in December 1890. Daudet called Hahn's music his "chère musique preferée". At the Daudets' house in 1893 the singer Sybil Sanderson premiered Hahn's Chansons grises, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine. The poet was present and was moved to tears by Hahn's settings of his verse. Stéphane Mallarmé was also present, and wrote: Le pleur qui chante au langage Du poète, Reynaldo Hahn tendrement le dégage Comme en l'allée un jet d'eau. The weeping that sings in the words Of the poet, Reynaldo Hahn tenderly releases it Like a fountain on the pathway. In the early 1890s Hahn worked on his first opera L'île du rêve, a "a Polynesian idyll", written at Massenet's behest. During this period he met Marcel Proust for the first time, at Madeleine Lemaire's salon on 22 May 1894. As far as is known, the 19-year-old Hahn's romantic attachments before then had been intimate but platonic relationships with the famous Parisienne beauties Cléo de Mérode and Liane de Pougy. Until this point, he had been uneasy to the point of hostility about homosexuality and homosexuals, but the two men quickly began an intense love affair, Proust's only real liaison. Their affair lasted for little more than two years, but it evolved into a lifetime's close friendship. Proust wrote, "Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo". The music scholar James Harding notes, "It was Hahn who suggested to Proust the famous petite phrase which recurs symbolically throughout À la recherche du temps perdu and which is none other than a haunting theme from Saint-Saëns's D minor violin sonata". Hahn completed his studies at the Conservatoire satisfactorily but "without producing sparks in examinations and competitions", as his biographer Jacques Depaulis puts it. Massenet resigned from the faculty in May 1896, and Hahn left at the same time as his mentor. 1896 to 1913 In 1896 Proust wrote the words and Hahn the music for Portraits de peintres for reciter and piano, premiered at the house of Madeleine Lemaire, where they had met. Later in that year Hahn formed another of his closest friendships: he had long admired the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and at the end of 1896 he met her and quickly became part of her inner circle of friends and helpers. He frequently visited her in her dressing room during and after performances, lunched with her at her Paris townhouse, travelled with her