THE GUERMANTES WAYelegance of his time. He was unintelligent and devoid of taste
except in clothes; but as he had now been separated from his
wealthy wife for fifteen years, he could no longer afford the best
tailors, and the extraordinary distinction of his appearance came
largely from his personal presence. The Prince frequented the
foyer of the Comedie-Fran~aise, then a fashionable resort,
adorned with antique furniture and old prints which made it look
like Louis de Turenne's drawing-room. He stood astride in his
velvet-collared greatcoat with white rose button-hole, twirling
his monocle on a sensationally broad black ribbon, with his
friends Robert de FitzJames, General de Galliffet, Charles Haas
and Turenne; and after the performance they would depart
severally with the actresses of the evening, with Mile Reichenberg
or Mile Marsy. He lived in bachelor roonis over the Club in the
Rue Royale, and with Charles Haas was a favourite of old Isabella,
the flower-seller outside the Cafe Anglais. "You're a real gentle-
man," she told Boni de Castellane after Haas's death, "there's only
you and the Prince de Sagan left of your sort, now Monsieur Haas
has gone." His archaic Christian name, Boson, helped by its
similar sound to give a contemporary ring to that of the Duc de
Guermantes, which was borrowed from Basin, the eleventh-
century Count of Illiers. But in his tragic last days the Prince
came to resemble the fallen Baron de Charlus. In 1908 he had a
paralytic stroke, and was willy-nilly taken back by the wife he
had not seen since the I880s. Looking like an aged, white-maned
lion, he was pushed about in a wheel-chair, with bent head and
dribbling mouth, as was Charlus by J upien; he bowed, like
Charlus, to all the wrong people, clutched the arms of his chair
in a vain effort to rise, and mumbled "Delighted, I'm sure-
delighted, I'm sure."
The Princesse de Sagan his wife, born Jeanne-Marguerite
Seilliere, came of a rich, parvenu family of Second Empire barons,
related, like Mme de Galliffet, to Mme Aubernon and Baron
Doasan. She spent the summer at her Villa Persane at Trouville
and was to be seen walking on the front with her negro page, thus
serving as a model for the Princesse de Luxembourg at Balbec.
She gave a famous ball in 1885 at which all the guests-including
Charles Haas, the Chevignes, Turenne, and the rest of the
Guermantes set-were dressed as animals, and the whole of the
Opera ballet emerged from an enormous beehive. The Duchesse