Proust and Three Upper Class Models for his Characters

Here's a very intriguing idea for a book: research the three women who inspired Proust's composite creation of the Duchesse de Guermantes in his million-page book In Search Of Lost Time or as it was translated 100 years ago, Remembrance of Things Past. Author Caroline Weber did exactly that in her recent book Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris. (Publication Date: May 22, 2018). A long book: I managed to read it all, and I am very sorry to say, I don't think it was worth it. 

Weber found a huge gynormous mahoosive amount of material on the three celebrated women, and she doesn't seem to have left out anything at all. She includes some very interesting and amusing paragraphs and even a few good chapters, but way too much other stuff.  Here's what she finds intriguing about the social situation in the late 19th century in Paris:

"The existence of a rarefied parallel universe, inaccessible to the rest of society, represented a maddening enigma to the people it excluded. In defiance of the history that had supposedly destroyed it, the hereditary gentry asserted the abiding power of entitlements conferred by birth." (p. 30). 

However, the sheer volume of material Weber includes about these self-perpetuating nobles and their hangers-on is overwhelming. It's hard to stay focused on the ins and outs of aristocrats who had survived into the late 19th-century Paris Republic and how intermarriage with non-nobles enabled them to maintain an aristocratic life in their chateaus and mansions. It's hard even when you are promised that persistence will give you all sorts of insight into the time and into the milieu that interested Proust.

Somewhere around the middle of the book, I think Weber herself was getting a bit overwhelmed -- she starts jumping back and forth in time, telling first one thing then another about one and then another of the three women, their husbands, their in-laws, their lovers, their husbands' and lovers' political and literary aspirations, their salons and costume balls, the tailor shop that produced livery for their servants, the way they kept up their reputations in the popular press, and more. Reading, I found, became more and more challenging. 

Finally in the last few chapters, after something like 500 pages, Weber actually gets to the young Proust's relationship to these women, when he finagles invitations to their aristocratic and high-level intellectual salons. Then it gets a little interesting for a while, as Proust didn't fit in very well -- or as one of the people who introduced him into these salons said: “Do you not see that your presence in her salon would rid it of the very grandeur you hope to find there?” (p. 562). 

I was especially disappointed because in this wealth of detail, elegant formal dinners and other meals are often mentioned, but we are rarely told what was on the menu. Here's an exceptional description: "Two hours before all the rest of her invitees were slated to arrive, the princesse had plied her inner circle with truite à la Condé, mousse au foie gras, and liqueurs Congrès de Vienne." (p. 38).

One big surprise for me: though there are quite a few references to the Dreyfus case, the author includes very little about it in her extremely detailed political and social history that affected the three women. Because there's so much other background material, and so much about the Jewish elements of Paris society (including the Jewish identity of one of the three women and including quite a bit about the Rothschilds), this makes me uneasy. Why isn't it there?

Why did I buy this book? I don't remember where I read a review of the book that led me to it. However, in preparing to write this blog post, I looked up the Washington Post's review, "A 19th-century Parisian world of style over substance that reflects modern life" by Katrin Schultheiss, chair of the History Department at George Washington University. This reviewer summarizes the book very effectively. Just her review would almost be enough, without the book -- well, almost. Here's her summary of the three women:

"The three aristocratic women at the center of this elegantly written and deeply researched 'triple biography,' Laure de Sade (Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné), Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay (Vicomtesse — later Comtesse — Greffulhe), are 19th-century paragons of that quintessential 21st-century phenomenon: the media icon and 'tastemaker' who is famous primarily for being famous. 

"Although these women’s careers as socialites depended on the persistence of the fragile, deeply anachronistic world of the old aristocracy, their not-insubstantial cultural influence was made possible by the modernizing forces that threatened their very existence as a social class."