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Caroline Weber

Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris Hardcover – May 22, 2018

by Caroline Weber (Author)

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From the author of the acclaimed Queen of Fashion--a brilliant look at the glittering world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All well but unhappily married, these women sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves, between the 1870s and 1890s, as icons. At their fabled salons, they inspired the creativity of several generations of writers, visual artists, composers, designers, and journalists. Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives of masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.

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736 pages
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Knopf
Publication date

May 22, 2018
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0307961788
ISBN-13

978-0307961785
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Proust’s Duchess is rich with intimate details of the extraordinary lives behind the carefully crafted public images of its three heroines. Celebrated names are dropped like confetti over the pages…. Ms. Weber has done a remarkable job of bringing to life a world of culture, glamour and privilege swept away by World War I.”
—Moira Hodgson, The Wall Street Journal

“A captivating triple biography…Focusing on three alluring women who were objects of Proust’s fascination, Weber portrays in rich detail a French aristocracy threatened by profound social and political change…Weber offers intimate details of their love affairs, betrayals, friendships, and rivalries; their worries over money and status…She recounts vividly the plush ambience, dress, and décor of their châteaux and palaces as well as the parties and salons peopled by royalty, artists, and writers who mesmerized the young, aspiring, impressionable Proust. A palpable, engrossing portrait of three extraordinary women and their tempestuous, fragile world.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Proust’s Duchess, Caroline Weber’s beguiling group biography of three aristocratic salonnières of Parisian high society in the Belle Époque… with sumptuous details, apt and amusing illustrations… and an enormous cast of the dandies, decadents, artists, writers, musicians and financiers… has succeeded much as [Proust] did in bringing that lost time back to glorious life.”
—Elaine Showalter, The New York Times

“Dazzlingly well researched and compulsively readable...”
—Leslie Camhi, Vogue

“The great strength of this literary history from Weber lies in its sheer accumulation of detail, which paints a granular picture of the ultra-wealthy milieu that provided the subject matter for Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu...Weber reveals the darker side of a culture that contributed little to the larger society while spending lavishly on its own whims...The final impression is one of a topical warning against the accumulation of vast wealth for its own sake. Readers will be impressed when they reach the end of this lengthy book, nearly every page of which offers factual riches, served up with precise and witty prose.”
—Publishers Weekly

“This delicious feast of a book combines narrative flair, literary scholarship, original new material, a sharp, flamboyant eye for society and literature high and low, a style as elegant and playful as its subjects—three remarkable women in late 19th Century Paris who are accompanied onstage by a cast of writers, from Proust to Maupassant, princes, actresses, politicians, journalists, artists, courtesans, to create a superb, original and irresistible study of a time and a place and the great art it created.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and The Moscow Trilogy of Novels

“Better than Proust.”
—Cécile David-Weill, author of The Suitors and Crush

“Engrossing and intelligent… Proust’s Duchess skillfully guides readers through the heyday of fin-de-siècle France, unveiling its beauty and elegance, its cleverness and charm, but also its contradictions and inequities, its cruelty and wretchedness… Weber’s study has the feel of both a delicious guilty-pleasure read and a penetrating, clear-sighted piece of literary commentary.”
—Hollie Harder, The Yale Review

“Extraordinary… Proust’s Duchess [is] not only a serious work of scholarship but also a riveting triple biography of three rebellious women… the first 'it' girls, reinventing themselves as celebrities long before Instagram.”
—Lea Carpenter,Condé Nast Traveler

“One unending stream of quotable anecdotes…Weber’s book is a fascinating portrait of a segment of Parisian society, a wonderful slice of social history… It’s almost too good…One feels after reading Weber, for instance, that the actual model for the Duc de Guermantes was an even more theatrical and interesting character than the one Proust created.”
—Andrew Holleran, The Gay & Lesbian Review

“A tour de force… We are there, through Weber's masterful writing, at the grand masked balls of France… in the salons where conspiracies of Royalists against the recently arisen bourgeoisie are always enflamed… Bravo, Professor Weber, you have brought to life a wonderful recreation of a marvelous, scandalous, but above all unforgettable time.”
— John Davis, The Decatur Daily

“Caroline Weber has given us a meticulously researched, well written and generously illustrated book… a treasure trove of information both serious and entertaining… Weber deserves credit for filling gaps left by other scholars and biographers and indeed by Proust himself.”
—William C. Carter, The Paris Insider Newsletter

“Thanks to her astonishing, prize-worthy research, Caroline Weber knows more about the three real women Proust modelled the Duchesse de Guermantes on than the mythologizing Proust himself did. This is social history at its best.”
—Edmund White, author of Marcel Proust: A Life.

