THE GUERMANTES WAYhave the smallest ears in Paris, and wore red to set off her dark
hair and her celebrated blue eyes. We have already seen her
husband, Comte Othenin, with his ironic smile, bright, inquisitive
eyes and dangling monocle, at Mme Straus's. He was a member of
the Academie F ran~aise, and their salon became the headquarters
of the clique of nobly-born academicians, the so-called 'party of
the dukes'. Although his was said to have been the voice that had
voted the survival of the Third Repuhlic in ,876 by a majority
of one, M. d'Haussonville was a leader of the liberal Orleanists,
with whom he united the legitimists after the death of the Comte
de Chambord in ,883, He was the grandson of Mme de Stael's
daughter Albertine, whose Proustian Christian name was shared
by two other ladies known to Proust, Princesse Albertine de
Broglie and Comtesse Albertine de Montebello. Both husband
and wife were exceedingly courteous and kind-hearted, but none
the less conscious of the importance of their position; and the
new guest would be gratified by the depth of their bow, only to
be snuhbed by the 'gymnastic harmony' (as Proust called it) with
which, after regaining the perpendicular, they leaned as far back-
wards as they had bowed forwards. Proust attributed the
Haussonville bow to the Guermantes ladies, who had borrowed
it, he tells us, from the Courvoisiers, and to the Duchesse de
Reveillon in Jean Santeuil.
'
In the Haussonvilles' drawing-room
in the Rue Saint-Dominique hung the portrait of M. d'Hausson-
ville's ancestress, Beatrix de Lillebonne, abbess under Louis XlV
of the exclusive convent of Remiremont. Proust gives this paint-
ing to Mme de Villeparisis, who stupefies Bloch by maintaining,
a little exaggeratedly, that even the King's own daughter would
not have been admitted to this nunnery, "because after its mis-
alliance with the Medicis the House of France hadn't enough
quarters".^2 It was an incident in the memoirs of the Count's
father, which Proust read only in 19~o-in his youth the elder
M. d'Haussonville had stood in douht outside Mme Delessert's
house, wondering if he had really been invited to her reception-
that suggested the Narrator's anxieties at the Princesse de
Guermantes's soiree.^3 In '907 we shall see Mme d'Haussonville1 II, 445; Jean Santeuil, vol. I, 285_ For Albertine de Stai!l, afterwards
Duchesse de Broglie, and !he Haussanvilles, cf. II, 275, and III, 968.
2 n, '99
- II, 633, etc.