Marcel Proust: A Biography

MARCEL PROUST
figure seemed to coil about her parasol like a snake round a rod,
and whose reticule was carried by a little negro page in red satin.
She was the Princesse de Sagan, and he made her Mme de
Villeparisis's friend the Princesse de Luxembourg. Soon, in a
gown of a bygone, Second Empire elegance, the Princesse toiled
up the hill to Les F remonts from her Villa Persane with her great
friend the Marquise de Galliffet, who was a first cousin of Mme
Baigneres. Both ladies were daughters of Second Empire financiers
(the Princesse was a Seilliere, the Marquise a Laffitte), separated
from their husbands, and continuing in their middle fifties to lead
lives of assiduous gallantry. We shall meet them again three
chapters later, but may note meanwhile that another original of the
Princesse de Luxembourg was Princesse Alice of Monaco, and
that in A fa Recherche the Luxembourgs as a family correspond to
the royal house of Monaco.
Another visitor to Les Fremonts was the painter Jacques Emile
Blanche, who came over from his parents' summer villa at Dieppe,
where his friends among the English colony included Sickert,
Beardsley, Whistler, Conder and Wilde. Blanche was ten years
older than Proust, and had left Condorcet, where he had studied
English under Mallarme and philosophy under Victor Brochard
(the chief original of Brichot), two years before Proust's arrival.
They had likewise failed to meet at Auteuil, although the famous
private lunatic asylum kept by Dr Antoine Blanche was only a
few yards from Louis Weil's villa; and their paths had first crossed
earlier in 1891 at the salons of Mme Straus, Princesse Mathilde
and Mme Baigneres. Blanche's parents were wealthy-"We have
a hundred thousand francs a year, not counting our dear lunatics,"
his mother would say complacently. He was a burly, heavy-
featured young man, sharp-tongued and vindictive, a talented and
delightful painter, and destined later to be an almost equally
brilliant writer; his work in both fields has lived. On 1 October at
Les F remonts, during the hour before dinner, he made a pencil
sketch for the well-known poriIait of Proust which he painted
in his studio at Auteuil during the mornings of the following
spring, and exhibited in the Salon des Artistes Fran!Jllis of 1893.
After the sittings they would lunch with Dr Blanche, who from
professional habit, and long familiarity with madmen of genius-
Maupassant at this time was one of his inmates-would cry:
"Now, Jacques, you must try not to upset him-pay no attention,