86 MARCEL PROUST
ranch in rhe Andes; her farher, an engineer, died when she was
still a child, and her morher, after trying in vain to live by giving
piano-lessons, brought her up as a courtesan. Her lovers were
qUite as distinguished as rhe Grand Duke who supplied rhe
cigarettes of Uncle Adolphe's lady in pink. They included rhe
Duc d'Orleans, rhe King of Greece, Karageorgevitch, pretender
to rhe Serbian rhrone, said to be rhe only man she really loved,
Prince Karl Egon von Furstenberg, the financier Raphael
Bischoffsheim, and Michael Herbert, a secretary at rhe English
embassy in Paris.l Albert Flamenr2 called her 'rheeducator of
dukes', and her lessons included not only rhe art of love but rhe
correct use of language. Vicomte Charles de la Rochefoucauld
wrote to her from Biarritz, wirh unconscious derangement of
epithets: 'We're having torrential heat here,' to which she replied
by return of post: 'The rain here has been positively torrid.'
"He's got blue blood, all right," she would remark, "I can't even
teach him to spell-and as for his French ... !" Like Odette she
lived in a little house in rhe Rue La Perouse, with a back-entrance
on rhe Rue Dumont d'Urville.
When Proust first met her, in rhe autumn of [888, she was
thirty-seven and he was seventeen: she was now just forty. She
was plump but wasp-waisted,3 and wore an extremely low
decolletee wirh festoons of pearls dangling, rhree a side, from
what little of her bosom was hidden from view. Her hair was
ash-blonde, tied wirh a pink ribbon; her eyes were black, and
when she was excited tended to open too wide-"I have almond
eyes, but in rhe wrong direction," she would say wirh a laugh.
She owned a large collection of china, and added Proust to it,
calling him 'my little porcelain psychologist'. He replied by
1 Michael Herbert, brother of Lord Pembroke and Lady Lonsdale, was
astonished to find that he was not asked to contribute to her expenses, which
were looked after by M. Bischoffsheim. "An English girl wouldn't have been
satisfied with a banker," he declared admiringly.
2: He saw her riding in the Bois, stin beautiful, on the morning of .3 April
1899, and recorded the fact in his diary, adding: 'A handsome woman looks
still more graceful on horseback.'
3 As a photograph of this period shows. In a later photograph she is
painfully haggard and thin, while the festoons of pearls have increased to
five a side. But in earlier photographs she is exceedingly pretty and fluffy,
though quite un-mysterious and not in the least like Botticelli's fresco of
Jethro'S daughter, to which Swann compared Odette.