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

“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.

A friend recommended this to me. Having never read Proust, I hesitated, but glad I kept going as this is a really interesting book. The characters come to life, and I learned a lot. Also LOL several times as the author has a great sense of humor. Thoroughly enjoyable!

"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.

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.

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.

The book weighs a ton . Marvelously written .

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...

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