Caroline Weber is a Proust scholar, a professor of French and comparative literature at Barnard, and the author of the excellent Proust's Duchess, a group biography of the women who inspired the great novelist to create the Duchesse de Guermantes for his masterwork In Search of Lost Time. We spoke to her about the book and its unmatched eye for the threads in the fabric of human life (a transcript of the podcast is below). And if you haven’t subscribed already to WHY THE CLASSICS? you should click here — that way you’ll never miss our newsletter, hitting inboxes every Thursday.
OR: To start with, what prompted you to write a history of these women who inspired this seemingly — well, I don't want to say immortal, but seemingly very, very long-lived literary portrait?
Weber: I think what inspired me was simply the fact that about 10 years ago, I went back and reread In Search of Lost Time for the first time since graduate school, maybe 15 years before that. And I was, at the time, working with a friend of mine who is a novelist in Paris on a profile that I was writing about her for the New York Times Book Review. Her name is Cécile David-Weill and her novel is called The Suitors.
And the big question that was interesting people in both the French and the American media, at the time, was the real identity of several characters presented in the novel. And so while I was thinking through with Cécile how her novel could be read as a roman à clef, what the real life inspirations of that book were, I started rereading Proust and realized I could ask a lot of those same questions about his novel.
And when I reread that novel, thinking about the phenomenon of the roman à clef and real life inspiration, I became intrigued by different details of the Duchesse de Guermantes' characterization that didn't seem necessarily to cohere into one person. And so I thought I would start doing some research on Proust's real life inspirations and found indeed that the Duchesse was modeled on three quite different women.
And that just seemed like a rich area for exploration, how three very distinct society mavens from late 19th/early 20th Century Paris inspired Proust to create this one character who became a catchall for aristocratic femininity.
OR: Can you talk a bit about these three separate women and how Proust comes to decide to amalgamate them?
Weber: Proust made his way into aristocratic society through the first of the three women who inspired the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes and her name was Geneviève Straus and like Proust, she was an outsider to the aristocracy, which was traditionally a hereditary class dating back to the Middle Ages where people were Catholic. They didn't work for a living, they inherited property. Landed gentry. Geneviève, like Proust, was from the urban Jewish-Parisian bourgeoisie, but she was notoriously or famously charming, witty, fascinating and as a result, she found herself an honorary member of aristocratic society during Proust's lifetime.
She happened to be both the mother and the aunt of two boys whom Proust idolized in high school and who were his schoolmates. And so in his unhappy or luckless attempt to seduce either or both of those boys — who weren't gay, as Proust was — Proust started hanging out a lot at Geneviève's salon.
And it was there that he got his first taste of aristocratic society and started meeting some of the other people who would inspire characters in his fictional portrayal of that world. Geneviève was notable, in particular I think, for members of aristocracy, because she had a lot of celebrity art world connections and performing arts connections.
Her father was an opera composer called Fromental Halevy, who's largely forgotten today, but whose opera from the 1830’s La Juive, the Jewess. It was the most performed opera of the 19th Century anywhere in the world. And when he died, he got a state funeral, thousands of people followed his coffin through the streets of Paris.
And before he died, he had played host to all of the dignitaries of the Parisian arts and letters. So Geneviève essentially grew up with them. Charles Gounod was her piano teacher; Edgar Degas was a regular family friend, calling at their house all the time. And she continued that lifestyle when she grew up by marrying her father's most promising pupil at the Paris Conservatoire, an at-the-time unknown composer named Georges Bizet.
She inspired, so she was for a long time known as Geneviève Bizet and then when Bizet died tragically and very suddenly after the critical failure of his masterpiece, Carmen, where she had inspired, in fact, the main character, the titular character of that opera, Geneviève was around to absorb all of the posthumous celebrity that then got stirred up when people started realizing after Bizet's death that Carmen was a masterpiece.
So she paraded around Paris in widow's weeds for about six years after his death, pointedly placed herself in the front row at all revivals of his work. And she became the celebrity associated with Bizet that Georges Bizet himself never was during her lifetime.
By the time Proust met her, she had remarried, for security and probably for the money a bit, an otherwise unremarkable Jewish lawyer named Émile Straus whose only real claim to fame and his apparently key attraction for Geneviève was that he was believed to be an illegitimate son of Baron James de Rothschild, one of the richest men in the world.
