Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/214

174 sat up and in the voice which was then still a caress, the luminous, ardent voice, trembling like a violin (in the last fifteen years it was spoiled and seemed to be emitted by a tragic phonograph) she cried out, "There's Morand's boy! How like his father he looks!"

She had the trick of pronouncing my name nasally—it was theatrical and at the same time expressed the deep friendship she had for my father—which gave me a physical pleasure I shall not forget. It was the time of MacNab, of the songs of the Chat Noir. I had been taught the Pendu de la Forêt de St Germain and the Fiacre—the fiacre with the coachman in yellow and in black—that song which, says Tzara, is like a print by Toulouse-Lautrec. I got up on a gilt chair and sang and Sarah kissed me and stuffed me with bon-bons which I ate with one eye squinting at the door where the lion would come in.

But I see that I am writing my memoirs, which is quite ridiculous. It is only out of superstition that I set at the head of this first letter the name of her who was always good to me and who, under a beautiful sun, a short time ago, left us, surrounded by the tired, intelligent faces which are the ornaments of the streets of Paris and preceded by five carriages of the most beautiful flowers. Sarah is dead and her throne remains vacant. Montesquiou is dead—this poet who would have gone down to posterity even if he had issued only one book—and his title dies with him. Nothing replaces what is dying to-day. After their death they leave us their outline, the hollow mould which no one fills; and this is necessary to make us feel that there is nothing in common between their time and ours. It requires the genius of Marcel Proust to pass over the chasms which divide the generations and master the years. (He should be called "The Master of Time.") Proust, however, was fully of their time; his letters to Montesquiou which, with a pang at the heart, all Paris saw the other day before they were put on sale and gathered up by the pious hands of his brother—these letters were of that period and of no other. Those of Proust are full of kindness and submissive respect (too submissive say those who do not understand that it was this excess of humility which, by reaction, gave the character of de Charlus all its virulence); those of Montesquiou are full of vain and arrogant writing, and are sustained only by the extreme culture of his malice and the very excess of his artifice. In this connexion I want to repeat a little known anecdote which Proust told me less than a year ago and which is