Proust’s Duchess
How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris
by Caroline Weber
Knopf, 736 pp., $35
At the center of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s masterwork, a novel of seven volumes, more than 3,000 pages, roughly 1.5 million words, and 400 or so characters, is the Duchesse de Guermantes. In Proust’s portrayal of her, the duchesse is a woman at the zenith of belle époque social life. The belle époque, that period in France bounded by the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the beginning of the First World War (1914), wasn’t belle for everyone, as Captain Alfred Dreyfus would have been the first to attest, though it did witness the final flowering of French aristocracy, also known as le monde, le gratin, the “born.”
In one of the novel’s crucial scenes, the Duchesse de Guermantes is told by her friend Charles Swann that he has only a few months to live. A moment later her husband, the duc, points out that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress and insists she return to her room to put on red shoes. Riven between compassion for Swann’s impending death and the need to coordinate her outfit for the evening, she chooses to return for the matching shoes, thus revealing a heartless superficiality that anyone who has read the scene does not soon forget.
Caroline Weber, a professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University, certainly hasn’t forgotten it. The cover of her Proust’s Duchess has a single high-heeled red slipper under the book’s title. A triple biography of three women—Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus (1849-1926), Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné (1859-1936), and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse (later Comtesse) Greffulhe (1860-1952)—Weber’s book recounts the conquest by these women “of a world where projecting an image was the precondition, and the price, of belonging.” Proust’s Duchess also chronicles the salon culture of aristocratic France between the years 1870 and 1890. This was a culture whose ethos is nicely captured in a remark by the Duc de Doudeauville upon his blackballing the writer Paul Bourget from membership in the Jockey Club: “I’d like to think there’s still one place in Paris where individual merit doesn’t count for anything.”
Proust’s Duchess is a handsome piece of bookmaking, elegantly printed, with photographs in both color and black-and-white, set out on the pages to which they are most relevant, a book with a substantial look and comfortable feel in the hand. Caroline Weber has supplied her book with more than 100 pages of back-matter—footnotes, bibliography, appendices—making it, as its author hoped it would be, a work both of scholarship and of compelling storytelling. She notes that the completion of her book was slowed by her relentless search for “le mot juste,” a largely successful search, for her writing is admirably clear, often amusing, and precise in its formulations of matters of considerable subtlety. In her next book, though, I hope she will eliminate those less than juste words “gender norms,” “feedback,” and “mindset” and take a pass, too, on the much overworked “icon,” “lifestyle,” and “charisma.”
The three women at the center of Weber’s study—the Mesdames Greffulhe, Straus, and Chevigné—all married badly. Élisabeth Greffulhe, easily the most beautiful of the three, married a brute, a wealthy, deeply philistine man thought to have had affairs with no fewer than 300 women while remaining jealous of his wife and who saw no breach in etiquette in bringing some of these mistresses to dine at his wife’s table. Geneviève Straus, Jewish, of Sephardic lineage, was born a Halévy; her father was a composer famous in his day; and after her first husband, Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen, died at 36, she married a well-to-do bore, a Rothschild lawyer named Émile Straus. (Famous for her witticisms, when asked why she married the dullard Straus, she replied, “It was the only way I could get rid of him.”) Laure de Chevigné, born a Sade, of the Marquis de Sade Sades, was the least physically attractive of the three women, but hers was the most secure pedigree. Her husband, thought to be homosexual, was among those aristocrats in the retinue gathered around Henri d’Artois, putatively Henry V, last Bourbon pretender to the throne of France, then living in exile in Austria.
These three women operated in a society that Lord Lytton called “brilliantly superficial.” It was a society where, in Maupassant’s words, “laughter is never genuine,” one in which intelligence was not valued, striving was thought vulgar, and the only ignorance that counted was ignorance of dress, pronunciation, and the pecking order. This society in the middle of Paris, as Princesse Marthe Bibesco notes in her novel Égalité, “formed a world as distant from ordinary people on the streets as the moon is from the earth.”
For people on the outside, mere earthlings, the members of the monde radiated a powerful, almost magical attraction. A young Englishwoman named Barbara Lister, mentioned in another of Princesse Bibesco’s books, happened to be in a Parisian bookstore when Laure de Chevigné and her mother were in the shop. “When they left the shop,” Miss Lister afterwards wrote, “I thought the sun had gone in.”
Proust’s Duchess describes the world of the gratin of the belle époque and along the way reveals how thin, how shallow, how nearly bogus it all was. “Life,” said Bismarck, “begins at baron,” meaning that in 19th-century Europe, without a title one was rabble, rubbish, scarcely existent. Theatergoing, boxes at the opera, elaborate costume balls—these were the events in which the gratin appeared outside the social fortresses of their homes and salons. Summer months they spent under the roofs of grand mansions in the country; parts of the autumn and winter were given over to shooting foxes and pheasants. A sycophantic press chronicled their comings and goings. The monde, in Caroline Weber’s phrase, “existed in a time warp.”
A woman in this select inner circle, Weber informs us, required as many as seven or eight changes of clothes daily, which of course implied a cadre of servants. “The ‘born’ Parisienne’s golden rule: always look perfect, no matter how shaky one’s finances or one’s marriage,” she writes. The game of keeping up was costly. The dirty little secret among the born was not sex, Weber notes, but finances.
