MARCEL PROUST
de Guermantes refers to her as 'my aunt Sagan', and F ran~oise,
with her love of unsafe grammatical analogies, as 'the Sagante'.1
The Prince de Sagan's nephew, Boni de Castellane, was now
and for the next twelve years the most brilliant young man in
Parisian society. He had the golden hair, the dazzling pink
complexion, the cold lapis-lazuli eyes, the flying monocle and
darting movements, the tall, slim figure ofSaint-Loup. His Rachel
was Mile Marsy, the actress, whom he had torn from the embraces
of his admiring uncle Sagan and the furious Comte Greffulhe; ,like
Saint-Loup he was blackballed at the Jockey Club, of whim his
mother's father, the Marquis de Juigne, had been vice-president
for many years.
In 1895, when Boni's money was already growing short, he
married an American millionaire heiress, Miss Anna Gould. She
was short, thin and sallow, with a line of black hair down her
spine-'like an Iroquois chieftainess,' people said; but Boni
depilated, rouged and dressed her, and taught her to reply, when
complimented on her appearance, "Nice of you to say so." Their
monumental house in the Avenue du Bois was built to Boni's
design, after the Petit Trianon at Versailles. "The staircase will be
like the one at the Opera, only bigger," she told enquirers. Boni
went into politics as a royalist and anti-Semite; he gave receptions
of a megalomaniac lavishness; but it seemed to some observers
that he was riding for a fall. "You need to be used to it, if you're
going to handle all that money," remarked Baron Alphonse de
Rothschild. Later we shall have further glimpses of Proust's
contact with Boni in the periods of his highest glory, his catas-
trophe and his pathetic, courageous sunset.
Boni de Castellane's great-aunt, Comtesse Sophie de Beaulain-
court, was the original of Mme de Villeparisis, the type of an old
lady who has slowly and painfully regained a social position
forfeited by the excesses of her youth. She was the daughter, born. in 1818, of the Marechal de Castellane and Comte Greffulhe's
great-aunt Cordelia Greffulhe, who was the mistress of Comte
Mole and of the great Chateaubriand: well might Mme de
Villeparisis say "I remember M. Mole very well," and: "Chateau-
briand often came to my father's house"!2 In 1836, under Louis
1 II, 526, 207. Her ball is referred to ironically by Mme de Villeparisis in
conversation with Bloch: "Is that what you'd call a great social solemnity?"
she asks the Duchesse (II, 244). • II, '92; I, 711