So they had this very luxurious, very elegant salon that gathered at Geneviève's apartment, which was very close to the Prousts' on the right bank of Paris, on Sundays. And it was there that Proust first started meeting all these aristocrats who came to the salon because they were fascinated to meet the widow Bizet.
The second person who inspired Proust was a woman he met in Geneviève Straus's salon. Her name was Laura de Chevigné. She was, if not properly beautiful, a very distinguished and patrician looking blue-eyed blonde, and Proust essentially borrowed her physical traits wholesale for his characterization of the Duchesse de Guermantes.
She had a few titles to notoriety in aristocratic society at that time. One was that she was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade: he was her great grandfather. And that was shocking in an age which corresponded to the Victorian age in England.
Laura proudly proclaimed and reminded everyone all the time of her descendence from this man who had written some of the most pornographic fiction ever to exist in the French literary canon. Laura proudly reminded everyone of her descendence from this scandalous man.
And then she also proudly reminded everyone of the fact that in the very early years of her marriage, when she was maybe 19 to 23. She and her husband, whom she had married also essentially like Geneviève with Émile Straus, for the convenience of it, for the sake of being married in a society where it wasn't really an option for women to stay single, a guy called Adhéaume de Chevigné who was a courtier at the tiny and very depressing court of the last French Bourbon pretender to the throne in exile in Austria. It was a tiny little grim, depressing castle. Laura, who was a sardonic wit, termed it the “kingdom of shadows.”
The last Bourbon heir to the throne was this sad, morbidly obese man called the Count de Chambord, whose family had been exiled from France since the 1830’s. And by the time Laura got there in the late 1870’s, it was clear that he was never going to take back the throne, but he lived with this miniature retinue of people who were loyal to the idea of the Bourbon throne and carried out every day all the empty ritual that had been full of meaning in the age of his ancestor, Louis XIV.
So when he died and there was no direct Bourbon heir left to the French throne, Laura moved back to Paris with her husband and promptly turned herself into a mythical character as the one who had lived at this last, glorious, grand, and fascinating Bourbon court.
It was anything but, and yet Laura essentially branded herself as a royal best friend and as somebody who had this incredible and thrilling and unusual proximity to royal majesty and glory.
And then the third of the three women who inspired Proust was a woman called the Comtesse Greffulhe, Elizabeth Greffulhe, who was born to an aristocratic family in Belgium (although her mother was from the French aristocracy). She married one of the richest men in the French nobility in Paris and was known in Paris and to Proust, who borrowed this phrase for his Duchesse de Guermantes, as "the most beautiful, the richest, and the most cheated on woman in Paris."
Her husband had, I think, 300-some mistresses who came out of the woodwork when he died in the 1930’s with these love documents he had forced them to sign saying that they would love him till death and that in his eyes, they were the real countess Greffulhe.
These women came forward trying to get a part of his massive fortune, but it was a testament to something that Elizabeth and Parisian society, as a whole knew all along, which was that her husband basically loved anyone in Paris and everyone in Paris except for her. And she was tragically beautiful, artistic, sensitive, and very difficult to get access to. She was extremely exclusive in her social circles and really preferred only to socialize with members of the very highest nobility and members of European royalty from throughout Europe.
And so she was the one that was hardest for Proust to get to meet. And my book ends with him finally getting to meet her for the first time in 1894, even though he's been fascinated with her for most of his adolescence and young adulthood.
So that's the trio and their characteristics were very recognizable to Parisian readers of Proust's generation. His contemporaries would immediately recognize who was "the most beautiful, the richest, and the most cheated-on woman in Paris," who was the one who had been a courtier to the Count de Chambord and had a sassy, sometimes slightly off-color sense of humor, who had an artistic background where she was associated with musical theater and opera and contemporary literature. So Proust took the elements that he liked in each of these women and merged them in the figure of the Duchesse de Guermantes.
OR: How did you arrive at Proust as a more general subject and related? What is it like to read him as it were professionally? And does that differ greatly from reading him personally as it were? How do those two methods of reading play into, and maybe even against each other for you?
Weber: Oh, that's such a great question. And not one I think that I've thought a lot about, for the simple reason that I became a French literature professor, because I liked reading French literature. So, anytime I'm reading something, even if it "counts for my profession," I'm basically doing it because I enjoy it, because I'm interested in it.