“A necessary companion for lovers of Proust's vast melancholy vision, Weber's equally vast social history explores the late 19th Parisian 'monde' of salons and masked balls, lit by the meticulous, mad obsession of its most elite residents to hold all the forces of the modern world at bay.”
—Tom Reiss, author of The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

About the Author

Caroline Weber is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006). She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Rara Avis

June 2, 1885

After the fact, society pages reporting on the Princesse de Sagan’s annual costume ball would liken it to Noah’s Ark, the Arabian Nights, and an opium dream, although for sheer extravagant strangeness, it may well have surpassed all three. Taking the animal kingdom as her theme this year, the hostess had directed her seventeen-hundred-odd guests to model their outfits on the illustrated works of the Comte de Buffon, an Enlightenment naturalist who had studied the “denaturing” effects of environmental change on the fauna.

In the great ceremonial courtyard that separated Mme de Sagan’s hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain from the street, fifty footmen in powdered wigs and red-and-gold livery danced attendance on arriving guests, handing them down from carriages emblazoned with coats of arms and ushering them inside to an immense reception hall bathed in violet-tinged electric light. (The lady of the house judged “Swan Edison lamps”—lightbulbs, still a relative rarity in Paris—more festive than candles or gaslight.) After a Swiss guard announced them by name and by title, invitees swept up a white marble staircase lined with fifty more liveried footmen and an equal number of porphyry vases. Antique Aubusson carpets cushioned the ascent.

From the top of the stairs, guests entered an enfilade of magnificent formal reception rooms successively decorated à la Louis XVI, Louis XV, and Louis XIV, a sequence that gave visitors the impression of traveling back in time. In one salon hung antique Gobelins tapestries so precious that Mme de Sagan displayed them only once a decade. In a second reception room, the hand-carved boiseries had been gilded with fifty pounds of pure gold, while in a third, floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined the walls, in emulation of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Although the hôtel had previously belonged to Henry Thomas Hope, profligate owner of the Hope Diamond, its décor had grown even more opulent since its new proprietress had moved in. Tall and blond with patrician cheekbones and creamy white skin, the Princesse de Sagan, forty-six, liked to think she bore a striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette.

Dazzling though they were, the splendors of the Sagan residence paled beside the menagerie assembled there this evening: a hodgepodge of zoological curiosities defying the dictates of nature—and culture. As denizens of the monde, the revelers were Paris’s ordained exemplars of breeding and good taste. Tonight, however, they played against type, making a game of their fabled civility by masquerading as savage beasts.

At this so-called bal des bêtes (ball of the beasts) as at all mondain functions, the guests were attired with consummate chic, only on this occasion their elegance assumed weird, unsettling forms. Beneath their customary silk top hats, impeccably tailored clubmen—members of such exclusive all-male Parisian social clubs as the Jockey and the Cercle de l’Union—sported oversized papier-mâché heads denoting insects and vermin, crustaceans and big game. To their own uniform of evening dresses and jewels, the women had added furs, masks, and exotic plumage. Statuesque Mme de Sagan, whose “queen of the birds” regalia included a gigantic feather-and-gem-covered mechanical tail that she could unfurl and retract at will, had gone so far as to perch a taxidermied peacock’s head atop her own. Its diamond-studded eyes glittered eerily in the electric light.

With similarly macabre wit, slim, haughty-looking Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, twenty-six, had tucked a dead snowy owl’s head into her coif. The comtesse, a mythology buff, had dubbed herself “the Friend of Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom [Sagesse],” although her take on Minerva’s avian mascot contradicted the other meaning of sagesse: “decorousness” or “good behavior.” On its own, Mme de Chevigné’s dress of snow-white tulle and feathers might have exuded decorum, but the giant blood-red rubies sparkling in the eye-sockets of her owl’s head told a different story. They were the eyes of a fiend, a devil, a good owl gone bad.

