MARCEL PROUSTcontributors for the ruthlessness of his proof-corrections,
"pursuing hiatuses," said Anatole France, "into the very interior
of words"; and Jules Renard pretended that when frogs croaked
in lily-ponds they were only repeating: "Ganderax! Ganderax!"
One of her humbler friends was a gentle and melancholy musician
named Ernest Guiraud, who once uttered a remark which in A fa
Recherche is made to the Narrator's grandmother.l Mme Straus
had good-naturedly asked him to bring his illegitimate daughter
to call on her. "Does she take after her mother?" she asked, and
the naIve father replied: "I don't know, I never saw her dear
mother without her hat on."
Among her nobler guests was Prince Auguste d' Arenherg,
who appears in Odette's salon as the Prince d' Agrigente: Mme
Straus had intrigued with her friends among the republican
politicians to have him appointed president of the administrative
council of the Suez Canal. Comte Othenin d'Haussonville would
be there, absent-mindedly twirling his monocle and following a
train of thought usually connected with his ancestress Madame de
Stael, whose life he was exhuming from the archives at Cop pet.
Others included Princesse Mathilde, Louis de Turenne, and
several English friends, Lord Lytton, the English ambassador,
Lady de Grey, later Marchioness of Ripon, and Reggie Lister.
But the three who most concern Proust and his novel were the
Comtesse de Chevigne, Comtesse Greffulhe and Charles Haas.
The first became the Duchesse de Guermantes, the second
contributed to both the Duchesse and the Princesse de Guer-
mantes, and the last was Charles Swann himself. At that time,
however, Proust could only admire the twO ladies from afar: to
be invited with a great lady, he found, was not the same as being
invited by her. But Haas, with whom he was never to become
personally intimate, but who meant so much to his novel and his
life, must be examined immediately.
Charles Haas was, as he himself used ironically to say, "the
only Jew ever to be accepted by Parisian society without being
immensely rich." He was, however, far from poor, for his father,
a stockbroker, had left him a comfortable fortune. His gallantry
in the Franco-Prussian war won him the entry to the exclusive
Jockey Club, of which the only other members of his race were
the Rothschilds. Earlier still he had moved in the court society
1 I, 859