MARCEL PROUSTpeeps benevolently through the curtains at Odette's guests.^1
There is, indeed, a distinct likeness between his photographs and
those of Charles Haas, the chief original of Swann. Both are
dressed with the same exquisite, imperceptible elegance; their
features are whimsical and Jewish; but M. Straus lacks the
melancholy, puzzled look ofM. Haas. Sometimes, however, when
he asked his guests "Have you heard Genevieve's latest?" he
resembled for a moment the Duc de Guermantes saying the same
of his wife Oriane; and he would go on to explain, like the Duke,
that his wife's intelligence was admirable not so much for its wit
as for its sound common sense. He was an exceedingly but quite
unjustifiably jealous husband.
Mme Straus's wit is important, for Proust made it his chief
model for the celebrated 'Guermantes wit'. Some of her sayings
are repeated as chestnuts to this day, though their authorship is
forgotten. It was she who said: "I was just about to say the same
myself," when her former music-teacher Gounod remarked at a
performance of Massenet's Hirodiade that the passage they had
just heard was "perfectly octagonal"; or "I'd no idea you had
any," when tlle dramatist Pailleron, after reviling her friend Louis
Ganderax for a hostile article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, said:
"And now you can have your revenge on my friends." When it
was rumoured that the lady novelist Marcelle Tinayre was to be
given the cross of the Legion d'Honneur, she commented: "A
woman's breast was never meant to be honoured." Of a gentle-
man who pursued her with unwarranted optimism, she said:
"Poor Achille, it would be so much less trouble to make him
happy than it is to make him unhappy." Of her florist, who had
the same name as the general who shouted "Merde" when invited
to surrender at the Battle of Waterloo-so that the word was ever
afterwards known euphemistically as 'Ie mot de Camhronne' -she
remarked, "She is so nicely spoken that she calls herself Cam-
bronne." The Duchesse de Guermantes, then Princesse des
Laumes, makes a similar joke on the name of Mme de Cambremer
at Mme de Saint-Euverte's party.2 When she uttered, or urged by
her husband repeated her 'latest' , her face was that of the Duchesse
inviting and sharing the hearer's amusement. It was Mme Straus
who once put on black shoes instead of red when dressing for a
fancy-dress ball, and like the Duchesse was compelled by her
'1,599 '1,)4'