THE STUDENT IN SOCIETY 107part of her evenings, and saw to it that many a great artist was
first launched in Paris by performing to the nobility in her house.
She insisted on absolute silence during a recital, and would shout
across the studio to suppress any offender; but as no memorialist
has thought her own behaviour under the influence of music
worthy of special attention, it is perhaps unlikely that she gave
way to the pantomime of intense emotion attributed to Mme
Verdurin. Indeed, if any incident in A fa Recherche resembles a
musical evening at Madeleine Lemaire's, it is rather the soiree at
Mme de Saint-Euverte's in Du CiJte de chet Swann than any
Wednesday of Mme Verdurin's. One of her guests, Frederic de
Madrazo, known as 'Coco' to his friends, was an original of the
sculptor Ski, the dabbler in all the arts, at Mme Verdurin's. Coco
composed a little and sang a little, both very badly, and painted,
rather better, a great deal: "This dear young man is so artissstu,"
Mme Lemaire would coo. He was a lifelong friend of Proust and
of many friends of Proust: so the unsympathetic character of Ski
seems to have had a more sympathetic original.
If a musical evening at Mme Lemaire's was very like the 'crush'
at Mme de Saint-Euverte's, where Swann heard the Vinteuil
Sonata for the second time, it is none the less certain that the chief
original of that hapless lady was Marquise Diane de Saint-Paul.
Like Mme de Saint-Euverte she was of excellent family, being
born a F eydeau de Brou, and her company was as aristocratic as
she pleased: it must be remembered that Mme de Saint-Euverte's
salon was attended by the Duchesse, Breaute, Swann and the rest
of the Guermantes set, and it was only M. de Charlus who
pretended, for his own sadistic pleasure, that her house was no
better than a privy.1 Mme de Saint-Paul gave concerts at which the
greatest artists of the day performed, and dinners for academicians
at which the food was not infrequently provided by the guests:
"They bring me flowers, so why shouldn't they bring pheasants?"
she said. Her biting tongue and her brilliance as a pianist were
expressed in her nickname, the Serpent a Sonates, or sonata-snake
-a pun which Proust gave to Swann's rival Forcheville, who had
to explain it to the baffled Cottard.^2 Proust gave Mme de Saint-
Euverte the forename, Diane, of her original, and took her sur-
name from the Rue Saint-Em·erte near his lodgings at Orleans
1 II,7 00
a I, 163. Serpent ci sonnettes, of course, means 'rattlesnake'.