THE STUDENT IN SOCIETY 93of the Second Empire: we have a glimpse of him in December
1863, playing in private theatricals at the Duc de Mouchy's
country house, along with the Galliffets, the Pourtales's, Gaston
de Saint-Maurice, and other persons fashionable in their day. In
1868 Haas appears in Tissot's famous painting of the balcony of
the Club in the Rue Royale,! with the Prince de Polignac and
Saint-Maurice again ('the only two people in the picture, besides
Haas, whom I knew personally,' Proust told Paul Brach in 1922),
the Marquis's du Lau and de Ganay, General de Galliffet and
others. He is tall and svelte, wise, sad and arrogant; he cocks his
walking-cane on his right shoulder; he lolls astride in the french
window of the balcony, ineffably elegant in grey top-hat and
striped trousers. His hair was frizzled and reddish, and later as it
receded turned pepper-and-salt colour. He had arched, amused
but puzzled eyebrows, an upturned moustache into which he
faintly smiled, and his nose, people would say, was hardly curved
at all; but in his last days, when his skin stretched over it like
parchment and his ancestry reappeared, it was found, like Swann's
in his last illness, to be enormously hooked. He died in July 1902.
Haas frequented Mme Straus's salon during the late 1880s and
early '90S, and Proust probably met him there. But he must also
have seen him as the guest of several other hostesses: the Princesse
Mathilde in the early '90S, and later, when Proust had succeeded
in penetrating to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the Princesse de
Polignac, Comtesse Rosa de FitzJames, and Comtesse Greffulhe.
Haas had met Mme Greffulhe's cousin Robert de Montesquiou as
early as 1871, and was, we are told 'the darling of her coterie in
the Rue d'Astorg'. Correspondingly in Proust's novel Swann is
the intimate friend of the Duchesse de Guermantes, and one of
the earliest friends of her cousin, the Baron de Charlus. Like
Swann, Haas was also a favourite companion of Edward VII as. Prince of Wales and of the Orleanist pretender to the throne of
France, the Comte de Paris, who lived in exile at Twickenham.
Apart from social life, his chief interests were woman-chasing
and Italian painting, on both of which subjects he was regarded
1 This club, although Saint-Loup (I, 772) thought Bloch senior might
possibly belong to it ('his family considered it "lowering", and he knew
several Israelites had been admitted'), was second only to the Jockey. The
Cercle Agricole and Cercle de I'Union came next, and some of the best
people like~ to belong to all four, as did Swann (III, 199).