By design, this study in contrasts stressed the contradictory traits for which the comtesse, née Laure de Sade, was famed. She looked like a princess, with the same heavy-lidded blue eyes, silky blond tresses, and chiseled bone structure that the Italian poet Petrarch had cherished in her fourteenth-century ancestress and namesake, Laure de Noves, Comtesse Hugues de Sade. Yet she spoke like a peasant, in an antiquated backwoods drawl, and cursed like a stevedore, in the filthy patois of her other noted literary forebear, the Marquis de Sade. Added to her fondness for shooting, riding, and man-tailored clothing, her tough talk moved one of her friends to brand her “Corporal Petrarch.” This sobriquet underlined the antitheses Mme de Chevigné somehow managed to embrace: womanly and virile, sacred and profane.

Her bawdy posturing and provocative “mannish air,” as another of her friends termed it, intrigued any number of mondain gallants, several of whom were suspected of enjoying Mme de Chevigné’s favors in bed. The Sagan ball found her coquetting with one such admirer, Comte Joseph de Gontaut, despite the presence of both their spouses (and despite Gontaut’s goofy attire: he was costumed as the hindquarters of a giraffe; two of his kinsmen represented the torso and head). As a rule, such brazen impropriety did not go over well in the gratin, where extramarital affairs were tolerated on the condition that they be conducted in secret. Strangely enough, however, Mme de Chevigné’s insubordinate antics endeared her to many of society’s grandest figures: crowned heads weary of the joyless formality that necessarily attended their station. To these exalted persons, the young noblewoman’s affronts to bon ton came as thrilling novelties, like séances or telephones.

The patronage of her high-placed friends allowed Mme de Chevigné to laugh off what she herself saw as her most shameful feature—her relatively modest means—by avowing that she was “poor in income, but rich in highnesses.” When society wags speculated that the rubies in her owl’s head were presents from a Romanov grand duchess, she neither confirmed nor denied the provenance. But in another virtuoso display of cheek, she disparaged her presumed benefactor’s good taste. After relating an anecdote about a different Romanov gift—a sturgeon stuffed with turquoises—she shrugged her shoulders at the tackiness and concluded, “Anyhow, I have been to Tsarskoe Selo, and it is not as chic as all that!” Lines like these were Mme de Chevigné’s masterstrokes. To receive special tokens of a highness’s esteem was impressive enough; to scoff at them was downright awe inspiring.

The comtesse flirted with the giraffe’s behind until a hummingbird with diamond-speckled wings broke up the colloquy, pulling her aside for a whispered exchange. This interruption restored Gontaut to his fellow giraffe components, who were enjoying their collective stature as the biggest brute at the party. Having heard rumors of another guest’s intention to show up in an elephant suit, they were relieved to discover that their hostess had vetoed the plan at the last minute, citing the risk of damage to the Old Master frescoes on the ceilings of her hôtel.

The princesse had also declared a ban on fish costumes, reasoning that guests thus attired would inevitably want to swim, and she couldn’t guarantee them a suitably warm water temperature in her (presumably capacious) aquarium. This caveat hadn’t deterred one vixen from decking herself out as a salmon, in a curve-hugging hot-pink mermaid ensemble patently designed to draw stares. Unfortunately, this woman’s dress attracted further notice because another femme fatale, known to her peers as “the Blond Cleopatra,” happened to be wearing a skin-tight ibis outfit of a nearly identical hue. The two fuchsia sirens eyed each other charily in the park-sized gardens behind the mansion, where Swan Edison lamps sparkled by the thousands in the old-growth chestnut trees.

Indoors, tension simmered between a portly duchess and a slender vicomtesse, both of whom had elected to appear en panthère. Despite her rival’s superior rank, the Vicomtesse Greffulhe, twenty-five, held the undisputed advantage. With her regal carriage, willowy frame, swanlike neck, and huge dark eyes the color of crushed pansies, Élisabeth Greffulhe, née Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, was one of Parisian society’s most celebrated beauties. Her contemporaries routinely compared her to Venus, the goddess of love, and to Diana, the chaste, ethereal goddess of the moon and the hunt. The matronly Duchesse de Bisaccia recalled no such deities. Onlookers joked that the only thing funnier than the contrast between the thin and fat panthers was the discrepancy between Mme de Bisaccia’s disgruntled mien and her family’s heraldic motto: “The pleasure is mine” (C’est mon plaisir).

