THE STUDENT IN SOCIETY lOSSwann and Odette.! Madeleine, her daughter by the Baron de
Pierrebourg, married in 1910 Comte Georges de Lauris, a member
of the group of young noblemen, the collective originals of Saint-
Loup, whom Proust was to meet in the early 19oos. Perhaps this
union helped to suggest the marriage of Odette's daughter and
Saint-Loup.
The last of Proust's chief hostesses at this time was Mme
Madeleine Lemaire. She conducted the most brilliant and crowded
of the bourgeois salons, the only one where it was possible to
meet in large numbers all but the most exclusive of the nobility.
She began with a few fellow-artists, Puvis de Chavannes, Bonnat,
Detaille, Georges Clairin, and the talented genre painter Jean
Beraud, whose pictures of social life in clubs, soirees, the Opera
and the Bois are nowadays appreciated anew after fifty years of
oblivion, and contributed to the paintings by Elstir on similar
themes. But soon the Faubourg Saint-Germain arrived, because
it was so delightful to meet artists, and then still more artists,
because it was so delightful to meet the Faubourg. On Tuesdays
from April to June her exiguous house at 31 Rue de Monceau was
crowded to suffocation. The neighbouring streets were obstructed
with waiting carriages, and ever more drew up, emitting
duchesses and countesses with their consorts, the La Roche-
foucaulds, Uzes's, Luynes's, Haussonvilles, Chevignes,
Greffuhles. Thanks to some long-forgotten excuse for violating
the building laws of Paris, Mme Lemaire's little house encroached
upon the pavement far beyond its larger neighbours; but the
passer-by, irritated here by being pushed into the gutter, would
be consoled by the rural scent of the lilacs in her garden. Her
receptions were held in a glass-roofed studio-annexe, which
despite its huge size rapidly became overcrowded. A late-coming
duchess might not only fail to find a seat, amid her hostess's cries
of "A chair for Mme la Duchesse I" but even be forced out into
the garden. There, pale in the light of lamps inside and street-
lamps outside, hung the clusters of flowering lilac; and over the
wall and across the street the dim masses of trees in Prince
1 When Hervieu left, on days when Mme de Pierrebourg had company,
she would see him to the door of her drawing-room and say, in the manner
of Mme de Villeparisis with M. de Norpois: "You know the way, don't
you?" Hervieu indeed knew the way, for she lived at I his Avenue du Bois,
and his own house was at NO.7.