Chapter 10
THE GUERMANTES WAYF
OR an unbroken period of four years, until he was turned
away by growing ill-health, the stresses of the Dreyfus Case,
and disillusion with the heartlessness of the Guermantes world,
Proust moved with manifold delight in the high society of the
Faubourg Saint-Gennain. In his novel the social experiences of
these years were distilled into three representative functions, the
afternoon at Mme de Villeparisis's, the dinner at the Duchesse de
Guennantes's, and the Princesse de Guennantes's soiree. The
biographer, similarly, must abandon for the space of one chapter
the chronological narrative of days and months; and conversely,
in the description of the persons and groups Proust then en-
countered, he must analyse the chemical compounds of Proust's
imagination into the human elements from which they were
fonned.
The agate-eyed Comtesse Elisabeth Greffulhe, when Proust
met her at Montesquiou's Delafosse fete, was aged thirty-four.
She was the eldest daughter of the Franco-Belgian Prince Joseph
de Caraman-Chimay and his wife Marie de Montesquiou, Robert
de Montesquiou's aunt: Count Robert was therefore her cousin,
just as Charlus was the Duchesse de Guermantes's.l Her family
was short of money, and had been forced to sell the ancestral
Hotel de Chimay on the Quai Malaquais and to marry into
wealth. Her brother, now himself Prince Joseph after their father's
death in I892, had become the husband of an American heiress,
Clara Ward, in 1890; but the princess was soon to raise a deplor-
able scandal by her affair with Jancsi Rigo, the swarthy, pock-
marked violinist in Boldi's gipsy orchestra at Maxim's, with whom
she eloped in I896: "my dishonoured cousin Clara de Chimay,
who has left her husband," says Charlus.^2 Elisabeth's marriage in
1878 to the fabulously wealthy Comte Henri Greffullie was
considered far more satisfactory.
1 urve got furniture that came to Basin from the Montesquious," says
the Duchesse de Guermantes (1, 339). • I, 764