The pleasure should have been Mme Greffulhe’s. Yet she gave no sign of savoring her victory, beyond the chilly Mona Lisa smile that so often played upon her lips. As one of her relatives noted, “She was beautiful always and everywhere. But her life was by no means a picnic—it was no laughing matter to be the most beautiful woman in Paris.” By her own admission, the vicomtesse’s prime objective in every circumstance was to project “an image of prestige like none other.” To achieve this effect, she was partial to fashions that provoked shock and awe, and tonight was no exception. More often than not, she went in for variations on an ice-queen aesthetic, consistent with her reputation for spotless virtue. (Her family motto was “Piety stands with me”—Juvat pietas—to the despair of many an enamored clubman.) But for the bal des bêtes, she had morphed into something elemental and wild. Eschewing the evening dress that subtended the other beasts’ costumes, she had swathed herself in only a whispery white chemise, overlain with a genuine panther skin. Her lustrous chestnut-brown curls, sprinkled with pieces of jet, spilled loose over her shoulders.

Mme Greffulhe’s outfit was all the more arresting in that she had based it not, as the other guests had done, on imagery from Buffon but on one of the treasures of the Louvre’s permanent collection: Leonardo da Vinci’s John the Baptist. Along with her beauty, the trait on which she most prided herself was her passion for the arts, and she was infamous for lording it over her peers. Her John the Baptist garb typified her high-cultural pretensions, which she believed set her apart from the rest of the gratin. The details of her costume indicated a careful study of Leonardo’s painting, from the artful drape of the panther’s hide to the curtain of tumbling dark hair, to say nothing of the chilly Mona Lisa smile.

At the same time, her costume raised questions about her rationale for choosing that particular work as her prototype; for Leonardo’s John is a comely androgyne, endowed with the features of a young man thought to have been the artist’s lover. On a tomboy like Laure de Chevigné, such gender-bending attire would have been equally audacious—cross-dressing had another few decades to go before it would become a mainstay of society costume balls—but at least it would have been consistent with her “mannish air.” On Élisabeth Greffulhe, the guise made less sense. Whatever speculation it drew from her peers, the logic behind it remained her own tantalizing little secret.

Meanwhile, the visual clash between the two panthers had caught the eye of a little frog looking on from the sidelines, a dark-eyed, olive-skinned newcomer to the monde. Always quick with a joke, the frog took the dueling panther getups as a pretext to crack jokes to her companions: a trio of Rothschild heiresses arrayed as a leopard, a bat, and a bright orange tropical bird. It was then that the frog, mocking the duchesse-panther’s heft, first made what would become one of her best-known witticisms, though years of subsequent requoting and revision would transform the fearsome jungle predator into a bland farmyard herbivore. “She isn’t a cow,” ran the final version of the sally, still circulating in the Faubourg a full generation later. “She’s an entire herd!”

If such put-downs passed in Parisian society for the height of cleverness, they also disclosed the undercurrent of malice that subtended the nobility’s polish, making that class itself a peculiar hybrid species: part gleaming tooth, part gory claw. At the bal des bêtes, this duality surfaced with arresting clarity when the blast of a hunting horn abruptly turned a pack of human staghounds loose in the mansion. Outfitted in dog masks and hunting pinks, the baying creatures raced on all fours across gleaming marble and parquet floors, in hot pursuit of a fleet-footed human stag.

While the outcome of the chase has been lost to history, the scene revealed something essential about its participants. Like the sport it mimicked, this faux stag hunt was a form of ritualized violence, a stylized rechanneling of the latent hostility the French courtier class had once felt toward the king. It was no accident that before he turned a modest royal hunting lodge into the seat of the most magnificent court in Europe, Louis XIV (1638–1715) had come of age at a time when noblemen resentful of the monarchy’s absolutist pretensions waged civil war against the throne, nearly toppling it. To forestall any further such sedition, the young sovereign ingeniously transposed his vassals’ bloodlust into an arena that he alone could define and control: court ceremony.

