Marcel Proust: A Biography

u6 MARCEL PROUST
Proust: 'but I'm afraid, such is his character,' she wrote, 'he
stopped at the fa~ade and never even tried to penetrate your inner
condition'. He was a short, stout, melancholy young man,
interested in metaphysics and fencing, and an ardent reader of
Greek poets in the original. His father, Hugo Finaly, was a fat
little man with short legs and side-whiskers. Femand Gregh
compared son and father to Hamlet and Polonius; but we may
compare them to Bloch and Bloch senior. Horace Finaly became
Director of the Bank of Paris and the Netherlands, and for a
short period was even Minister of Finance. Proust rather lost
sight of him in later years, and, as we shall see, used other models
for the later aspects of Bloch; but he still found Horace useful
when he needed advice on stocks and shares or a job for some
young protege. Prince Andre Poniatowski, who knew Finaly
many years later, writes rather snobbishly of another character-
istic which he shared with Bloch, 'his utter lack of manners, the
uncontrollable ill-breeding characteristic of the millionaire who
has never ceased to be a clerk'.
Mme Hugo Finaly's uncle, Baron Horace de Landau (1824-
1903), had been the representative of the Rothschilds in the newly
created Kingdom of Italy during the railway boom of the 1860s.
He was an imposing, white-bearded old gentleman, who smoked
an immense pipe that reached nearly to the floor; and Gregh, with
his whim for finding Shakespearean equivalents for members of
the Finaly family, compared him to King Lear. The Baron was
devoted to his niece, to whom he willed his entire fortune, and
had recently made her a present of Mme Baigneres's villa at
Trouville, Les F remonts. He had bought tile property for
200,000 francs from Arthur Baigneres, and rewarded Proust for
his services as intermediary in the deal with a superb walking-
cane, a cross between a sceptre and a sugar-stick. It was said the
Baron had given Les Fremonts to his niece to tease her ('pour la
taquiner') as the outcome of abet. "That's what I call Taquin Ie
Superbe," exclaimed Atthur Baigneres; and Proust treasured the
epigram to give it to the Duchesse de Guermantes on the occasion
of the Baron de Charlus's presenting the draughty chateau of
Breze to his sister Mme de Marsantes.^1 If Hugo and Horace
1 II, 46j. M. Nissim Bernard likewise paid for the Bloch's villa near
Balbec, La Commanderie (I, 774; II, 841), and made Mme Bloch his sale
heir (I, 773).