocissus quinquefolia, 54, 141.

Orris root, 27, 28, 217

Parthenocissus tricuspidata, 141

Papaveraceae, 275 Papilionaceae, 318

Osier, 49

Passiflora, 278

Paeonia, 109

Passion flower, 278

Palm, 16, 25, 87, 135, 172, 173, 188, 191, 199, 292, 352

Pea, 44, 45, 89, 92, 161, 191, 315 Peach, 111, 112, 113, 126, 220, 253

Palm oil, 173 Palm, Date, 26

Peach cultivars, 112

Palm, Doum, 292

Pear, 43, 98, 158, 159, 198, 219, 220, 235, 240, 246, 250, 303, 304, 341, 355

Palmae, 172 Pampas grass, 26, 188 Pandan, 128

Peat, 85

Pansy, 8, 16, 40, 41, 45, 53, 83, 125, 137, 176, 223, 254, 341

Pedicula .is 321

sylvatica,

Pelargonium, 16, 18, 109, 143, 232, 256

Papaver, 24, 275 Papaver rhoeas, 81, 274 477

Pelargonium frutetorum, 18

Phaseolus coccireus, 350

Pelargonium inquinans, 18

Phaseolus vulgarls, 350

Philadelphaceae, 320

Pelargonium peltatum, 18

Philadelphus, 36 Philadelphus coronarius, 320

Pelargonium scandens, 18

cultivars,

Pelargonium domesticum, 18

x

Philadelphus 320

Pelargonium hortorum, 18

x

Philadelphus macrophyllus, 320 Philadelphus purpurascens, 320

Pelargonium zonale, 18

Pelargonium, leaved, 18,231

Ivy-

Phoenix, 173, 188 Phoenix dactyufera, 26

Pelargonium, Regal, 18

Phormium, 188

Pelargonium, Scentedleaved, 18

Photosynthesis, 132, 164

Pelargonium, Zonal, 18

113,

Phragmites australis, 26

Peony, 109

Phyllostachys, 344

Pericallis lanata, 203

Picea, 133

Pericallis x hybrida, 203

Picea smithianx, 250

Periwinkle, 33, 49, 58,

82

Picea, 156

Phalaenopsis, 332

Pimpinella anisum, 94

478

Pine, 14, 99, 116, 130, 133, 140, 308

Platanus occidentalis, 252

Pine, Bristlecone, 140

Platanus orientalis, 252

Pine, Norfolk Island, 121

Platanus x hispanica, 252

Pineapple, 82, 133

Plum, 98, 111, 210, 341

Pink, 123, 124, 222, 284

Polianthes tuberosa, 290

Pink, Cheddar, 284

Pollen, 3, 76, 85, 104, 173, 175, 177, 212, 276, 281, 306, 319, 320, 325, 328, 330, 333, 334, 345

Pink, Clove, 283 Pink, Cottage, 124, 284 Pink, Fringed, 283

Pinus, 140, 336

Pollination, 46, 136, 176, 177, 213, 276, 284, 295, 318, 321, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334

Pinus aristata, 140

Polyanthus, 142

Pinus longaeva, 140 Pinus radiata, 140

Poplar, 23, 49, 86, 103, 143, 189, 217, 231, 363

Pinus wallichiana, 250

Poplar, Black, 103

Pisum sativwn, 44

Poplar, Grey, 103

Plane Tree, 252

Poplar, Lombardy, 103

Plant, 1, 2, 4, 9, 29, 42, 47, 76, 113, 127, 141, 165, 218, 276, 296, 325

Poplar, Normandy, 102

Pink, Indian, 124, 210 Pink, Laced, 124

Poplar, White, 103 Poppy, 9, 24, 47, 50, 80, 120, 139, 168, 190, 217,

Plant, Polar, 90 Platanaceae, 252 479

247, 248, 259, 274, 275, 289

Prunus 'Sato Zakura', 202

Populus, 49

Prunus armeniaca, 112

Populus alba, 103

Prunus avium, 68, 202

Populus cultivars, 102

Prunus cerasus, 202

Populus deltoides, 102

Prunus domestica, 111, 210

Populus nigra, 102 Populus nigra Italica, 103

Prunus dulcis, 268

cv.