Some of the activities that fell under this rubric, such as the royal hunt and the ballet de cour, were strenuous enough to provide a physical outlet for the courtiers’ aggression. But the Sun King (a persona Louis cultivated by playing the role of the sun in some early court pageants) also addressed this threat more abstractly, by subjecting his retinue at Versailles to an intricate system of etiquette in which nearly every gesture and word bespoke their place in the court hierarchy. When the members of the court gathered each day to watch the king dine, which of them had the right to sit in his presence, and within that tiny élite, who was accorded a stool and who a proper chair? Did a French duke walk into a room ahead of a legitimized royal bastard (Louis XIV had plenty of those) or behind him? To whom did the prerogative of initiating or ending a conversation belong? Who had the privilege of carrying the monarch’s candlestick when escorting him to bed, or of removing the royal riding boot from the royal foot after a long, sweaty day in the royal stirrup? The Sun King’s genius lay in convincing the members of his court to treat these seeming trivial questions as matters of (symbolic) life and death. By this means, he trained his nobles to envy one another, rather than him, so deflecting from the crown whatever hostile energies might not be exorcised by shooting and dancing alone.

As at the fin de siècle, a century’s worth of roiling political upheaval having finally dethroned Louis’s royal heirs, the Bourbons (along with their archrival cousins, the d’Orléans, and the self-made imperial Bonapartes), the French nobility retained an atavistic taste for pomp and circumstance. But the target of its rancor had changed. Instead of an all-powerful king, its most formidable rival now was the bourgeoisie—well educated, high achieving, and, in this industrializing age, increasingly rich. Over the past half century, this demographic had asserted its might in virtually every area that counted: politics, finance, industry, technology, the sciences, the media, the arts. By the time of the Sagan ball, the strides made by the middle classes in all these fields had precipitated a golden age in French history: a period of unprecedented economic, industrial, scientific, and cultural vibrancy that would end only with the outbreak of world war in 1914, and that historians would retroactively label the Belle Époque.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (May 22, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307961788
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307961785
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,025,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #323 in French Literary Criticism (Books)
- #472 in Historical France Biographies
- #11,240 in Women's Biographies

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Caroline Weber
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I am a professor of French & Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, where I specialize in 18th & 19th-century French literature, history, & culture. My newest book, PROUST'S DUCHESS (Knopf, 2018), explores the fizzy intersection of aristocracy, celebrity, & artistic genius in fin-de-siecle Paris. The book involved 7 years' worth of detective work in the unpublished private papers of its three heroines, the real-life society doyennes upon whom Marcel Proust modeled his fictional Duchesse de Guermantes, the reigning goddess of the Parisian nobility in IN SEARCH OF LAST TIME. My previous books are QUEEN OF FASHION: WHAT MARIE ANTOINETTE WORE TO THE REVOLUTION (2006) & TERROR & ITS DISCONTENTS (2003). I have written extensively for the mainstream press & for fashion magazines as well as for scholarly publications; my aim in all my work is to make my material accessible & engaging to the reader. The image that appears above as my main author photo is actually a portrait of me painted by my amazingly talented friend Brad Livingstone Black.
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Niala

A witty chronicle of the deeds and misdeeds of aristocrats at the top of French society.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 12, 2018

