MARCEL PROUST'this witty old woman with her inexhaustible flow of talk' would
write her memoirs. She never did; and the Memoirs of Mme de
Villeparisis, and those of her equally fictitious sister Mme de
Beausergent, who was the Narrator's grandmother's favoutite
author next to Mme de Sevigne, were both suggested by the
voluminous and rather boring Memoires of the Comtesse de
Boigne, whose favoutite nephew the Marquis d'Osmondl was a
friend of Proust's parents, whose great-nephew the Comte de
Maille was his near neighbour in the Boulevard Malesherbes, and
whose niece the dowager Duchesse de Maille, then in her
seventies, he often saw at the balls of the 189os. "Mme de Beau-
sergent, afterwards Mme d'Hazfeld, sister ofMme de Villeparisis,"
says Swann in the Goncourt Journal pastiche (III, 715); and the
sister of Mme de Beaulaincourt was, in fact, Comtesse Pauline de
Hatzfeldt.
Mme de Villeparisis's rival 'Alix', who attends her afternoon
receptions in the hope of stealing her guests, was Mme de
Chaponay: Proust characteristically mentions her by name,
together with Mme de Beaulaincourt, in juxtaposition with the
characters they suggested. Mme de Chaponay, like 'Alix', wore
her white hair piled high in Marie-Antoinette style, had the same
difficulty as Mme de Beaulaincourt, and for the same cause, in
recruiting her salon, and was famous for her social raids. But the
Christian name Alix came from Vicomtesse Alix de Janze, who
was born (as the Narrator mentions of 'Alix') a Choiseul. Mme
de Janze wrote a book on Alfred de Musset, and 'Alix' has written
one on Lamartine. She and Mme de Chaponay were the originals
of two of the 'Three Fates, with white, blue or red hair' who were
Mme de Vineparisis's friends and competitors: the third was Mme
de Blocqueville.^2
1 The Marquis d'Osmond appears in Mme de Cambremer's box at the
Opera as the channing young Marquis de Beausergent (II, 55), and again,
transformed by old age, at the Princesse de Guermantes's matinee (III, 938).
But Proust prefers to make the Narrator discover in Le Temps Retrouve that
the favourite nephew for whom Mme de Beausergent wrote her memoirs
was none other than the Due de Guennantes as a boy (III, 71 j, 717). In
le Cdu! de Guermatltes the Marquis d'Osmond (nicknamed 'Mama') is the
cousin of the Due de Guermantes whose death, announced by the Ladies
with the Walking-sticks, does not prevent the Due from taking the Duchesse
to the fancy-dress ball (II, 575).- For the references in the foregoing paragraph cf. II, 202, 198 , 197.