154 MARCEL PROUST
Duc de La Rochefoucauld." And the refusal of the Prince de
Guermantes to greet Mme (,Tiny') de Hunolstein at the foot of
his stairs! may be compared to Comte Aimery's advice to a friend
on the correct manner to receive a certain bishop. "When His
Grace came to our house my wife saw him out as far as the
drawing-room door, and I took him to the front door. So I think
your wife had better see him as far as the lobby, and you'd better
take him right out into the streed" He, too, like the Prince de
Guermantes, had a Bavarian princely title, though this was not
granted till 1909. The incident of the Duc de Guermantes's
insistence on attending the fancy-dress ball, in spite of repeated
warnings from the Ladies with the Walking-sticks that poor
'Mama' d'Osmond is at death's door, was borrowed by Proust
(with the addition of Mme Straus's red shoes) from an anecdote
of Montesquiou's about his cousin Aimery. Montesquiou's
brother Gontran was dying, but Comte Aimery felt unable to
give up his plans for the evening. He was overtaken by a tactless
informant, who cried "Gontran's dead!"; whereupon Comte
Aimery merely pushed his wife (who was dressed as a queen-bee)
up the steps, declared, in the Duc de Guermantes's very words,
"People exaggerate!" and fled majestically into the ball.^2 Comte
Aimery's son Gabriel, whom Proust met a few years later, was
one of the many originals of Saint-Loup.
Other hints for various Guermantes's came from the Talley-
rand-Perigord and Castellane families, who were closely related
to one another, and more distantly to the Greffulhes. It is clear
not only that Proust used individual Talleyrands and Castellanes
in the creation of his characters, but that their interrelationships
served decisively as a model for the general structure of the
Guermantes family. Boson de Talleytand-Perigord, Prince de
Sagan, supplied elements both to the Duc de Guermantes and
Charlus; he was half-brother to Comtesse Jean de Castellane,. whose affinities with the Princesse de Guermantes have just been
noted; he was a cousin of the Comtesse de Bealllaincourt, the chief
original ofMme de ViJleparisis; and Boni de Castellane, his nephew
and heir, was an early original of the Duc de Guermantes's
nephew and Mme de Villeparisis's great-nephew, Saint-Loup.
The Prince de Sagan, now in his sixties, was generally con-
sidered the most consummate grand seigneur and arbiter of
1 II, 130 • Cf. II, 7~!