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“Will we ever get rid of all these damned princes?” first verse of « L'Expulsion » sang by Maurice Mac-Nab at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre in 1886. “On n'en finira donc jamais avec tous ces Nom de Dieu d'princes ! »
These are the words that the “celebrated women” of Caroline Weber’s book must have heard sung at The Chat Noir cabaret when they left their brilliant salons to go slumming in Montmartre. In The Chat Noir, performers like the anarchist poet-singers Aristide Bruand and Maurice Mac-Nab delighted in insulting their aristocratic visitors. But as observed by Weber, these insults were what the aristocrats were looking for in Montmartre. An exciting contrast to the stultifying politeness rules of the salons where they were spending most of their idle time planning for the next ball.
Mac-Nab’s colorful verse expressed precisely my first reaction when reading Caroline Weber’s wonderful book. The aristocratic society she depicts so carefully and wittily is arrogant, superficial, and reactionary. It is also reflexively antisemitic, in spite of occasionally marrying the daughters of Jewish bankers to be able to maintain their leisure class status. The male characters are all either obnoxious, like Greffuhle or Strauss, or pathetic like Adhéaume de Chevigné—“poor Adheaume” as his wife Laure call him! The Comte de Montesquiou (the Baron de Charlus in The Search) is the only pleasant male protagonist redeeming his idleness with a wild creative imagination.
The historical context of France in the 1880s is the essential background of the story told by Weber. While France was painfully recovering from a crushing military defeat and a bloody popular revolt, while the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine had been lost to Germany, while the Third Republic was slowly emerging from the disasters brought by the Second Empire, the “aristocracy” primary concern was their costume for the Princess de Sagan’s ball.
One wishes this parasitic class (except for Montesquiou) would have disappeared after the revolution, not by being martyred under the guillotine, but more peacefully by mixing with the bourgeoisie or by participating as entrepreneurs in the industrial revolution then in full bloom. Instead, their unjustified pride isolates themselves in salons from which they exclude the meritocracy that had emerged after the Napoleonic wars. Marcel Proust obsession to break into this exclusive circle of mediocrities is difficult to explain except as a challenge: “because it was there.”
“Proust’s Duchess” is not about unveiling the secrets of Proust’s roman à clef. It is a witty chronicle of the deeds and misdeeds of a small group of aristocrats at the top of French society, who to paraphrase Talleyrand, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. This social elite political ambition was limited to reestablish the monarchy around the last surviving Bourbon, the inept Comte de Chambord. Their social ambition was to appear at their best at the next party.
In one of the most brilliant parts of the book, Weber describes the dutiful visits of Laure Comtesse de Chevigné and her husband Adhéaume to the castle of Frohsdorf, in Austria, where the Republic has exiled the Comte de Chambord, who called himself Henry V.
Caroline Weber provides the first insider account that I have ever read on what this court was like. Far from being a hotbed of redoubtable Machiavellian plotters that we all imagined, it was a rather pathetic group of boring and insignificant retirees, hunting in the morning, playing cards in the evening. Most of the time, the entire court was bored to death—literally, in 1883, in the case of Henry V. The lively Comtesse de Chevigné was able to bring a little life to this retirement home, but not enough to prevent Henry from dying of "ennui” eventually. We learn that although she was flirtatious with him, she did not wake up his libido to the point of producing an heir to the throne of France! Weber has a gift for telling stories, and the account of the exiled Comte de Chambord’s court is full of what Nabokov would have called “divine details”!
With the well-documented stories about the political bumbling of the Count Greffulhe, Caroline Weber provides a lively description of one of the royalist plotter in Paris. His incompetence is hugely reassuring for the survival of the Republic. We learned in history books that Gambetta saved the Republic by forcing the royalist President MacMahon to resign! But Caroline Weber witty account of the behavior of the Comte Greffulhe seems to give the credit for the Republic survival to the Comte stupidity more than to Gambetta decisiveness! Again, this brilliant book makes this new perspective on French history possible because it gives us an inside account of the daily behavior of the Republic’s opponents. The history manuals look at those opponents from the outside and therefore make them much more formidable than what they were! Proust’s Duchess give us an original perspective that explains the happy historical outcome: the survival of the Third Republic for the next 70 years.
If the Comte de Chambord and the Comte Greffulhe had been more competent, the Third Republic would have been short-lived. France would have seen a brief reactionary Monarchy for a few years. Probably around 1900, the monarchy would have been overthrown by a bloody revolution, as the French cannot change political regime without putting barricades in the street of Paris. Political passions would have probably extinguished the brilliant artistic vigor that characterized France between 1880 and 1914. Macron would now be the president of the Sixth Republic! Caroline Weber' s book, therefore, gives us a new perspective on this very crucial part of French history. And few history books are as pleasant to read!
With Proust’s Duchess, Caroline Weber reproduces a Proustian feat: producing a masterpiece from the carefully analytical description of a decadent society.

