MARCEL PROUSTFrance, a selection from Montesquiou's Les Perles Rouges (a
volume of sonnets on Versailles published on the following 6
June) and the first impassioned poems of Mme de Noailles. The
poetess's husband Mathieu looked on, tall and thin with a narrow
blond moustache, smiling politely but saying not a word. Flament
was captivated by the new Muse: greatly daring, he spoke to her,
and listened to a flood of enchanting images, like a river of
diamonds. Her black hair hung to her eyebrows in a fringe which
she alternately parted and smoothed down with a tiny hand
decked with an enormous sapphire. Having said her piece, she
enquired of each of the obscurer after-dinner guests: "Who's he?
Does he write?"; and already she was calling Flament, as she
called everybody, 'my dear'. M. France, he noticed, was beaming
at the Comtesse, while Mme Arman pulled a grimace. Flament
moved towards her to confide his emotions; but Mme Arman was
not interested: "I've made M. France copy out the whole manu-
script of Le Lys Rouge," she announced, "and we're going to
give it to the Bibliotheque Nationale!"
Proust had met Anna de Noailles in Mme Arman's salon, where
her success was dazzling but brief. "That little girl's a genius,"
declared Monsieur France; to which the jealous Mme Arman
replied, for she felt that one genius was enough for any drawing-
room: "When she's about, you don't exist!" She was the daughter
of the Roumanian Princesse Rachel de Brancovan, the excitable
Chopin-enthusiast, whom Proust had met at her Villa Bassaraba
on Lake Geneva in August 1893, and who was the original of the
elder Mme de Cambremer. Princesse Rachel, who lived in the
Avenue Hoche near Mme Arman, was the widow of the
Roumanian Prince Gregoire de Brancovan (1827-86) and
daughter of Musurus Pacha, Turkish Ambassador in London in
the 18ioS and a descendant of a Greek family whose greatness
dated from the mediaeval Byzantine Empire. Mme de Noailles
had married Comte Mathieu in 1897 and was now twenty-three
years old.' It was not till several years later, when his sudden
1 She was a cousin-by-marriage of Montesquiou several times over, for
his cousin Henri had married Mathieu de Noailles's sister Marie in 1889; his
uncle Odan de Montesquiou was the husband of Princesse Rachel's cousin
Princesse Marie Bibesco; and Anna de Noailles's sister Helene had married
in 1898 Prince Alexandre de Chimay, Mme Greffuhle's brother and the son
of the late Prince Joseph de Chimay who had been the husband of
Montesquiou's aunt Marie.