Prunus jamasakura, 202

Populus tremula, 103

Prunus laurocerasus, 64

Populus x canadensis, 102

Prunus laurocerasus cv. Zabeliana, 64

Populus x canescens, 103

Prunus lusitanica, 64 Prunus persica, 126

Potato, 45, 52, 66, 123, 240, 243, 352, 362

112,

Prunus speciosa, 202

Primrose, 42, 83, 142, 182, 335

Prunus spinosa, 48 Psoralea pinnata, 250

Primula, 142, 223, 332 Primula veris, 142, 334

Pteridium aquilinum, 161

Primula vulgaris ssp. heterochrorna, 143

Puccinellia, 120 Pueraria lobata, 54

Primula vulgaris ssp. vulgaris, 142

Pumpkin, 81, 315 Puya, 133

Protium, 108

Pyrus communis, 220 480

Pyrus cultivars, 220, 303

Ranunculus 105

Quercus, 96, 348

Ranunculus bulbosus, 139

Quercus alba, 96 Quercus canariensis, 96

Ranunculus repens, 140

Quercus cerris, 96

Raphanus sativus, 186

Quercus coccifera, 82, 96

Raspberry, 185, 221

Quercus coccinea, 96

40, 184,

Ravenala madagascariensis, 155

Quercus ilex, 82, 96 Quercus macrocarpa, 96

Redwood, 86, 87, 337, 342

Quercus palustris, 96 Quercus petraea, 104

asiaticus,

Redwood, Dawn, 119

96,

Reed, 323

Quercus robur, 96, 104

Reed, Spanish, 26

Quercus rubra, 96

Reseda, 139

Quercus suber, 96, 258

Reseda luteola, 139

Quercus x rosacea, 96 Quinine, 235

Reseda odorata, 357

Radish, 186

Resedaceae, 358

Ranunculaceae, 284

Rheum officinale, 341

Ranunculus, 47, 139, 299

Rheum 341

Ranunculus acris, 139

Rhipsalis, 199

Ranunculus aquatilis, 47

Rhododendron, 85, 99, 124, 312, 339

481

139,

rhaponticum,

Rhododendron arboreum, 125, 250

Rosa bankiae cv. Lutea, 152

Rhododendron campanulatum, 250

Rosa canina, 44, 148 Rosa carolina cv. Plena, 43, 148

Rhododendron caucasicuin, 125

Rosa centfolia, 148

Rhododendron ferrugineum, 85

Rosa centifolia cv. Muscosa, 148, 203

Rhododendron ponticum, 85

Rosa chinensis, 149 Rosa cv. Albertine, 153

Rhubarb, 341

Rosa cv. Anne of Geierstein, 150

Ribes grossularia, 28 Ribes nigruni, 28, 123, 189

Rosa cv. Baroness Rothschild, 148

Ribes rubrum, 123

Rosa cv. Baronne de Rothschild, 149, 304

Ribes sanguineuin, 28

Rosa cv. Baronne Edmond de Rothschild, 149

Ribes sativum, 28, 123

Rice, 79 Robinia, 20

Rosa cv. Bengale Descemet, 149, 150

Robinia pseudoacacia, 89

Rosa cv. Comtesse de Turenne, 152

Roemeria hybrida, 81 Roinneya, 275

Rosa cv. de la Grifferae, 151

Rosa, 148

Rosa cv. Duchesse de Guermantes, 151

Rosa alpina, 256 482

Rosa cv. Duchesse de La Tremoille, 151

Rosa cv. Professeur Ganiviat, 152

Rosa cv. General Gallieni, 153

Rosa cv. Vicomtesse Decazes, 152

Rosa cv. Henri Martin, 151

Rosa cv. William Lobb, 151

Rosa cv. La France, 150

Rosa cv. Zulme, 149

Rosa cv. Madame de Villeparisis, 151

Rosa damascena, 43, 148

Rosa cv. Madame Wagram, Comtesse de Turenne, 151

Rosa eglanteria, 148, 150 Rosa gallica, 43, 149

Rosa cv. Marechal Niel, 148, 152, 304 Rosa cv. Nordlinger, 151

44,

Rosa glauca, 148 Rosa hemisphaerica, 148, 355

Marie

Rosa pendulina, 256

Rosa cv. Meg Merrilies, 150

148,

Rosa pimpinellifolia, 148

Rosa cv. Mme Hardy, 220

Rosa x alba, 43, 148

Rosa cv. Mme La Baronne de Rothschild, 149

Rosaceae, 39, 159, 320 Rose, 60, 65, 75, 77, 78, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 106, 107, 113, 122, 123, 125, 134, 135, 138, 148, 152, 153, 169, 175, 181, 197, 207, 208, 228, 229,

Rosa cv. Princesse de Panne, 151 Rosa cv. Princesse de Sagan, 152

483

230, 234, 260, 268, 280, 283, 290, 303, 304, 316, 321, 340, 347, 354, 359, 370

Rose, Pennsylvania, 43, 107, 148

Rose fever, 208, 340 Rose of Sharon, 272

Rose, Provence, 148, 283

Rose, Alpine, 256

Rose, Rock, 272

Rose, Bengal, 146, 149, 152

Rose, 355

Rose, Burnet, 148

Rose, Syrian, 43

Rose, China, 149

Rose, Tea, 148, 151

Rose, Damask, 43, 148, 283, 293

Rose, White, of York, 148

Rose, Dog, 34, 44, 148, 308

Rose, Wind, 81

Rose, Penzance Hybrid, 150

Sulphur,

148,

Rowan, 254

Rose, French, 149

Rubber, 307

Rose, Hedge, 316

Rubusfi-uticosus, 160

Rose, Hybrid China, 149, 150

Rubus idaeus, 185

Rose, Hybrid Perpetual, 150

Rush, 269, 271

Rum, 164

Rose, Hybrid Tea, 150

Ruta graveolens, 321

Rose, Jerusalem, 83

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, 357

Rose, Moss, 148, 184, 202, 203

Saccharomyces ellipsoideus, 357 484

Saccharum officinarum, 164

Sarcococca, 31 Saxifragaceae, 320

Safflower, 255

Schlwnbergera, 199

Saffron, 108, 255, 311

Scilla, 180

Sago, 173

Scrophulariaceae, 8, 305

Sago Palm, 173

Seaweed, 157, 225

Sainfoin, 50, 281

Sedum acre, 83

Saint John's wort, 281

Salix babylonica, 50

Seed, 7, 107, 160, 178, 205, 224, 251, 261, 265, 270, 309, 314, 315, 316, 318, 324, 333, 335, 346, 360

Salix caprea, 173

Sempervivurn, 120

Salix fargesii, 50

Sernpervivuin tectorum, 122

Sairocarpus, 306 Salix, 49, 103

Salix Janata, 50

Sequoia sempervirens, 86, 342

Salix rnagn/Ica, 50 Salix purpurea, 49

Sequoiadendron giganteum, 87

Salix triandra, 49 Salix vitninalis, 49

Sesame, 267, 279

Salt-bush, 243

Sesamum indicum, 279

Salvia, 56, 321

Shallot, 351

Sambucus, 131

Silybun marianum, 162

Sapwood, 128, 131, 132

Sinningia speciosa, 327

Sarcanthus teretfolius, 321

Sloe, 48

485

Snapdragon, 143, 305,

Star of Bethlehem, 285

306

Statuary, vi, 17, 55, 62,

Snowball Tree, 30, 31

64, 84, 111, 147, 204,

Snowdrop, 65, 270

230, 231, 235, 248, 260, 312, 323, 344, 382

Snowflake, 271

Stock, 53

Solanaceae, 258, 352

Stock, Virginian, 53

Solanurn tuberosunr, 52 Solidago

Stone flower, 234

canadensis,

Stonecrop, 83

314

Storax, 109

Sonchus, 162

Strawberry, 16, 22, 34,

Sorbus, 254, 336

39, 40, 126, 361

Sorbus aucuparia, 254

Strawberry tree, 359

Sorghum, 79

Styrax, 108, 109

erectum Sparganium ssp. microcarpum, 367

Styrax japonica, 109 Styrax benzoin, 109

Sparmannia africana, 250

Styrax hemsleyana, 109

Spartiumjunceurn, 321

Styrax obassia, 109

Spices, 108

Styrax officinale, 109

Spirogyra, 46

Sugar, 10, 60, 79, 164, 165, 216, 372

Spore, 107, 129, 130

Sugar beet, 164, 165, 243

Sporophyte, 261, 262, 316, 317

Sugar cane, 164, 165

Spruce, 133

Sugar, Barley, 62, 163

Squash, 81 486

Sunflower, 53

Tamarix, 97

Sweet briar, 148

Tamarix maniifra, 97, 108

Sweet pea, 45, 210

Tangerine, 19, 146

Sweet William, 222

Taraxacum officinak, 224

Swietenia mahagoni, 57 Sycamore, 145, 345

Tares, 299

Symbiosis, 130, 156, 183, 313

Tarragon, 221 Taxodium, 119, 308

Symphyomyrtus, 342

Taxus baccata, 132

Syringa, 36

Tea, 23, 140, 146, 172, 178, 225, 234, 266, 312, 368, 369, 370, 371

'Syringa', 322, 323, 324 Syringa cultivars, 37 Syringa protolaciniata, 38

Tea, Labrador, 225 Tea, Paraguay, 130, 225

Syringa sweginzowii, 37

Theobroma cacao, 25

Syringa villosa, 37

Thibaudia, 304

Syringa vulgaris, 36, 38

Thistle, 144, 160, 162

Syringa x laciniata, 38

Thistle, Canine, 162

Syringa x nanceiana, 37

Thistle, Milk, 162

Syringa x persica, 37

Thistle, Musk, 144, 162

Tagetes erecta, 143

Thistle, Scot's, 162

Tagetes panda, 144

Thistle, Sow, 162

Taiwania, 119

Thistle, Spear, 162

Tamarisk, 97, 106, 158

Thorn, 32, 211, 310 487

Thorn, Glastonbury, 35

Tree, Traveller's, 155

Thrinax, 173

Trifolium pratense, 24

Thuja, 249

Trifollum repens, 24

Tilia, 20, 102, 363

Triticum, 248

Tina cordata, 371

Triticum aestivum, 194

Tilia oliveri, 363

Triticum boeoticum, 194

Tilia platjphyllos, 371

Triticum 194

Tilia tomentosa, 363

Triticum dicoccum, 194

Tilia x europaea, 371

Triticum monococcum, 194

Tobacco, 82, 145, 146, 216, 223, 352

Tropaeolum majus, 45, 236

Tomato, 315, 352

Trachycaipus fortunei, 172

Truffle, 82

Tuber, 82

Trapa natans, 321

Tuberose, 207, 290, 322

Tree, 23, 55, 85, 103, 114, 119, 128, 129, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 183, 205, 219, 226, 234, 249, 273, 323, 369, 376

Tulip, 54, 123, 146, 167, 191, 192

Tulipa gesneriana, 192 Tulsi, 352

Tree fern, 155

Turmeric, 255

Tree onion, 155

Ulex europaeus, 161

Tree, Banana, 155 Tree, 299

dicoccoides,

Ulex gal/ii, 161

Barnacle-goose,

Ulex minor, 161

Ulmus, 128 488

Ulmus glabra, 17, 100 Ulmus minor cornubiensis Sarniensis, 100

Vegetation, 168

var. cv.