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David H. (Austin)

Marcel Proust finds inspiration in Belle Époque France

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 26, 2018

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This dense, meticulous, and mostly readable account of the nascent career of Marcel Proust centers on three ubiquitous mondaines who provided inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his multi-volume REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST: Elizabeth comtesse de Greffuhle: Laure de Sade comtesse de Chevigné ; and Geneviève Bizet-Straus née Halevy. The book serves as a sort of quadruple biography of all three women, and Proust as well.

The histories of these four are alternately interesting and, unfortunately, mind-numbing. The comtesses and Madame Bizet-Straus are ultimately revealed as vapid and selfish persons always on the hunt for men to fascinate. However, a who’s who of France’s greatest painters, authors, and composers parade through the ladies’ salons. This is not mere name dropping but a hypnotic look at the rich cultural history of fin-de-siecle Paris. Proust eats all this up and as a somewhat callow youth, he pursues his arriviste goal of ingratiating himself to aristocrats despite his bourgeois and Jewish roots. As an aside, while not confined to France, anti-semitism is a recurrent and disgusting motif.

Once the reader accepts the dreariness of Proust’s muses, he or she can just sit back and revel in the sheer variety of artistic trends, persons, and a constellation of politicians, roués, military fools, grandes horizontals, and a motley crew of European aristocrats who all drift through Paris and all the while sharpening Proust’s literary gifts.

In conclusion, this book is a great introduction to Proust’s magnum opus as it provides background for his ‘fictional’ characters. I hate to give this book just four stars but the three muses wore me out with their maundering careers as fascinators, especially the comtesse de Greffuhle who spent ten years trying to coax Prince Giovanni Borghese into adultery before she realized she was barking up the wrong tree after her Italian swain dumped her to be with Prince Ferdinand of the house of Saxe-Coburg as he travelled to Sophia to witness Ferdinand’s installation as Regent ( later king ) of Bulgaria. Read all about it and more in this well-researched book. 4.5 stars then.

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Mike Ellis

Well writen and researched

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2022

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Tons of material, reading in small sections to keep storyline in focus.
Bought as used book, but in excellant condition

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 30, 2018

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"Proust's Duchess" is, as noted by many reviewers, an excellent read, well researched and well written. The detail grabs your attention on every page. The author spent six years researching the subject matter; her efforts were a labor of love as it is doubtful that the book will be a best-seller made into a movie.

I love how the author puts together the data to paint portraits of her subjects. She quotes letters, poems, books, and newspapers to document her word portraits. We read about the neighborhood of the Faubourg st. Honore, the distances from the house to the church, the dog-walking route of a Duchess, the shops on the street level of a principal's apartment building, the orange drink severed at the afternoon salons, the rituals of hunting season, family histories, etc. No detail is too small, even the conversation when an artist paints a portrait of the Duchess. Amazing.

For a long time, I have been a reader of Proust and look forward to re-reading, again, 'Swans Way" and the "Guermantes Way" as I will have greater insight into the characters and milieu of the novels.

Merci, Ms. Weber, mille fois.

12 people found this helpful

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A. M. Glenville

A work of genius!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 1, 2019

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Unputdownable! Fascinating, delicious, intense, informative and truly Proustian. This brilliant book truly adds to my shelves a superb piece of research, brilliantly evocative writing, masses of facts served up in a delightful way. Well written, and entertaining yet history combining the facts and the narrative in perfect harmony.

2 people found this helpful

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Elegant . Befitting Proust’s love for details .

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 4, 2018

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The book weighs a ton . Marvelously written .

One person found this helpful

Client d'Amazon

Proust's duchess

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on July 1, 2018

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Le récit de trois destins fascinants. Particulièrement bien documenté et sourcé, mais aussi extrêmement émouvant. Se lit d'une traite. Un seul regret,l'auteur (mais c'était son propos) s'arrête au moment où ces personnalités s'insèrent dans l'œuvre de Proust. Je l'aurai volontiers suivi jusqu'au bout de leurs vies...

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Pierre Hiribarne

Indigent à défaut d'être intelligent....

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on December 4, 2018

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Livre inintéressant, mal écrit, superfétatoire à défaut d'être superbe.... A fuir!

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Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris Hardcover – May 22, 2018

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