But you're right to say, nevertheless, that the work of reading a novel and reading about a novelist in order to write a book about them can be different than just the experience of picking up a great novel like In Search of Lost Time is, and savoring the beauty and laughing at the wit and appreciating the wisdom.
So I think as I mentioned before, I came to Proust again some 10 years ago because I was really thinking a lot about this very French genre of the roman à clef, the key novel, the novel where it's believed that if the reader just knows how to unlock the mystery of the novel, the real identities of the fictional characters can be exposed.
This was a genre that went back to the court of Louis XIV, when people enjoyed writing sometimes somewhat scandalous novels about the exploits of the men and women of the court, but nominally disguised them as fictional characters in order not to get in trouble with the King. And it's a genre that became really associated as a result with French aristocratic society and French high society.
So it was really with that hat that I started reading Proust again and the downside of that reading is of course, that one doesn't get to attend to at least in one's writing all of the details of the novel that are fun or funny or beautiful or fascinating that don't really fit one's lens of research. There are many, many, many passages and characters in Proust's book that I love, but I couldn't really write about them because they didn't have much, if anything to do with the central question of, How did he create the Duchesse de Guermantes.
OR: When you first encountered the book, what was it like? What is your view of it? How do you read its architecture and its themes and its meaning, I guess, to use a somewhat old-fashioned word?
Weber: You're right. That the idea of a book's meaning is I think perceived as somewhat old fashioned in literary/critical circles in which I was trained and in which I work. And yet, when I approach the book, when I read it, as I say, for me, my professional reading is always also a matter of personal enjoyment and vice versa.
It really is the non-scholarly aspects of the book and its interpretation that grab me. I mean, I think there's a beautiful line that Proust uses towards the very end of the novel where he says, "I wanted my book, if I would be able to write it," because throughout the course of the book, the narrator of the book Marcel is trying to figure out what to do with his life, “to be for people a kind of a pair of glasses or a lens through which they could read, not my life, but their own." And for me, that's one of the key sentences in the novel to explain its enduring appeal and to explain the hold that it's had on so many readers, whether they read it in French or in translation, whether they read it in Proust's time or in our own.
This idea that the experiences that he describes, even though they're all organized around a bourgeois young man named Marcel in late 19th-Century Paris have an almost uncannily universal feeling to them. So feelings of loss, feelings of not belonging, feelings of getting older and seeing the world change, feelings of falling in love with someone who's never going to love you back, feelings of suddenly being indifferent to the person that you used to love madly many years ago, all of these emotions and experiences and perspectives are so eloquently and compellingly rendered by Proust in his prose that it starts to feel when you're reading the novel like you're reading the story of your own life.
And I think that's what I appreciate the most about it, even though again, when I'm reading for my professional purposes, I'm really reading for social and cultural history in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in Paris, there's the parallel me, who's a human being in the world in 21st-Century America, who's saying, "Oh yes, that's exactly how it felt to fall in love for the first time and then have one's heart broken. That just how it felt to be at a party where everybody was horrible. But I was secretly convinced that maybe the reason the party was horrible was that I was there. And if I weren't there, everybody else would be much wittier and more interesting than they were in my presence."
OR: Do you have a favorite moment? Is there a supreme moment in the book for you?
Weber: A lot of the moments that I really appreciate the most are moments that are many comedies of manners, where Proust will, even though the perspective of the novel is ostensibly anchored in this first person, narrator named Marcel who has a bourgeois family, who like Proust has enough money that he doesn't have to work for a living, who like Proust loves to read and loves the arts and loves dreaming, and is fascinated from afar by characters in society like the Duchesse de Guermantes.
And yet at the same time, this narrator has this uncanny ability to penetrate into the minds of characters who he never even talks to and tell you what they're thinking. And a lot of those moments are really hilarious. So there's one moment early on in the novel, in volume one, Swann's Way, where the narrator is describing a party in high society that he hasn't even attended, but he goes around the room and essentially tells you what the different people sitting and listening to this piano recital, which is the centerpiece of the party are thinking while the music is playing.
And there's a one woman who's sitting there, very irritated with the fact that people at the party don't seem to understand that she's related to the Guermantes and that this is actually her great source of glory and pride, Proust writes, but also her source of frustration and shame because the Guermantes themselves are so grand that they snub her all the time in society.