The men in this strange world seemed, most of them, to have little to do other than fill up the salons and kill afternoons in this matriarchal, entirely self-enclosed society. Their numbers included retired military men, superannuated political figures, heirs aspirant. The Prince of Wales, awaiting the long-delayed death of his mother, Queen Victoria, would put in an occasional appearance. Geneviève Straus’s salon, the one into which Proust first gained entry, was unusual in having among its denizens painters, writers, and composers, lending it a vaguely bohemian air.
Easily the most exotic among the male salon frequenters of the belle époque salons was Robert de Montesquiou, uncle to Mme. de Greffulhe, who would later serve Proust as his model for the Baron de Charlus. Ardent for gossip, Montesquiou was a snob of the first order and said to be the soul of indiscretion. Sarah Bernhardt, the actress of the age, was the only woman Montesquiou claimed ever to have made love to, and he remarked that for fully a week afterward he vomited continuously.
For those who seek living parallels for the characters in Proust’s novel, the leading candidate for the Duchesse de Guermantes is probably Élisabeth de Greffulhe. Certainly she looked most like the duchesse Proust describes in In Search of Lost Time. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, always strikingly turned out, wealthy through marriage, the Duchesse de Guermantes at Proust’s narrator’s first sight of her seems “a whole poem of elegant refinement and the loveliest ornament, the rarest flower of the season.” on the other hand, perhaps the model for Proust’s Duchess was Mme. de Chevigné—“the woman in whom,” wrote Princesse Bibesco, “the genius of Marcel Proust, divining her perfect essence by the light of his worship, found the archetype of his Duchesse de Guermantes.” What seems most likely is that, as Caroline Weber suggests, Proust’s duchesse is an amalgam of all three women.
Marcel Proust, the better part of whose own life—born 1871, died 1922—was lived in the belle époque, was its great, its unsurpassable chronicler and the Duchesse de Guermantes among his most memorable creations. The character Charles Swann remarks of the duchesse that “she is one of the noblest souls in Paris, the cream of the most refined, the choicest society.” But as the novel plays out, the Duchesse de Guermantes proves simultaneously bewitching and bitchy, clever and shallow, generous and malicious, charming and anti-Semitic, a snob whose chief pretense is that she values talent and intellect over birth and breeding, which in all her actions she clearly does not.
As a young man, Proust knew the three women at the center of Caroline Weber’s book, but just as he knew their world generally: from the outside looking in, nose pressed against the glass. Half Jewish, on his mother’s side, his only connection with the world described in Proust’s Duchess was his schoolmate Jacques Bizet, son of Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus. When older, Proust implored Robert de Montesquiou to help him gain entrance to Mme. de Greffulhe’s salon. “Do you not see,” Montesquiou told him, “that your presence in her salon would rid it of the very grandeur you hope to find there?” He would eventually come to know Mme. Greffulhe quite well. As for her, when much older she recalled Proust as “a displeasing little man who was forever skulking about in doorways.”
Groucho Marx famously said that he wouldn’t care to join any club that would have him as a member. Poor Proust was never able to test the Groucho rule, for he was never extended a full invitation to the club to which as a young man he so yearned to belong. The earlier rap on Proust was that he was little more than a social climber. When he published his first book, Pleasures and Days (1896), a reviewer described its contents, not mistakenly, as “little nothings about elegance.” The young Proust’s excessive flattery, applied not with a trowel but a backhoe, came to be known
as “Proustifying.”
The luster of the gratin would soon enough wear off for Proust. The dandiacal dilettante would soon turn into the penetrating social observer. Through his novel he would explode the pretensions of a society that would rank a young duc higher in importance than an octogenarian Victor Hugo. Weber writes that her three disdainful subjects would live to see the day that their prestige-laden but utterly artificial world would “fall to pieces under the deft, merciless touch of a (half-)Jew” named Marcel Proust.
Marcel Proust, who began life as a snob, soon became the great anatomist and equally great contemner of snobbery. “The juxtaposition of surface elegance and hidden corruption,” as Caroline Weber writes, “would become a defining feature of his portrayal of the monde.” Princesse Bibesco takes the Duchesse de Guermantes to be the heroine of Proust’s novel. She turns out to be quite the reverse. Proust’s narrator begins “genuinely in love with” the duchesse. As the novel proceeds, her flaws are ticked off and their number mounts. In the third volume, The Guermantes Way, Proust writes that she “despised rank in her speech while ready to honor it by her actions.” Her put-downs of others, famous in her circle as evidence of wit, he, the narrator, views as fired by “genuine malice” by which “I was revolted.” Her pretense to culture turns out to be just that—pretense, little more. This noble soul, human poem, rare flower, the Duchesse de Guermantes, with her taste for provocation, can say of the Dreyfus Affair: “I think you’re all equally tiresome about this wretched case. It can’t make any difference to me as far as the Jews are concerned, for the simple reason that I don’t know any of them and I intend to remain in that state of blissful ignorance.” In Time Regained, his novel’s final volume, Proust describes the duchesse as having “more head than heart,” which is distinctly no compliment. “You’re entirely wrong,” Proust once told an admiring reader, “if you think the Duchesse de Guermantes a good-hearted woman.”
All paradises, as Proust taught, are lost paradises. Many among them are mistaken for paradise to begin with. That of the belle époque, as every reader of In Search of Lost Time discovers, and will now have reinforced by Caroline Weber’s excellent book, was prominent among them.