Twisted,

Verbena, 8, 53, 222, 223, 308

Ulmus minor var. minor, 100

Verbena 223

Ulmus x hollandica, 100

Verbena officinalis, 222

Umbellifer, 94, 350

Verbena peruviana, 223

Unisexuality, 325, 326, 328

Verbena phiogiflora, 223

Urtica dioica, 156

Verbena x hybrida, 223

Urticaceae, 156

Verbenaceae, 223

Valerian, 258, 260

Vergissmeinnicht, 29

Valeriana officinalis, 260

Vermouth, 94, 95

canadensis,

Vervain, 222

Vanda, 332

Vetiver, 97

Vanilla, 212, 213, 327, 330

Vetiveria zizanioides, 98 Viburnum farreri, 30

Vanilla planfoIia, 213 Variegation, 314

Viburnum grandlorum, 30

Vegetable, 58, 88, 98, 99, 244, 292, 299

Viburnum opulus, 30

'Vegetation', 63

Viburnum opulus cv. Roseum, 31

Vegetation, Human, 314

Viburnum plicatum, 30

489

Viburnum plicatum cv. Thunberg's Original, 31

199, 209, 228, 234, 321, 356, 366

Viciafaba, 291, 350

Violet, Dog, 41

Villarsia nymphoides, 321

Violet, Parma, 91, 198

Violet, Sweet, 41

Vinca major, 49

Virgilia capensis, 250

Vinca minor, 49 Vine, 5, 54, 97, 236

Virginia Creeper, 21, 54, 140, 152, 235

Vine, Kangaroo, 54

Viscum album, 86

Vine, Kudzu, 54

Vitaceae, 141

Vine, Trumpet, 54

Vitis vinfera, 54, 227

Viola alba, 198

Wallflower, 223, 277, 326

Viola altaica, 41

Walnut, 14, 54

Viola canina, 41, 366

Water crowfoot, 33, 47

Viola cornuta, 41, 42

Water milfoil, 46

Viola lutea, 41

Water plant, 34, 46, 48

Viola odorata, 41, 198, 366, 367

Watercress, 46

Viola tricolor, 41, 366

Waterlily, 9, 15, 16, 47, 48, 104, 266, 288, 289, 312

Viola x hybrida, 41 Viola x williamsii, 41

Water-moss, 46

Viola x wittrockiana, 41

Water-weed, 46

Violet, 27, 40, 42, 80, 90, 111, 125, 143, 146, 169, 176, 177, 181, 198,

Weed, 47

490

Wheat, 79, 193, 194, 248, 270, 291, 299

Woods, 58, 95, lii, 146, 185, 249, 250, 287

Whin, 161

Wormwood, 94

Willow, 15, 49, 81, 128, 243, 299

Yeast, 227, 356, 357

Yellowbark, 236

Willow, Palm, 173

Yew, 86, 129, 132

Willow, Weeping, 50

Yucca, 188

Willow, Woolly, 50 Willow-herb, 147

Zantedeschia aethiopica, 169

Windröschen, 81

Zea mays, 248

Wisteria, 92

Zinnia, 136, 143, 184

Wisteria floribunda, 92

Zinnia elegans, 137

Wisteria sinensis, 92

Zinnia peruviana, 137

Woad, 139

Zostera, 321 Zygote, 316

491

Index to people and places, real and fictional creations of Proust

Achard, Franz, 164

Albins, M., 212

Adanson, Michel, 358

Albufera, Louis, Marquis d', 169

Adrianopolis, 192

Alcazar d'Ete, 60

Agostinelli, Alfred, 76, 170, 247, 290, 356

Algeria, 25

Agrigente, Prince d', 246

Algiers, 343

Aladdin, 105

Aline, Sister, 216

Albaret, Celeste, 8, 39, 40, 66, 98, 115, 148, 170, 196, 198, 237, 240, 242, 243, 326, 372

Allinges, Family d', 252

Albaret, M., 128

Amiens, 263, 267, 268, 272, 273

Ali Baba, 105, 279

Allwood Nurseries, 124

Albaret, Odilon, 247

Amilet, Paul, 27

Albert, M., 25, 238

Amiot, 16, 25, 38

Albertine, 35, 106, 107, 110, 113, 114, 115, 134, 153, 158, 192, 197, 205, 229, 232, 242, 248, 249, 255, 288, 306, 311, 313, 314, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 382

Amphion, 24, 136, 254, 336 Amphitryon, 352 Amsterdam, 254, 286 Andigne, Comte d', 99

Albi, 382 493

Aubernon, Mme Lydie, 118

Andree, 35, 109, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 382

Aubert, Edgar, 338

Anet, Claude (= Jean Schopfer), 230

Aubervilliers, 349 Auger's, 198

Angelico, Fra, 233

Augusta, Princess, 89

Angers, 220

Augustin, 167, 234

Annunzio, Gabriele 211

Aunay, M. d', 128 Aunts, 38, 52, 54, 83, 167, 222, 223, 243, 244, 364

Apollo, 63 Arab, 108 Arborescent page, 98 Arbury, v

Aurevilly, Jules Barbey d', 201

Arcadia, 270

Austerlitz, 36

Archivist, 310

Auteuil, 3, 13, 14

Argencourt, M. d', 358

Aveyron, 129

Argenteuil, 22, 289, 349

Aztecs, 25

Aristotle, 88

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 243

Argues, Forest of, 95

Baden, GrandDuchess of, 186

Artagnan, 212 Ashbourne, v

Bagatelle, Parc de, 338

Astruc, Gabriel, 245

Bagshot, 159

Athens, 88

Baigneres, Arthur, 118

Attleborough, v 494

Baignères, Mme Henri (Laure), 118

Barry, Marie Jeanne, Comtesse du, 123

Bailleau-le-Pin, 81

Bartholoni family, 252, 253

Bakst, Leon, 211, 230

Bary, Heinrich Anton von, 313

Balbec, 3, 77, 90, 97, 99, 101, 106, 108, 111, 115, 120, 135, 158, 209, 215, 217, 233, 255, 287, 288, 299, 346, 352, 376, 382

