166 MARCEL PROUSTcontributing for a moment to the character of Mme de Cam-
bremer, and in 1920 her husband prefiguring the old age of the
Duc de Guermantes.
One of the salons in which the gratin could meet the arts was
that of the beautiful and cruel Comtesse Emmanuela Potocka,
with whom Jacques Emile Blanche had had a heart-breaking love-
affair in the early 1880s. Her riotous circle, which included
Bourget, Dr Pozzi, Maupassant (one of her lovers), Beraud and
Gervex (yet another original of Elstir), was known as the
Maccabees (meaning Ghouls), and called her sometimes the Siren,
sometimes, like Mme Verdurin, the Mistress. One of Proust's
favourite anecdotes was Mme Potocka's belated reply to a theo-
logical argument of the philosopher Caro: as he was leaving she
leaned over the banisters and spat downstairs on his bald head,
shouting: "Take that for your Idea of God!" One evening at the
Duchesse de La Tremoine's, when Mme Potocka graciously rose
to greet the scholar Vaufreland, Mme de Chevigne uttered words
adapted in one of the Duchesse de Guermantes's epigrams: "She's
like the sun, she rises for one man just before going to bed for
another."l On one of his visits to Mme Potocka Proust saw the
Duchesse de Luynes's carriage and the Comtesse de Gueme's
motor-car waiting outside, and had the extreme pleasure of
hearing the hall-porter saying "Mme la Comtesse is out," to an
unwanted caller and "Mme la Comtesse is expecting you," to
himself. Towards the end of the 1890S the Siren moved to Auteuil
in order to devote more time to the only creatures she ever really
loved, her greyhounds. "Take care," said Reynaldo Habn,
"You're too malicious to live so far out." At first the gratin
followed her, though with some grumbling: "It's charming out
here," said Proust's friend Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, "Is
there anything one oughtn't to miss seeing in the vicinity?" She
was to be seen in the morning mists of the Bois, her beauty
fading, with a yelling pack of dogs around her and a huge collie
straining on the leash. But in the end Reynaldo's warning was
justified: during the Occupation, after forty years of isolation,
the deserted countess and her last greyhound clied of old age and
hunger in the house at Auteuil. When their bodies were dis-
covered at last, the rats had been at them.
The tale of the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain is com-
I II,4IO