THE G UERMANTES WAYTalleyrand-Perigord, Prince de Sagan. Just as the Princesse de
Guermantes was a Bavarian royalty, so Comtesse Dolly had
mairied Karl Egon, Prince von Furstenberg (the former lover of
Laure Hayman), and had spent her youth in a German court. It
was not till 1898, after her first husband's death, that she married
Comte Jean de Castellane, her cousin and nephew, and became,
in rivalry to Mme Greffulhe,. one of the rulers of Parisian society.
She was majestic, beautiful and Teutonic, and had retained the
grand manner of a German princess. People called her 'Griifin
Jean', and she looked, says Andre Germain, 'as if she'd always
just come back from a visit to Wotan'. The jealous Mme Greffulhe
affected to confuse her with her less dazzling sister-in-law, and
once, when Montesquiou was lamenting her absence from one of
his fetes ("She said she'd been asked to a shooting-party at
Mme Porges's, so I told her that there was some houses where it
was absolutely inexcusable to go shooting, unless it was to shoot
one's hostess I"), she enquired devastatingly" Which Mme de
Castellane?"
For the feudal devotion of the Prince de Guermantes to
questions of birth and etiquette, the 'almost fossil rigidity of his
aristocratic prejudices' ("His ideas are out of this world," said the
Duchesse),1 Proust thought of Comte Aimery de La Roche-
foucauld, whose extreme regard for precedence had caused him
to be nicknamed 'Place-at-table'. Of a girl who had married
beneath her for love he remarked: "A few nights of passion, and
then a whole lifetime at the wrong end of the table." It was
exceedingly important not to put Comte Aimery at the wrong
end of the table: he was liable, if so insulted, to call for his carriage
immediately after dinner; and once he was heard to enquire in a
loud voice: "Does one get a helping of everything where I'm
sitting?" Of the Luynes family, into which his aunt the Duchesse
Yolande de Luynes had married, he observed: "They were mere
nobodies in the year 1000."2 When the Comtesse de Chabrillan
asked whose was a portrait on his drawing-room wall, he replied:
"That is Henry the Fourth, madam." "Really, I should never
have recognised him." "I refer, Madam, to Henry, the Fourth
1 II, 570, 523
, M. de Charles makes similar remarks about the Luynes family; "I ask
you-a mere Alberti, who didn't manage to scrape the mud off his feet
until Louis XIII I" (III, 233).