Bassaraba, Villa, 24, 120, 136, 254, 308, 336

Balder, 86

Bastelle, M. Silvain, 362

Ballykilcavan, v

Bateson, William, 315

Baltet, M.M., 220

Baudelaire, 82, 292, 302

Baizac, Honore de, 4, 60, 189, 201, 278, 289, 295, 344, 345, 348, 365, 383

Charles,

Bavaria, Duke of, 195 Bearceaux, Les, 54

Banks, Sir Joseph, 207

Beauce, 15, 16, 233

Bar family, 383

Beaune, 265

Barbier et Cie, 153 Barfleur, 104

Beausergent, Mme de, 355

Barnet, 176

Bee-dog, 162

Barneville, Château de, 99

Becker, Mrs, 333 Beckett, Samuel, 1, 7, 9, 344, 368

Barrès, Maurice, 232, 381, 386

Becquerel, M., 291

Barrie, J.M., 264

Beddington, 365 495

Violet,

Bibesco, Prince Emmanuel, 267, 363

Bedouins, 97 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 4, 228

Billancourt, 256

Beg-Meil, 156, 161, 163, 287

Billy, Robert de, 118, 158, 180, 257, 338

Belle-lie, Marquis de, 385

Bing, Siegfried, 205 Bismarck, 355

Belle-Ile-en-Mer, 156

Bizet, Jacques, 68, 73, 75, 247

Bentley, W.O., 247 Berget, 295

Blanche, JacquesEmile, 117, 118

Bergotte, 208, 226, 296, 331, 362

Bloch, Albert, 186, 351

Bergotte (in JS), 225, 286

185,

Blum, Rene, 370

Berlioz, Hector, 224

Bois de Boulogne, 3, 13, 16, 35, 66, 85, 106, 178, 180, 213, 249, 256, 337, 347

Berma, 228

Bois Pilou, 50

Bernaix, A., 151

Boisdeffre, General de, 235

Bergson, Henri, 68 Berl, Emmanuel, 76

Bernhardt, Sarah, 156, 209, 228, 385

Boissier, Pierre Edmond, 71, 300

Bertulus, M., 239

Bonami, M. Jacques, 144

Beulier, M., 69, 239 Bibesco, Prince Antoine, 356

Bonnier, Gaston, 71, 72, 308 496

Breyves, Mme Francoise de, 132, 259

Bonnot and Gamier, 159 Bontemps, Mme, 170, 323, 324

91,

Brichot, Professor, 11, 104, 127, 128, 129, 133, 298, 300

Bordeaux, Henry, 226 Borodin, Alexander, 229

Bricqueboeuf, 104

Borodino, Captain, 215

Briey, Mlle de, 268

Boticelli, Sandro, 179 Boulbon, Dr du, 63

Brittany, 86, 99, 100, 103, 132, 154, 156, 158, 161, 206, 305

Bourbon Island, 213

Broceliande, 162

Bourges Cathedral, 269, 354

Brosse, Salomon de, 338

Bourget, Paul, 73, 169, 171

Brown, Dan, 380

Bourg-la-Reine, 113

Brucourt, Guy de, 215

Boyle, Robert, 309, 380, 384

Bruges, 280

Boulaye, M. de la, 128

Brown, Robert, 325

Brunfels, Otto, 298

Brancovan, Constantin, Prince de, 136, 254, 336, 339

Buest, M. de, 144 Burbank, Luther, 315 Burgess, Anthony, 380

Brantes, Marquise Sauvage de, 253 Brantwood, 42

Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de, 192

Brayne, Martin, ix, 36

Bussiere, M. de, 128

Breaute, M.de (=Babal), 212, 326

Buttes-Chaumont, Parc des, 382, 383 497

'C' M., 138

Carolus-Duran, Mme Pierre, 230

Cabourg, 3, 95, 102, 106, 118, 247, 255, 258, 260

Carpaccio, Vittore, 82, 191

Caen, 99

Carqueville, 99

Caesars, 275

Cartier, Jacques, 206

Caillavet, M. Gaston Arman, 215, 307

Cattley, William, 176

Caillavet, Mlle Simone de, 87

Catusse, Mme Marie, 170, 232

Caillavet, Mme Arman de, 117, 169, 307, 338

Challis, Gerald, ix Champagne, 80

Caillavet, Mme Jeanne de, 87, 159

Champlatreux, Mlle de, 355

Calcutta, 152

Champs-Elysées, Jardin des, 59, 66, 73, 87, 260

Cambremer, M. de, 127 Cambremer, Mme de, 6, 120, 121, 122, 123, 134, 135, 136, 288, 289, 299, 336, 354

Chantilly, 289, 291, 292

Cambremer-Legrandin, Mme de, 120, 288, 336

Chapelle-Marinieresur-Avre, Mme Loulou de la, 186

Candolle, Alphonse de, 71

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste, 111, 287

Augustin Candolle, Pyramus de, 71

Charlemagne, 163 Charlus, Baron de, 72, 122, 129, 133, 149, 195, 196, 197, 201,

Carlo-Alberto, King, 95 Carlyle, Thomas, 374 498

202, 204, 208, 212, 217, 220, 282, 300, 302, 303, 324, 326, 328, 334, 347, 358

Circe, 108

Charost family, 283

Clark, Lord, 285

Chap lies, 15, 163

Clermont-Tonnerre, Elisabeth, Duchesse de, 245, 290

Christ, 269, 278 Cinzano family, 95

Chateaubriand, Francoise Auguste Rene, Vicomte de, 291, 357, 371, 383

Clothair, 381 Cocheris, 129

Chatelet, M. du, 345

Hippolyte,

Chãtellerault, Duc de, 310

Cochet, P.C.M., 151

Chaumont family, 383

Cocteau, Jean, 230, 364, 380, 386

Chènevières-sur-Marne, 150

Colette, Sister, 341

Chevet, 198

Colomb, M., 72

Chevigné, Laure de Sade, Comtesse de, 75, 82, 83, 118

Combray, 3, 16, 21, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 42, 45, 48, 55, 58, 82, 93, 101, 184, 185, 204, 218, 233, 237, 242, 245, 251, 288, 344, 346, 353, 354, 369, 377, 385

Childebert, 183, 381 Chilperic, 381 Choiseul family, 283

Cholet, Armand-Pierre, Comte de, 215

Concarneau, 156, 157, 160

Cholet, M. de, 128

Coniston, 42, 276

Chopin, Frederick, 134

Connolly, Cyril, v 499

Constable, John, 285

Cremieux, Adolphe,

Constantinople, 192

380

Cremieux, Amelie, 381

Cornouaille, 305

Crete, 219

Correns, Karl Erich, 315

Criqueboeuf, 99

Cortes, Hernan, 25

Crome, John, 285

Cottard, Mme, 91, 127, 170, 177

Cure, 19, 31, 93

Cottard, Professor, 91, 255

Cydalise, 162 Dagobert II, 383

Cotte orchard, 157

Dante Alighieri, 48

Cotte, Jules Robert de, 137, 219

Darwin, Charles, 72, 176, 213, 325, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334

Coffin, Celine, 241

Dassault, Marcel, 68

Coffin, Nicolas, 237, 240, 258 Coucy, 268

Daudet, Alphonse, 251, 259

Coudree, Chateau de, 252

Daudet, Leon, 251, 365

Coulombes, Mile de, 146

Daudet, Lucien, 8, 76, 96, 181, 222, 251, 307, 381

Coventry, v, 1.59 Crapote, Messrs, 198

David, Old, 48

Crawford, Tom, vi

Deauville, 95

Odette de Crecy, (=Mme Swann), vi

Debac florists, 170 Debussy, Claude, 4, 122, 211, 336, 380, 381, 386

Crecy, Pierre de Verjus, Comte de, 1.15 500

Degas, Edgar, 289

Dordrecht, 280

Delaux, M., 127, 174

Douglas, David, 28

Delft, 192

Douville, 119

Delven, M. and Mme, 226, 286

Dresden, 123 Dreux-Brezé, Mme Ketty de, 186

Derbyshire, v Descemet, M., 150, 151

Dreyfus Case, 105, 174, 235, 236, 239

Desprez, R., 151 Desroches, Mme Cephise, 167, 222, 223

Dreyfus, Robert, 73

Dester, 40

Dublin, v

Diaghilev, Sergei, 230

Dubreuil, M., 152

Dickens, Charles, 295, 326

Ducher, C., 151

Druids, 13, 86, 96

Duchesne, Nicolas, 40

Dieppe, 3, 95, 154, 156, 265

Antoine

Duclin, M., 51

Dikaiosyne, 108

Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 148, 381

Dike, 108 Dimier, Louis, 129

Dumas, Qere), 212

Dionysus, 100, 249

Alexandre

Duplay, Maurice, 258, 292

Dioscorides, 281 Disney, Walter Elias, 346 Dodona, 337

Durand Rue! Gallery, 229

Doncières, 117, 128, 201, 215, 217

Edirne, 192 501

Edward VIII, 158

Eulalie, 204

Egyptians, 43, 236

Europa, 193

Eiffel Tower, 58

Evans, Mary Anne (=George Eliot), v

Eliot, George, v, 4, 80, 228, 295, 345

Evian, 24, 135, 188, 226, 252, 254, 336, 372

Elstir, 110, 111, 122, 125, 186, 245, 285, 288, 289, 296, 302, 323, 326, 348, 382