And then Proust describes how physically, while she's thinking about the fact that she's proud of being related to the Guermantes, but she's humiliated for always being snubbed by them, she puffs out her chest and throws back her shoulders. And contorts her neck in such a way that her head is jutting out. And Proust then says, "Kind of like a pheasant who had been shot and then rearranged on a table as the centerpiece of a game dinner."
And it's just such perfect conceit with which to conclude this little miniature psychological portrait of this proud, silly, arrogant woman. So I love little moments like that throughout the novel. And then some of the big moments are unbelievable as well.
The hardback cover of my book Proust's Duchess has a cover that I didn't choose and wasn't responsible for, but I really loved it because the jacket designer chose the image of a red shoe that had belonged to the Comtesse Greffulhe and as a Proust reader as you must know the vignette of the red shoes.
OR: Yes, absolutely.
Weber: So this moment where Swann — who is like the narrator not born into aristocratic society; he's Jewish, he's from the moneyed Parisian bourgeoisie, but he's got this honorary membership in that world — and he is supposedly the best friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes. He comes over to her house one night in Paris, and the narrator just happens to be standing around and witnesses this scene where he tells her that he's dying and he only has a few months left to live.
And the Duchesse doesn't know how to react to this news because she's on her way out to a party that she and her husband really don't want to be late for. And so she says, "Oh, oh, I'm so sorry. We must run, you and I will discuss this later, but I'm sure you'll outlive us all."
It's like a sucker punch. You feel for this character Swann, who's just told his best friend he's dying and she has no time to talk to him about it.
Until she then realizes that she's wearing black shoes with a red dress — or more precisely her husband recognizes this and says, "Oh, it's horrible. Black shoes with a red dress, it's so tacky. You must go and change into red shoes right now."
And even they've just told Swan they really can't stay another second because they have to go to this party. They suddenly have all the time in the world for her to change her shoes. And so it's this moment of just an utter condemnation of the superficiality and the artifice and the falsity of high society friendships, which are the thing that Swann has basically given his life to cultivating. So the scene of the red shoes is one that is notorious in association with the characterization of the Duchesse de Guermantes.
And there's some biographical evidence to support the idea that Proust actually witnessed something like this happening with Geneviève Straus, whose husband was infamously bossy and domineering, and who did once in the early 1890’s, when Proust was in his early twenties, attend a ball in a red dress with a red and black accessories and had potentially changed into red shoes based on a letter that she and Proust or letters that she and Proust exchanged about that incident much later.
But it is one of those scenes that stays with you. Friends of mine who love the novel and who know the novel well, almost all said to me, when I first mentioned to them that I was writing a book about the real characters who inspired the Duchesse de Guermantes, "Oh my God. What about the red shoes?"
So that's a haunting one and I was really happy that the red shoe wound up on the cover of the book. Even if some readers who weren't maybe as much Proust's aficionados as they were just interested in French history would send me these messages on Instagram and on e-mail saying, "Why did you take an image from The Wizard of Oz and put it on the cover?"
OR: On the subject of hidden identities, Swann also has something of a real-world inspiration, does he not?
Weber: Absolutely. It's one of the few identities that Proust himself was actually willing to cop to when he was alive.
Proust acknowledged in some of his correspondence that he had drawn as he put it Swann on the basis of a real life, character, whom he met in Geneviève Straus' salon, who was called Charles Haas. Haas, like Swann, was a debonair man of the world. He had enough independent wealth that he didn't have to work for a living; he was from the refined Parisian-Jewish bourgeoisie.
And yet he found himself accepted by the predominantly Catholic hereditary aristocratic world that comprised high society in Paris at that time. And Geneviève herself recognized the similarities enough that in her correspondence with Marcel Proust, she referred to the character of Swann as Swann-Haas, I think, and it leads to an incredible moment in the novel. I think it's in maybe volume five where Swann dies. And we've been told in volume three that he's dying, in this heartbreaking scene of the red shoes. He finally dies in volume five and the obituary that Proust inserts into the novel is largely lifted directly from the real obituary that ran when Charles Haas died in the early 1900’s.
So the connections to actual lived experience and actual flesh and blood human beings was quite pronounced at that time. Although, unlike the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes with whom Proust became acquainted, and in the case of Geneviève, really became good friends, Charles Haas never particularly liked Proust and thought of him apparently as a wimp or a little bit of a nincompoop, and Proust gets his revenge by even writing in his novel when Swann dies, he has Marcel break down the fourth wall and say, "And you Charles Swann, you who never had any time for me when I was young, you who thought that I was annoying and a loser, if anybody remembers you in the future, maybe it will be because I wrote about you in this book."
