THE G UERMANTES WAYIn real life Mme Blanche Leroi, who bows so coldly to poor
Mme de Villeparisis and refuses to attend her salon,! was Mme
Gaston (Clothilde) Legrand, nee F ournes, known as 'Cloton' to
the Faubourg. She was married to a wealthy owner of coal-mines
---5imilarly Mme Leroi was the daughter of a timber-merchant.^2
Montesquiou owned her portrait, 'Mme Legrand returning from
the races', by Mme Romaine Brooks. "Notice those romantic
eyes glowing under her veil," he would say, "and how they are
belied by the wryness of her mouth, embittered by chewing the
cud of the vileness of humanity; in this painting one sees the
fusion of defiant pride and compulsory diffidence!" As we have
seen, the remark attributed to Mme Leroi-"My opinion oflove?
I make it, often, but never, never talk about it"3-was uttered by
Laure Baigneres to Mme Aubernon.
The gratin included persons who, without disgracing them-
selves openly like the poor Princesse Clara de Chimay, contrived
to live a life as wild as Mme de Beaulaincourt's in a previous
generation. One of the late arrivals at the Princesse de Guer-
mantes's soiree is the Princesse d'Orvillers, in whom the Narrator
recognises the lady with gentle blue eyes and opulent bosom who
had made advances to him while pretending to look in a shop-
window near his home. She appears many years later at the final
matinee of the Princesse de Guermantes in Le Temps Retrouve,
still tender and magnificent, but 'hurrying to the grave', though
here Proust forgetfully calls her the Princesse de Nassau. She was
the Marquise d'Hervey de Saint-Denis, one of the guests at
Montesquiou's fete in honour of Delafosse: she was invited at
Proust's earnest request, so she may well have made eyes at him
in real life. Her husband, the much-betrayed Marquis (1823-92),
was an eminent Chinese scholar, and is mentioned under his own
name as having given a Chinese vase to Charlus in his boyhood.
Like the Princesse d'Orvillers, Mme d'Hervey was a nattIral
daughter of the last reigning Duke of Parma.^4 She was rich, fair-
haired and ever-youthful: people called her the Demi-Chevreul,
in allusion to the long-lived chemist Michel Chevreul, whose
hundredth birthday was celebrated in 1886. After her husband's
death she became younger than ever, and married Mme de
Chevigne's nephew Jacques de Waru, who was fifteen years her
1 II, 186
- II, '9!
- II, 273
« 11,373,720,721; III, 979-80; II, 718
- II, 273