Evreux, 290 Eyragues, Charles, Marquis d', 201

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 374

Fabrice, 79, 198 Faffenheim, Prince von, 199, 288, 302

Empress Josephine, 149, 286

Fairy, Good, 78

Eos, 108

Falaise, 201

Ephrussi, Charles, 186, 245, 246, 250, 256

Falconet, Maurice, 204

Epte, 289

Etienne

Fantin-Latour, 285, 288

Ernestine, 24, 45, 52, 238

126,

Farrer, Reginald, 274

Escarbagnas, Comtesse d', 303

Fasquelle, Eugene, 174 Father, 13, 59, 65, 91, 92, 99, 171, 184, 198, 241, 256, 257, 292, 310, 380

Eskimos, 205 Esse, E.C., 247 Etreuilles, 3, 17, 18, 20, 24, 30, 38, 43, 45, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57, 68, 93, 219, 238

Faure, Gabriel, 211 Fell, Clarence, v 502

Fénelon, Comte Bertrand de Salignac, 76, 280, 305, 356, 386

Fokine, Michel, 211 Foleshill, v Fontainebleau, 215, 216, 251, 286, 350

Ferrières, 355 Ferval, Claude, 257

Forcheville, Odette de Swann), 359

Féterne, 120, 122, 135, 136, 336 Féternes, 135

Mme (=Mme

Figuig, 67

Fortune, Robert, 31, 158, 159, 174

Finaly, M. and Mme Hugo, 117, 338

Fouquet, Abbe Louis, 384

Finistère, 157

Fouquet, Nicolas, 383, 384, 385

Fiquefleur, 104 Fitau, Felicie, 241, 243

Fouquieres, Andre de, 160

Fitch, Walter Hood, 285, 286, 389

France, Anatole, 5, 69, 117, 263, 293

Flame!, Nicolas, 382 Flament, Albert, 254

Françoise, 38, 45, 61, 67, 81, 244, 313, 322

Flaubert, Gustave, 4, 181, 295, 297, 315

Françoise (in JS), 167, 319

Piers, 104

Freycinet, 128

Fiers, Robert, Marquis de, 5

Admiral,

Freycinet, M. de Saules de, 128

Florence, 27, 179, 233

Freyssinet, Marie Eugene Leon, 128

Flower maidens, 346 503

Frézier, Francois, 39

George III, 89

Amedee

Gervex, Henri, 106

Fuchs, Leonhart, 298

Gide, Andre, 1, 76, 193, 309, 372

Gainsborough, Thomas, 171, 285

Gilberte (= Swann, Mile Gilberte), 28, 32, 34, 35, 53, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 75, 87, 88, 90, 92, 195, 242, 285, 307, 354, 360

Gallé, Emile, 200, 206, 274, 340 Ga!liéni, Joseph Simon, General, 153 Gallimard, Gaston, 5 Gallou, Ernestine, 25

Gineste, Marie, 115, 116,282

Garden features, 54, 195, 204, 344

Gisors, 384

Gardener, 18, 46, 120, 121, 134, 199, 335, 336, 354

Giulia, 79 Giverny, 289

Gardener statuette, 204

Glasnevin, vi

Gascony, 212

Glastonbury, 35

Gaudichaud-Beaupré, C., 290

Glisolles, 290

Gisors family, 383, 385

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 9, 374

Gautier, Theophile, 50, 58, 61, 73, 281, 383 Gautier-Vignal, Comte Louis, 338

Gomorrah, 347 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, 123, 124, 181, 196, 365

Geneva, 70, 71 Geneva, Lake, 120, 252, 256, 336

Gourvile, 248 504

Gouthiere, 355

Guermantes name, 67, 183, 185

Goyon, Mile Oriane de, 160

Guermantes way, 9, 34, 42, 353, 365, 367

Grandfather, 33, 48, 59, 168, 369, 377, 380

Guermantes, Basin, Duc de, 184, 187, 189, 190, 195, 196, 217, 245, 355

Grandmother, vi, 15, 16, 63, 72, 94, 97, 98, 99, 158, 181, 184, 355

Guermantes, Comte de, 186, 189

Grasse, 320 Graves, Robert Ranke, 375

Guermantes,

Gravetye Manor, vi

de, 186, 189

Greco, El, 200

Guermantes, Marie,

Greece, King of, 169

Princesse de, 67, 195, 197, 347, 360

Floriane, Comtesse

Greeks, 43 Greffulhe, (=Guiche,

Guermantes, Oriane, Duchesse de, 67, 83, 184, 185, 186, 188,

Elaine Elaine,

Duchesse de), 244

190, 193, 195, 199,

Greffulhe, Elisabeth de Caramay-Chimay,

200, 205, 212, 300, 309, 322, 326, 329,

Comtesse de, 176, 207, 244

359, 360, 361

Gregory IX, Pope, 382

Guermantes, Prince de, 195, 197

Guermantes family, 182,

Guiche, Armand, Duc

184, 185, 191, 246, 284

de, 244, 245

Guermantes gardens, 66

Guillot, J.B., 151 505

Guise family, 309

Haussmann, Georges Eugene, 58

Guitry, Lucian, 99

Hayman, Francis, 171

Guitry, Sacha, 99 Gyp (= Martel, Comtesse de), 66

Hayman, Mme Laure, 23, 168, 169, 171

Haarlem, 192

Heaven, 45, 275 Hebrard, Adrien, 381

Haedury, 86

Heidelberg, 316

Hahn, Maria (=Madrazo, Maria de), 168, 191

Hell, 45 Hellau, Paul, 200

Hahn, Reynaldo, 76, 137, 146, 149, 152, 154, 156, 160, 162, 165, 168, 180, 191, 226, 227, 229, 250, 251, 264, 266, 267, 302, 305, 338, 346, 381, 382, 385, 386

Henraux, Albert, 233 Henry IV of France, 89 Hera, 108 Hercules, 96 Hervieu, Paul Ernest, 73, 257