And even though he's using the name Charles Swann, he's on some obvious level, addressing the character of Charles Haas. He even says, "You who posed for this painting by James Tissot that showed all these elegant gentlemen who were members of an exclusive Parisian club on the balcony, you who posed in that painting maybe will only be remembered because of me." And Charles Haas really did pose in a painting by James Tissot called The Circle of the Rue Royale, which shows a dozen gentlemen from Parisian society in the late 1860’s. And Haas is the tall, distinguished-looking redhead with a gray top hat standing at the far right of that group.
So Proust made it quite obvious in that case that he was talking about Haas or that he had, he had looked to Haas as the basis for Swann.
OR: And as it turns out, he was largely correct in his statement. It's amazing how Proust can be at once petty and sublime, but I suppose it's a privilege of all great artists.
Weber: Oh my God, that's the perfect description. I think that's why I love the novel. It's simultaneously petty and sublime.
OR: As a scholar of this subject of French and of Proust, is there a translation that you recommend?
Weber: Oh, I get asked that question a lot. And I always feel a little bit guilty answering it with putative authority only because I, being a French literature scholar, worked from the French version. So I don't spend a lot of time in the translations and I always feel like that sounds terribly pretentious, but it's just a fact of my job that I have to read things in French.
And by the same token, I will say that because I get asked that question a lot and because I have plenty of friends, even not to mention, students who are, expressed to me, an interest in reading Proust, maybe their French isn't up to, or, reading it in the original, I've looked at many of the translations. And the one that I think I've come to favor the most is one by a Proust scholar, an American Proust scholar, whom I really admire called William C. Carter.
He wrote a marvelous, big, authoritative biography of Proust many years ago. And Carter has over the past several years, been working on a correction and an updating and an expansion of the first translation into English of In Search of Lost time by Scott Moncrieff.
Moncrieff who gave the novel a title borrowed from a Shakespeare sonnet, Remembrance of things passed. And those of us who work on the novel really insist on In Search of Lost Time, because that's really what the title actually says and the novel really is all about reconstructing a lost experience through memory and through art. But Carter has been expanding and annotating and correcting some of the mistakes and some of the awkward or infelicitous moments in the Moncrieff translation.
And I really love it because the translation retains its flavor of the early 1900’s. Proust actually read some English, knew some English and liked (supposedly) the title Remembrance of Things Past, even though he knew that it didn't reflect what his title really said. And he liked the Moncrieff translation from what he read of it.
So there is this idea of the authenticity of it for Proust, but where with, a hundred years now of added research and commentary, and the way that the language has evolved, Carter has been able to bring the translation really into the 21st Century.
And he does something that I think is incredibly useful for readers of Proust, which is, he has these columns of footnotes that aren't on the bottom of the pages, but that run alongside, like in a far right column on the right side page and the far left column on the left side page explaining cultural, social, and historical that the novel makes.
So it's enormously helpful if you're not a specialist of late 19th or early 20th Century French history and society to understand how anchored Proust's novel really was.
As you say, there's a very specific situation happening when Marcel goes to the theater and sees an actress performing in a particular play or when the Duchesse de Guermantes and her friends are discussing in somewhat superficial and even maybe idiotic terms, the latest novel or play that everyone is talking about. Carter is able to give information to the reader who's not familiar with those things in this very unobtrusive form: you don't have to flip to the back of the book to see, "Oh, well, well, what was that play about? And why did Proust care about it?"
You get it in this very convenient place, just you let your eyes flick off to the side to take in a little bit of contextual information and then get back to reading Proust.
So I think it's enormously helpful. Carter hasn't finished that work yet. As far as I know, the last I heard, he was just finishing the fourth of the seven volumes. And that's really the one that I would recommend.
I have a great friend now who is reading Proust for the first time, and he's just gotten to the fourth volume and was devastated that he couldn't yet get his hands on the Carter correction when he started reading. And now he keeps calling me and saying, "I need those side footnotes. I need them. Can you tell me about this play? Can you tell me about this political figure?" So that's really, I think the one that I like the best, even though there are artistic merits to all of the translations that I've looked at.
