Marcel Proust: A Biography

SAINT-LOUP
family jewels, his mother's bright eyes'. He was the only one of
Proust's aristocratic young friends whose blood had the supreme
nobility claimed by the Guermantes's; for the La Rochefoucaulds
were one of the first three ducal families of France, and he would
quote with a show of contempt his father's saying: "We're every
bit as good as the La Tremoliles-they've been luckier, that's
all!" He was the son (instead of, like Saint-Loup, the nephew)
of the originals of the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes; and
he was a distant nephew of Comtesse Greffulhe, original of the
Duchesse, and of Montesquiou, original of Charlus. He was fond
of women and night-life, and was nicknamed, in contradistinction
from the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, his ancestor, 'the La
Rochefoucauld of Maxim's'. Saint-Loup was banished to Tunisia
as a cure for his love of Rachel, and afterwards married Swann's
daughter Gilberte. Similarly, we shall find Comte Gabriel in 1904
travelling to Constantinople to recover from a tragic love-affair
and in 1905 marrying a girl of half-ducal, half-Jewish birth.
A few hundred yards further up the Rue de Courcelles, at
69, lived Princesse Rachel de Brancovan's cousin Princesse
Helene Bibesco, widow of the Roumanian Prince Alexandre de
Bibesco. Like Princesse Rachel she was a virtuoso pianist, and
her salon was frequented by a galaxy of musicians, artists, writers
and aristocrats. In the past she had known Liszt, Wagner,
Gounod, Puvis de Chavannes, the royal Duc d' Aumale; her son
Antoine remembered Renan calling to autograph his books,
Saint-Saens and Faure playing piano duets with her, and the
polished cranium of Leconte de Lisle-'I wouldn't have thought
it possible for anyone to be so bald.' At the present time her guests
included Anatole France, Loti, Jules Lemaitre, Maeterlinck,
Porto-Riche, Debussy and the painters Bonnard, Vuillard and
Odilon Redon. Proust was no doubt invited to her salon through
her niece, Mme de N oailles, or her nephew Constantin de
Brancovan, who was attending Bergson's lectures at the Sorbonne
with his cousins, her sons; and it was there that in 1900 he had
met the young Bibesco brothers. Prince Antoine Bibesco was not
altogether favourably impressed. He saw a very pale, slightly
stooping young man, with unkempt black hair and dark lacquer
eyes, who offered and quickly withdrew a drooping, childishly