Halevy, Daniel, 68, 73 Halevy, Ludovic, 73

Hill 307, 36

Hammersmith, 174, 247

Hippocrates, 94

Hardy, M., 151, 220

Hobbema, Meindert, 286

Hardy, Thomas, 274, 295 Harfleur, 104

Hofmeister, Wilhelm, 316, 317, 318

Harvey, Gladys, 171

(Japanese Hata, gardener), 205

Holy Land, 272, 379

Hauser, Lionel, 356

Honore, 69, 78, 115

Honfleur, 99, 104, 206

506

Honorius III, Pope, 382

Istambul, 192

Hookers of Kew, 285

Icon, River, 290

Hortense, Queen, 191

James, Henry, 295, 297

Hotel des Reservoirs, 154, 204, 220, 231, 256

Jamin, M.F., 113

Houssaye (= Arsene Housset), 128

Jardin des Oublis, 16, 17, 21, 33, 37, 46, 93, 372

Jammes, Francis, 344

Houten, C.J.van, 25

Jardin des Plantes, 70, 89, 338

Hudimesnil, 376 Hudson, Stephen (= Sydney Schiff), 308, 365

Jardin du Roi, 338

Hugo, Victor, 344, 380, 381

Jauret, 198

Humblot, M., 236

Jews, 236

Humieres, Vicomte d', 264

Jerusalem, 379

Robert,

Johnson-Walsh, Revd. Sir Hunt, v

Huysum, Jan van, 283, 287, 288

Jonah, 273

Iceland, 224

Joseph of Arimathea, 35

Ile St Louis, 335

Jove, 323

Illiers, 3, 15, 23, 36, 38, 42, 56, 59, 92, 149, 157, 297

Judas, 278

Illiers-Combray, 15, 36

Jupien, 282, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 347, 358

Imbert, 336

Jupiter, 96

Innocent III, Pope, 382 507

La Salle, Comte LouisGeorges Seguin de, 116

Jura, 239 Jussieu family, 71, 302, 304

La Sizeranne, Robert de, 263, 274

Jussieu, Antoine de, 70

Lacharme, Francois, 151

Jussieu, Antoine Laurent de, 70

Lachaume florists, 170

Jussieu, Bernard de, 70

Laffay, M., 151

Kant, Immanuel, 6

Laleande, M. de, 132, 259

Karsavina, Tamara, 230 Kew, 89, 207, 285 Kipling, Rudyard, 264

Lamartine, Alphonse de, 381

Kossichef, Mlle Marie, 65

Languedoc, 382 Laon, 268

Kreuznach, Bad, 253 La Bresse, 349

Larue's Restaurant, 198, 230, 241

La Malmaison, 149

Laudet, Mme, 25, 94

La Mariposa, Hacienda de, 171

Laumes, Prince de, 187

Pommeliere, La Marquise de, 196

Laurent, Mme Mery, 165, 180, 302

La Pommeraye, M. de, 128

Lauris, Georges de, 157, 169, 211

La Raspeliere, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 133, 134, 135, 138, 154

Lauris, Marquise de, 169 Lavallee, Pierre, 250 508

Lawrence, Mme., 345

Leroy, M.A., 220

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 355

Les Aigneaux, 25, 94

Les Andelys, 384

Le Vésinet, 210

Les Frémonts, 117, 118, 137

Lear, Edward, 299 Leduc, Mme, 17, 20

Linnaeus, Carl, 36, 70, 71, 89, 299, 312, 320

Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 357

Lisieux, 15

Legrandin, M., 83, 99, 190, 251, 287

Lithuanie, Duc de, 144

Leix, County, v

Little Trianon, 70

Lemaire, Mile Suzanne (Suzette), 137, 138, 246, 250

Lobb, William, 121 Locke, John, 309, 384 Lodève, 129

Lemaire, Mme Madeleine, 117, 137, 138, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 168, 200, 203, 246

Loir, River, 16, 17, 46, 48

LemaItre florists, 170

Loiseau, Mme, 21

Lemaitre, Jules, 118

Loisel, Henri, 226

Lemoine, Victor and Emile, 37, 105, 147, 320

London, 279, 363

Lohengrin, 82

Longnon, Henri, 129

Lenoir, Mme, 225

Lorraine, 215, 381

Léonie, Aunt, 25, 48, 61, 90, 370

Lorraine family, 309 Louis XIII, 89, 137

Leroi, Blanche, 118 509

Louis XIV, 190, 209, 232, 384, 385

329, 331, 336, 344, 345, 374

Louis XV, 70, 123, 204, 210

Mailly-Nesle, Comtesse de, 162

Louise of France, 284

Maineville-laTeinturiere, 101

Louveciennes, 123

Male, Emile, 382

Louvre, The, 84, 289

Lucian, 279

MaHarm& Stephane, 165, 180, 200, 227, 253, 302

Luciennes, 123

Malvern, 322

Lustauds, 144 Gardens,

Manchester, 75, 231, 279

Luxembourg Palace, 254, 338

Manet, Edouard, 138, 165, 186, 245, 246, 250, 285, 289

Lowry, Bertie, 103

Luxembourg 338

Mantegna, Andrea, 225

Luxembourg, House of, 381

Marcouvillel'Orgueilleuse, 248

Luxembourg, Princesse de, 98 Lycee Condorcet, 61, 68

Marguerite, Les Andes, 99

Lyon, 70, 349

Marie, M., 51

Madrazo, Raymond de, 168

Mariette the maid, 239 Manly, 123

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 1, 174, 183, 213, 261, 281, 282, 284, 320, 321, 325,

Marmet, M., 144 Marmet, Mme, 144, 345 510

Marne, River, 138, 143, 364

Meilland, A. and F., 149

Marnock, Robert, vi

Melzi, Francesco, 366

Marquis, Fr Joseph, 17, 297

Menard the gardener, 59

'Marquise', The, 88

Mendel, Gregor, 44, 315

Mars, 85 Marsantes, de, 217

Menzies, 121

Comtesse

Archibald,

Merimee, Prosper, 381

Martel, Comtesse de (=Gyp), 66

Merovingian, 183, 379, 381, 382, 383

Martini and Rossi, 95

Meseglise, 28, 36, 81, 195, 354

Martinville-le-Sec, 377 Marx, Karl, 279 Mascarille, 236

Meseglise way, 9, 34, 92, 353

Mathilde, Princesse, 118, 181

Metz, 102

Maupassant, Guy de, 73, 79, 330

Meyrick, Mrs, 228, 345

Maurois, Andre, 87

Michelangelo, 86, 241

Mayas, 25

Milan, 366

Mayol, Felix, 110

Miller, Philip, 36, 320

Mazarin, Cardinal, 309, 385

Mnemosyne, 108 Moher, Cliffs of, 103

Meilhac, Henri, 73

Monaco, 247

Meuse, River, 280

511

Montmorency family, 283

Monceau, Parc, 59, 61, 66 Monet, Claude, 135, 245, 285, 288, 289, 290, 344

MontmorencyLuxembourg, Duchesse de, 204

Mongeland, 32 Monserfeuil, de, 300

General

Mont Blanc, 205

MontmorencyLuxembourg family, 283

Montauban, 304

Montsurvent, 248

Montaud, Louise (=Mornand, Louisa de), 169

Moore, David, vi Morand, Paul, 6, 361 Morbihan Bay, 157

Montausier, M. de, 365

Moreau, Gustave, 200, 207, 254, 277, 290

Montboissier, 357 Mont-Dore, 250

Morel, Charles, 201, 300, 303, 304, 331, 334

Monte-Carlo, 120 Montepin, 336

Mornand, Louisa de, 75, 99, 169, 208, 218, 267, 313

Montesquiou, Comtesse Gontran de (Pauline), 278

Mother, 4, 10, 13, 29, 30, 32, 45, 46, 54, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 82, 94, 168, 169, 170, 187, 192, 199, 220, 222, 232, 237, 241, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 264, 279, 344, 363, 380

Montesquiou-Fezensac, Comte Robert de, 29, 64, 137, 148, 154, 156, 159, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 253, 276, 277, 278, 386 Montjouvain, 32 512

