THE GUERMANTES WAY IS7Philippe, she married the Marquis de Contades, whose descendant
Vicomte Antoine de Contades was to become the husband of
Marie de Benardaky's sister Nelly. Of one of her innumerable
lovers Mme de Chevigne told Proust: "She ate him up, down to
his last farm-rent." During the Second Empire she was the
mistress of the Comte de Fleury, the French ambassador at St
Petersburg-whose liaison with her suggested that of M. de
Norpois with Mme de Villeparisis-and a friend of the Empress
Eugenie and of Merimee, a whole volume of whose letters are
addressed to her. From the Comte de Coislin she had a son, whom
she acknowledged and kept with her, despite the disapproval of
the Faubourg. In 1859 she took her second but short-lived
husband, the Comte de Beaulaincourt. Now, two generations
after her wild youth, she was an ugly little old lady of seventy-
six, with a purple face and big spectacles, like the aged Mme de
ViI\eparisis seen at Venice by Mme Sazerat, whose father she had
ruined; but she had succeeded, almost too late, in reconquering
her position in society, and was visited by Princesse Mathilde, the
ex-Empress Eugenie, and all the Faubourg. She lived in the Rue
de Miromesnil, near Mme Straus, Mme de Chevigne and the
Pouquets, and sat, wearing a black silk gown, a peasant-woman's
bonnet and a white lace-edged apron, at a little desk piled high
with paper petals and saucers of paint, making artificial flowers:
"when you're no longer young, you have to find a hobby to keep
you company," she told Edmond de Goncourt. The flowers were
copies from nature, and bunches of roses and violets were sent
for the purpose daily from her Chateau d' Acosta, near Princesse
Mathilde's at Saint-Gratien. Proust made Mme de Villeparisis
paint flowers, like Mme Lemaire: 'so that she wouldn't be too like
Mme de Beaulaincourt,' he told Montesquiou in 1921. She
watched her great-nephew Boni's career with a sardonic eye: "It's
like dining in a red marble aquarium, with goldfish for footmen,"
she remarked after a visit to his Palais Rose at 45 Avenue du Bois;
"and you should see Boni and his wife strutting up that staircase
of theirs, with peacock-feathers stuck up their behinds!" She took
a fancy to Proust and gave him valuable instruction, from her own
unique knowledge, in the state of politics and society under Louis
Philippe, Napoleon III and the young Third Republic.
In his account of a visit to Mme de Beaulaincourt (Journal,
vol. 7, 155-7, 7 September 1887), Edmond de Goncourt wishes