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Proust's duchess : how three celebrated women captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris / Caroline Weber.

by Weber, Caroline, 1969- author.

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New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.

Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 -- Sources.

Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922 -- Contemporaries.

Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu.

Straus, Geneviève, 1849-1926.

Chevigné, Laure de, 1859-1936.

Greffulhe, Elisabeth, comtesse, 1860-1952.

Women -- France -- Paris -- Biography.

Aristocracy (Social class) -- France -- Paris -- Biography.

Paris (France) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century.

Paris (France) -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.

9780307961785 (hardcover) :

0307961788 (hardcover)

715 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), color map ; 25 cm

Overture : like a swan -- Part one. Rara avis (June 2, 1885) ; Leitmotif : pretty birds ; My Don Giovanni, my Faust ; The kingdom of shadows ; Habanera : oiseaux rebelles ; Bohemia's child ; The fall and the rise ; Good for the goose ; Improvisation : trills and feathers ; The art of being seen ; Bagatelle : birdsong ; Prince Charming ; Paris high and low ; A modern-day Aramis ; Chorale : lovebirds ; The lunatic, the lover, and the poet ; Lame ducks -- Part two. Variations : caged birds ; Kisses never given ; Fodder for sonnets ; Birds of paradise ; The picture of Mme Bizet ; Cadenza : painters, writers, parrots, prophets ; Elegance for beginners ; Our heart ; Pavane : pair-bonding ; In which Proust is disappointed ; Lament : oiseaux tristes ; Dead love, still undying ; The replacements ; Goddesses and monsters ; So long as the gesture is beautiful ; Sovereigns of transitory things (May 30, 1894) ; Rondo : the real king of birds, or Vive le roitelet ; Coda : Swan song -- Appendix A. Author's note ; Appendix B. Timeline of political régime changes in France, 1792-1870 ; Appendix C. Proust as social columnist.

"A brilliant look at the glittering, decadent world of turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women who inspired the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes, the epitome of high-born glamour, in Marcel Proust's great novel, In Search of Lost Time. Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Elisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Comtesse Greffulhe, were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber writes, 'transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style.' All of them were stifled in loveless marriages and, between the 1870s and 1890s, sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves as icons. Weber offers a stunningly intimate look at the illicit passion, secret heartbreak, and fierce, indomitable ambition that lay behind her heroines' exquisite public facades. At their fabled salons, they inspired and championed the creativity of several generations of well-known writers, artists, composers, designers, and journalists who regarded them with boundless fascination and longing. Against a rich and vivid cultural and historical backdrop--the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, Henri V's court in exile, and the first stirrings of anti-Semitism before the Dreyfus affair--Weber takes the reader into the daily lives of these three seductive women as they attend the ritualized masked balls, formal dinners, nights at the opera and theater, hunts, and royal fêtes. Proust would worship them from afar as a young man in the 1890s and would later meet them, gathering material to create his famous composite character. Drawing extensively on private family archives, Weber has discovered new material as well as two unknown articles by Proust. A beautifully written tour de force of storytelling and scholarship, Proust's Duchess is a sweeping and enthralling narrative, an unforgettable saga of the end of an era: the epic decline and fall of a rarefied aristocratic ideal and the last gasp of the pageantry and privilege of an elite society soon to be lost forever in the trenches of World War I."--Dust jacket.

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