Mother Earth, 103

Nevers, 384

Mourey, Gabriel, 282

Newfoundland, 291

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 228

Newton, Isaac, 380 Nice, 170

Mugnier, Abbe, 325 Murat, Joachim, 268

Nijinsky, Vaslav, 230

Comtesse

Nike, 1.08 Nissim Bernard, M, 351, 352

Murat, Princesse Lucian, 160

Nivernais, 384

Muses, Nine, 108

Noailles, Anna, Comtesse de, 75, 146, 171, 254, 256, 281, 339, 340, 341, 343, 344, 355, 386

Musset, Alfred de, 61, 381 Nabonnand, Gilbert, 151 Nagasaki, 207

Noailles, Duchesse de (nee Champlatreux), 355

Nahmias, Albert, 153 Nancy, 37, 105, 147, 320, 340

Noailles, Mathieu, Vicomte de, 339

Naples, Queen of, 209 Napoleon I, 164, 181

Nordlinger, Marie, 146, 153, 154, 205, 226, 227, 231, 254, 264, 265, 266, 267, 279

Napoleon III, 13, 58 Nassau, Princesse de, 360

Normandy, 15, 85, 99, 101, 106, 118, 119, 124, 201, 206, 252, 260, 310, 354, 355, 365

Neptune, 193 Nerval, Gerard de, 227, 292, 383 513

Norpois, Marquis de, 82, 184, 186, 241, 288

66, 69, 70, 71, 81, 93, 94, 102, 104, 112, 115, 125, 136, 137, 150, 158, 159, 170, 172, 182, 191, 198, 210, 218, 219, 220, 223, 231, 233, 234, 235, 239, 241, 246, 247, 254, 258, 290, 303, 310, 335, 337, 338, 340, 341, 347, 348, 349, 351, 356, 358, 361, 362, 363, 380, 382, 384

Notre Dame, 93 Numidia, 224 Nuneaton, v Oceanus, River, 193 Octave, Mme, 244 Odeonia, 128 Oliviane, 363 011endorff 236

Publishers,

Paris, Governor of, 177

Olympus, 111 Oranthe, 346

Parme, Princesse de, 190, 197, 198, 199, 200, 212, 326

Orleans, 117, 153, 215, 216 Orleans, Duc d', 169

Parsifal, 31, 187, 346

Orleans, House of, 381

Pascal, Blaise, 209

Ormesson, M. d', 128

Pasteur, Louis, 357

Orpheus, 254 Ostende, 117

Pecuchet, M. Juste Romain Cyrille, 297, 315

Palatine, 301

Pekin, 206

Pan, 55

Pelleas, 336

Paris, vi, 13, 14, 15, 22, 34, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62,

Penmarch, 103

Osiris, 100

514

Penzance, Lord, 150

Pisanello, Antonio, 287, 288, 298

Pepin III, 380

Plantard 384

Percepied, Dr, 82, 377 Perche, le Pays, 15

family, 383,

Ploërmel, 163

Pernet, Claude, 151

Pont l'Evêque, 206

Pernet, M. (père), 149

Ponte Vecchio, 233

Pernet-Ducher, Joseph, 151

Pont-Labbé, 103

Pemod, M., 94

Porel, Jacques, 196

Perrier, M., 152

Porel, M., 128

Perrotin, M., 145

Porto-Riche, Georges de, 73

Peter, 278

Poulet Quartet, 229

Peter the Great, 210 Petit-Abbeville, 154

Pouquet, Jeanne, 87, 307

Pfalz, 301

Poussin, Mme, 385

Picardy, 263, 273

Poussin, Nicolas, 289, 383, 384, 385

Piedmont, 95 Pierre (from Penmarch), 103

Pradel, Henri, 152, 304

Pierre, Georges, 309, 384

Pré-Catelan, 16, 21, 50, 59, 204

Pré Catelan, Le, 106

Pierre, M. (historian), 185, 309, 310, 384

Prémonville, M., 307

Pierrebourg, Marguerite, Baronne de (= Claude Ferval), 257

Prevost, Marcel, 381 Prieuré de Sion, 379 515

Prothyraia, 108

Raz, Cape, 157

Proust, Dr Adrien (see also Father), 13

Reboux, Paul, 27 Redoute, Pierre-Joseph, 286

Proust, Dr Robert, 13, 23, 34

Regent, The (Duc d' Orleans), 210

Proust, Marcel, 13, 68, 75, 137, 199, 264, 291, 310, 356, 368

Regent's Park, vi Regnier, Henri de, 292, 344

Proust, Mme Adrien (Jeanne, see also Mother), 13

Reinach, Joseph, 73 Rejane, (= Gabrielle Reju), 118, 196, 218, 228, 364

Provence, 201, 320 Provins, 117, 215, 216 Puteaux, 247 Puy-de-Dome, 250

Rembrandt van Rijn, 176, 254, 286

Python, 63

Renan, Ernest, 208

Quetteholme, 248

Renard, Jules, 345

Quiberon, 156

Rennes-le-Château, 379, 380, 381

Rabelais, Francois, 298, 299

Renvoyze, Mme, 216

Rachel, 38, 169, 186, 218, 219

Reszke Mme Marie de, 162

Radclyffe, Charles, 380

Reunion Island, 212

Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 229

Reveillon, 117, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 373

Rapin, M., 21 516

RevelHon, Duc de, 138, 139

Roche the cabdriver, 255

RevelIlon, Duchesse de, 138, 140, 144, 152, 154, 216

Rod, Edouard, 144, 339 Rodier, Georges, 230 Roman, 131

Revellion, Gaspard, Vicomtesse de, 146

Rome, 380, 382, 383, 384

Revelllon, Henri de, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 152, 216, 305

Rose breeders, 151 Rose of Manchester, 153

Reveillon, Marquis de, 145

Rosemonde, 109

Revelllon, Mlle de, 306

Rothschild, Baron, 355

Richard, Georges, 247

Rouen, 154

Ritz, 115, 241, 361, 364, 367

Roussainville-le-Pin, 27, 36

Rivabella, 106

Rousseau, Henri Julian Felix, 116

Rivebelle Restaurant, 106

Rubenstein, Ida, 211

Robert, Hubert, 67, 195

Rueil, 159

Robert, Louis de, 369

Rumanians, 236

Robin, Professor Jean, 89

Ruskin, John, vi, 10, 35, 42, 76, 154, 256, 263, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286, 301, 344, 354, 374

Robin, Vespasian, 89 Robinson, William, v, 16, 56, 58, 70, 84, 151, 158, 188, 296, 332, 338 Rocco the gardener, 150 517

Saint-Loup, Gilberte, Marquise de (see also Gilberte Swann), 354

Russia, Emperor of, 181

Rustinlor, M., 143 Sagan, Prince Boson de, 196

Saint-Loup, Mlle de, 87, 360

Saint Denis, 150

Saint-Loup, Robert, Marquis de, 38, 106, 122, 184, 217, 218, 219, 220, 304, 354, 360

Saint Louis, 353 Saint Mark's, 369 Saint Paul, 190

Saint-Malo, 206

Saint-Armand, 336

Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, 303

Saint-Clair, Marie de, 383 Saint-Cloud, 383

Saint-Martin-duChene, 129

Saint-Denis du Desert, 35

Saint-Moritz, 116

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 181, 301, 302, 345, 355, 356

Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs, 129, 252 Saint-Saens, Camille, 228

