The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 July 2020
by Caroline Weber
The great work In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is sort of a literary test. Many readers make it through its first volume, Swann's Way, at least part of the way. Others might skip ahead to the last volume. But only the most obsessed readers, or those willing to go the distance to earn some readers' cred, the obsessive ones, and those engaged in a deep research into a time and a place, and those mildly crazy ones, finally make it through more than a million words of dramatically introspective and crazed prose. That's fitting, because all those things describe its author, too. As do many other adjectives and classifications. One of Proust's most towering characters in that great multi-volume book is the Duchess de Guermantes, a woman who typified the inaccessible heavens of Parisian society, the monde. She is a great beauty and expresses her greatest creativity in the social gatherings, parties and salons she curates like an artist. To Proust, she is emblematic of a romantic and epic nobility tracing back centuries of European royalty. There are so many elements of her personage put forth in Proust's book that it is impossible to encapsulate them in a mini-review. Proust's narrator yearns to spend time in this woman's presence. She is such a mythic creature, and gathers so much of the topmost crust of the monde around her that he can not resist her lure. Ultimately, he is disillusioned, as we all so often are with our ideals and idols. But it takes him seven volumes to come to that realization, and to turn around again and begin writing his story.
Proust's work is famous also for being semi-autobiographical. Most of its characters are thinly veiled simulacra of real living people in his youth. The Duchesse of Guermantes was, herself, a composite character made up largely from three great famous beauties of fin-de-siecle Paris, women we might today see as famous "celebutantes" or the well-heeled rich who travel in circles elevated well beyond typical notoriety, and perhaps most famous only in their immediate society. These three were Geneviéve Halévy Bizet Straus ; Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné ; and Élizabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Comtesse Greffulhe. Their long aristocratic names were themselves an obsession for Proust. They symbolized a mythic history. But they were women of their class and their time, iconoclastic to a limited degree, enduring in what was largely a chauvanistic man's world, carrying on their cultured lives amid ill-suited marriages, numerous affairs, and an aloof beauty. In this deeply researched book, Caroline Weber tells us the life stories of these three women, focussing on their history and their personal entanglements with a dizzying array of famous individuals, royalty, artists, authors and socialites, men ranging from Guy de Maupassant to Bertie, the Prince of Wales. She leads us along an engrossing narrative, developing their fame and ultimately young Marcel Proust's enthrallment. Until, finally, Proust himself turns around and starts to tell his story.
This book is about fame and beauty in a bygone era that may yet seem very familiar. This is the golden age, yet the waning age, of the French aristocracy. Proust's book is as much about that tarnished glamor as it is about the lure of beauty and cultured society. Weber's book is about the role of these women in that society, how they endured their constrained situation, their efforts to escape the hypocrisy of the men in their lives, yet while supporting them to the extent that the men's successes reflected upon them both financially and socially (indeed, many marriages in this milieu at this time were those of financial convenience, a faded nobility wedded to modern money). The book is perhaps even more about their love lives. Extramarital relations were commonplace in 19th century French upper class society, often in the open, even expected. These women were wooed relentlessly by men famous and obscure, and they surrendered, or not, as best to burnish their own romantic image. They themselves yearned for real romance with men who eluded them (and occasionally with women, which became another of Proust's obsessions). There's a bygone tragic romance to all their stories, compulsions and literary desires less common in our supposedly more concupiscent era. Weber explores this story through an engrossing research into the letters and other writings they (and many others) left behind.
The book is alternately beautiful and sad. Weber's writing is engaging and somewhat gossipy with a name-dropping quality that would be irritating if it wasn't so solidly based in the reality of these people's lives. The list of notables of the era that stroll through this book is incredibly long. The book itself is long, even though it comes to a close well before any of these three women passed away. It does not require the reader to have also read Proust's work. Indeed, for much of the book, Proust is a lurking peripheral character, which he was, indeed, for most of the time he was acquainted with these women. Both Weber and Proust, however, complement each other and inform each other. We are left with a long book with an amazing depth of research (revealed by many pages of bibliography and notes). Despite its length, the reader could want more, beyond the moment Proust sits down to write his epic novel. Perhaps it behooves us to read Weber and then turn to Proust. In any case, it is a rewarding journey.
(This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.)
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