THE GUERMANTES WAY ISJthe marriages he recommended always failed, the interior decora-
tions looked hideous, and the investments immediately slumped.
Breteuil, too, was a would-be connoisseur of art. Like Turenne
and Haas he was an intimate friend of Edward VII as Prince of
Wales; he had married an American heiress, Miss Garner, and
was often to be seen at Sandringham shoots or Windsor Castle
house-parties. He was witty and deformed, and once in A fa
Recherche Proust maliciously refers to him as Quasimodo de
Breteuil, giving him the name of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.^1
The Marquis was present at the famous dinner-party given by
Mme Greffulhe in 1910 to Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, at
which the only other guest was the fashionable painter Detaille.
In Le Cote de Guermantes this dinner is given by the Duchesse de
Guermantes, and is quoted as a supreme example of her un-
conventionality2; but in real life the choice of guests was the
King's, for he had been assured by experts in England that M.
Detaille was the greatest living French painter.
Another member of the Greffulhe coterie, a particular friend of
Charles Haas (with whom he appears in Tissot's painting) and of
the Prince de Sagan, and a probable original of General de
F roberville, was the boastful, loud-voiced and opportunist
General Marquis de Galliffet. He wore a silver plate in his
abdomen, the relic of a wound received at the Battle of Puebla in
the Mexican war of 1863-no doubt Proust was thinking of this
when he compared Froberville's monocle to 'a shell-splinter, a
monstrous wound which it was splendid to have acquired, but
indecent to exhibit'.3 Curiosity as to the real dimensions of this
silver plate, which some said was no larger than a twenty-franc
piece, while others alleged it was a good six inches across, was
thought to play some part in the General's enormous success with
society ladies. He had married a Laffitte, a relative of Baron
Doasan and Mme Aubernon; and when the priest in his nup tial
address used the unfortunate words "When the inevitable hour of
separation comes", the wedding-guests burst out laughing. Soon,
when that inevitable hour came, Mme de Galliffet was living near
her friend the Princesse de Sagan in the Manoir des Roches at
Trouville, where Proust saw them in 1891, and receiving frequent
visits from the Prince of Wales. Once the Prince de Sagan gave
1 III, 587
, I, )26
- II,43^0