904 MARCEL PROUST
as a connoisseur. Once Saint-Maurice showed him a new acquisi-
tion, a horrible, blackened Italian daub, and proudly asked:
"What do you think it isr" "A joke in rather poor taste," replied
Haas, as did Swann to the Duc de Guermantes when shown his
new 'Velasquez'.!
In some respects Swann is to be differentiated from Haas. As
we have seen, Swann at Combray was suggested by a family
friend at Illiers. There is no evidence that Haas was acquainted
with the chief original of Odette, Laure Hayman, who was, how-
ever, so popular with his fellow-clubmen. It is doubtful whether
he knew, as Swann knew Uncle Adolphe, Proust's great-uncle
Louis Weil.^2 Haas's Odette was a Spanish lady of noble birth
from whom he had a daughter, who is said to be still living; but
he never married. In the Dreyfus Affair Swann had the loyalty
and courage to tum from those of his old friends who became
anti-Dreyfusards; but Haas, we are told by Jacques Emile Blanche,
joined his nationalist fellow-members of the Jockey Club in
cutting General de Galliffet when he became war minister in the
revisionist government of Waldeck-Rousseau. '
In his novel Proust proclaimed Swann's origin in the famous
apostrophe to 'dear Charles Swann, whom I knew when I was
still so young and you were near the grave-it is because he
whom you must have thought a silly young man has made you
the hero of his volumes that people begin to talk of you again,
and that your name will perhaps live,' and in the allusion which
follows to Haas's presence in Tissot's painting.^3 He also character-
istically gave the clue to their identity, as he did with so many of
the people in A fa Recherche, by unobtrusively juxtaposing the
name of the character with that of the original: Swann, he tells us,
wears a grey top-hat of a shape which Delion makes only for him
and Charles Haas.^4 Those who had known Haas immediately
recognised him in Swann, whom Mme Straus insisted on calJ.ing
Swann-Haas. 'What, you recognised Haasr' Proust wrote to
Gabriel Astruc. Some, including Montesquiou, thought they
1 II, ,80
2 The prevalent idea that he did seems to rest solely on a general remark
by Robert de Billy, that in his belief Proust learned from Louis Wei! 'of the
structure of Jewish society and of the existence of Haas' (Billy,64).
8 TIl, 200
4 II, 579