Saint-Euverte, Marquise de, 225, 361

Saint-Simon, Duc de, 210

Saint-Fargeau, 129 Saint-Frichoux, 128

Saint-Vaast, 206

Saint-Germain, 95

Salter, John, 174

Saintine, Xavier, 61

Sandby, Paul, 285

Saint-Jean de la Haise, 248

Saniette, 128 Sanseverina, 198

Saint-Leu, 268 518

Santeuil, Jean, 59, 65, 68, 75, 92, 95, 103, 139, 141, 144, 202, 204, 235, 238, 253, 319, 356, 373

Schlumberger, Jean, 199 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 374

Santeuil, M., 14, 30, 40, 82

Scott Moncrieff, Charles, v, 365

Santeuil, Mme, 14, 40, 57, 82, 161

Scott Moncrieff, David 'Bunty', v

Saracens, 379

Seaune, Mme, 69

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 68

Segrez, Chateau de, 250

Satan, 133

Sein, Ile de, 157

Sauniere, Cure Berenger, 379, 381

Seine, River, 36, 58, 99, 193, 290

Sauvalgue, M and Mme, 161

Seine-et-Marne, 117

Savinien, M. the lawyer, 17, 18

Seine-et-Oise, 250 Selves, M. de, 128

Savoy, 226 Scheikevitch, Marie, 93, 230

Senlis, 226, 268, 321

Mme

Servan, M., 52

Schiff, Sydney, 365

Sevigne, Mme de, 29

Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von, 302

Shakespeare, William, 183, 244

Schlumberger, Frederick, 199

Sherbatoff, Prineesse, 129

Schlumberger, Gustave, 199

Sils-Maria, Lake, 116

519

Baldassare, Silvande, Viscount of, 150, 250, 363

Ster-en-Dreuchen, 129 Sterlaer, 129

Silver, Arthur, 75

Stermaria, Mlle de, 104

Sinbad, 105

Stermaria, Mme de, 232, 347

Sion, 381 Ski (= Viradobetski), 126

M.

Stothard, Thomas, 285

Smithson, Miss, 224

Stradbally, v

Sollier, Dr Paul, 256

Strasbourg, 321

Solomon, 83, 236

Straus, M. Emile, 73

Sophie, Sister, 343

Soutzo, Princesse Helene, 361

Straus, Mme Genevieve, 8, 75, 87, 91, 117, 118, 137, 153, 168, 205, 231, 247, 256, 289, 290

Spanish, 25, 53, 278

Stravinsky, Igor, 230

Spinoza, Baruch, 239

Sulieman Magnificent, 192

Sorbonne, 72, 127

Sprengel, Konrad, 325

Christian

the

Sureau, M. (greatuncle in JS), 30

Standish and Noble nurserymen, 159 Standish, Mrs Henry, 158

Sureau, Mme (greataunt in JS), 54

Stendhal, Henri Beyle, 198

Surgis-le-Duc, Marquise de, 221

Sterbouest, 129

Swann, M. (pere), 47 520

Swann, M. Charles, 33, 63, 67, 90, 92, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 197, 209, 211, 212, 221, 236, 245, 266, 319, 324, 335, 354, 359

Thianges, M. de, 144 Thianges, Mme de, 345 Thibaud, Jacques, 303 Thibaudet, Albert, 303

Swann, 111le Gilberte (see also Saint-Loup), 32

Thibaudier, M., 303 Thibault de Chanvalon, M.J.M.B., 303

Swann, Mme Odette (see also Crécy), 31, 75, 88, 90, 91, 92, 126, 170, 177, 178, 179, 186, 319

Thomery, 350

Swann's garden, 335

Thonon, 135, 252

Tame, Hippolyte Adolphe, 181, 301, 302

Thor, 96

Thierry, Augustin, 61

Thunberg, Carl Peter, 207

Tallien, Mme JeanLambert, 357

Tiber, River, 301

Talma, Francois-Joseph, 357

Tibur, 301 Tissot, James Joseph Jacques, 169

Talondebois M. (= Jacques Bonami), 144

Tolstoy, Count Leo, 251

Tansonville, 31, 33, 34, 36, 47, 92, 185, 335, 353, 354

Tomato No. 1 and 2, 352

Tarn-et-Garonne, 304

Toulouse, 127, 174

The Hague, 362

Trépassés Bay, 157

Themis, 108 Theophrastus, 88, 155 521

Trianon, 134, 230, 231, 337

Varengeville-sur-Mer, 265

Trouville, 95, 99, 117, 118

Varin-Bernier, Banque M., 364

Troyes, 220

Vaudoyer, Jean-Louis, 211,362

Tubingen, 316

Vaugoubert, M. de, 195, 331

Tuileries, vi, 21, 84, 223, 338, 382

Vaugoubert, Mme de, 331

Turin, 95 Turks, 236 Ulm, 128

Venice, 11, 191, 234, 237, 254, 263, 267, 272, 366, 369

Ulrich, Robert, 205

Venus, 38, 84, 179, 323

Uncle (in JS), 23, 25, 40, 43, 52, 55, 56, 93, 152, 238

Venus Erycina, 363

Turrill, W.B., 89

Verdier, Eugene, 152 Verdun, 105

Uroica, 363

Verdurin, M., 126

Vaillant-Rozier florists, 171

Valencia, 349

Verdurin, Mme, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 137, 170, 209, 355

Valmy, 36

Verlaine, Paul, 200

Valognes, 206

Vermeer, Jan, 362

Valtognes, Marquise de, 223

Versailles, 67, 70, 84, 135, 154, 204, 209,

Val Richer, 302

522

220, 230, 231, 232, 256, 257, 323, 338, 385

Vulcan, 45 Wagner, Richard, 4, 346, 347

Vetheuil, 289

Wagram, Princesse de, 207

Vezelay, 277 Vibert, J.P., 150, 151

Wales, Prince of, 158

Vieuxvicq, 377

Walewski, Charles, 215

Villeparisis, Marquise de, vi, 98, 99, 184, 185, 187, 208, 220, 285, 287, 288, 302, 309, 376

Captain

Warburg, Messrs, 356 Watteau, Antoine, 200, 338

Vincennes, Forest of, 143

Weil family, 380

Vinci, Leonardo da, 285, 288, 298, 366, 380 Vington, 295

Weil, Adele (grandmother), 72

Vinteuil, M., 229, 295, 371

Weil, Georges (uncle), 231, 256

Vinteuil, Mlle, 346

Weil, Louis (greatuncle), 13, 23, 168, 171, 257

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene, 265

Weil, Nathe (grandfather), 59

Virgil, 128 Vivonne, River, 17, 42, 47, 48, 104, 219, 251, 266

Wharton, Edith, 295 Whistler, James McNeill, 191, 200, 302

Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet de, 188

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 199

Vries, Hugo Marie de, 315

William the Conqueror, 201 523

Yturri, Gabriel de, 156, 209

Windsor, 285, 367 Wivelsfield, 124

Yvette, 129

Würtemberg, Prince of, 284

Zealand, 281

Wurttemberg, 380

Zermatt, 255

Wurttemberg, House of, 381

Zeus, 96, 337 Zinn, Johann Gottfried, 136

X, Madame, 204

Xenophon, 190

524

Brian D. Morley Dr. Brian Morley received his doctorate from the University of the West Indies for his thesis on the biosystematics of the Jamaican species of

Columnea

(Gesneriaceae). He subsequently worked as Horticultural Botanist at the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin in Ireland and later as Director of the three Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium in South Australia for 20 years. Dr. Morley is currently a consultant botanist and author.