Paris

Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

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Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

Marcel Proust, half-Jewish, from a bourgeois background, first became infatuated with Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus through his friendship with her son. As the widow of composer Georges Bizet, Geneviève drew artists and musicians to her salon where she dressed in gauzy peignoirs in half-mourning colors.

Later he became obsessed with Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, who made much of her descent from Petrarch’s Laura and from the Marquis de Sade—think of that combination! She chose to make her name by being the wildest of the wild and cosying up to whoever held political power.

Finally, Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe embodied his “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Dominated and all but imprisoned by her husband, she made herself famous for the beautiful clothes she designed or had designed for her. Trivial, yes, but her way of pushing back against a society where, as she wrote, “ ‘women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions . . . Smiling, placid, charming.’ ”

The book is less about Proust than it is about Geneviève, Laure, and Élisabeth, providing a vivid portrait of the restricted lives of even these most privileged women. However, his journey—he himself pursuing a place in society—is our journey; he is our guide into this world.

He is not without his own conflicts. Especially towards the end, we learn a bit more about how he claimed to be studying the “monde” or “gratin,” the highest circles of society, in order to gain material for his writing. True enough, but he seems also to have simply been as fascinated by it as any of us obsessively watching Downton Abbey these days. Weber says:

Proust concedes that a man of letters might just as fruitfully write about the impoverished as about the privileged. He goes on to explain, however, that when authors pursue ‘opulence,’ what really motivates them is a longing for the unattainable . . . The gratin intrigues them as artists because it is not readily accessible to them (whereas poverty presumably is).

Yet his pursuit of each woman ends in disillusion. “He would spend the next three decades writing and rewriting variations on this theme: the unreachable muse whose charm evaporates upon contact.” He is shocked to find that high social status is no guarantee of virtue. “[T]he juxtaposition of surface elegance and hidden corruption would become a defining feature of his portrayal of the monde.”

The end of the 19th century saw France’s Third Republic becoming more stable, as the hopes for restoring the monarchy dissipated, leaving the aristocracy with no political power. As some would say of today’s Western societies, they took refuge in entertaining themselves to death.

I seem to have read a number of Gilded Age books recently, perhaps looking for ways to understand and push back against our own age of extreme inequality, when the richest 1% own more of the world’s wealth than the bottom 95% put together. If nothing else, my readings of the robber barons of late 19th century U.S. tell me that they stored up trouble for their next generations. Look at all the mansions and luxury “cottages” of that time which had to be abandoned by the following generation.

Instituting an income tax system in 1913 after the ratification of the 16th amendment had something to do with that, of course, but I also remember my own time at an exclusive prep school. So many of those entitled young people simply coasted through, drinking and drugging too much, confident that Daddy’s money guaranteed them a free ride through life, without any effort on their part. Not all, of course. There were those who worked hard and deployed their intelligence to good effect. Still, we see it today in the Nepo-in-chief, who failed at every business he undertook, bailed out by bluster, fraud, and—yes—Daddy’s money.

There are a lot of names to keep track  of in Weber’s book, some famous today—Bizet, de Maupassant—some forgotten. I debated whether the book could have been streamlined a bit, but in truth I am just as guilty as Proust: I enjoyed all the details of salons and balls and intrigues. They do give me a better understanding of the context for his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, but that is not what kept me glued to the pages of this book. No, I reveled in experiencing a world far off in time and place, yet having much to say about the one I inhabit today.

What biography have you read that introduced you to a different world?

Murder in the Bastille, by Cara Black

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I’ve written before about Black’s series set in Paris featuring private investigator Aimée Leduc. After the shocking death of her father, a police detective, she decided that she would stay away from crime-solving; she and her partner René would only provide information security services, such as computer forensics and corporate security. However, when Aimée stumbles into a murder investigation, she can’t help but be drawn in.

One of the pleasures of this series is the setting. Each installment takes place in a different neighborhood, or arrondissement, of Paris. Here, it is the Bastille, known to many of us because of the famous prison. Once a working class neighborhood, it’s now a gentrified area with the Opera Bastille, fancy restaurants and nightclubs. However, there is still a maze of old passages, back alleys and inner courtyards, the home of furniture makers since the 12th century. Now, apparently, these mostly house trendy shops, but in 1994, the time of this story, some older businesses still held on.

In this, the fourth book in the series, she wears a new—supposedly one-of-a-kind—Chinese silk jacket to dinner only to find the woman sitting next to her wearing the same jacket. The woman appears afraid and forgets her cell phone when she leaves. When Aimée takes it up to the maître d’, it rings and she answers it. The person mistakes her for the owner of the phone and implores her to show up at a planned assignation. Aimée goes there, expecting to find the woman but instead is brutally attacked in the dark Passage Boule Blanche.

Found by René, she awakens to learn that damage from the beating has blinded her, though it is not known if this is temporary or permanent. Even worse, the woman wearing the same jacket was killed in a nearby street. Now she must help Loic Bellan, the distracted policeman in charge of the investigation, solve the crime before the murderer silences her.

As a reader what I most enjoyed was René’s expanded role. Preferring always to work at a computer, his partner’s blindness forces him to take on some of her investigative activities, a prospect which terrifies and excites him in equal measure.

As a writer what I most enjoyed about the book was the intimate experience of sudden blindness. The author has thrown herself heart and soul into Aimée’s emotional and practical struggles, ranging from despair to pride to the craving for a cigarette. I have no idea how accurate the treatments and expectations for the blind might have been at that time, only that Aimée’s emotions rang true to me.

What I can say, as an information security engineer and analyst myself, is that the technology side of the story is accurate. Some readers have complained that the technology used in the story didn’t exist in 1994, but they are wrong. Not only were Aimée and René, by virtue of their profession, working with cutting edge equipment and software, but the technologies described in this story were in common usage in certain arenas in the U.S. and even more so in Europe.

I don’t know Paris and have only schoolgirl French, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the descriptions and the various French phrases scattered through the book. I can only say that I enjoyed them and hope someday to visit Paris, seeing it not just through the eyes of a tourist but through the gritty lens Cara Black’s books have given me.

Have you been to Paris? Which arrondissement did you stay in?

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, by Francine Prose

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Intrigued by a photograph of a lesbian couple in a nightclub by Hungarian-born French photographer Brassaï, Francine Prose investigated further and found a blockbuster story. She considered writing it as nonfiction, but chose instead to use it as the basis for a novel.

Like the tuxedo-clad Violette Morris in Brassaï’s photograph, Lou Villars is an Olympic-bound athlete and a race car driver in 1920s Paris. She’s also an habitué of the fictional Chameleon Club, a gaudy, anything-goes nightclub. As the next war looms, she is recruited to spy for Nazi Germany and goes on to become famous for rooting out and torturing members of the Resistance.

I felt immediately at home in the milieu of this book, which was a bit puzzling because I’ve never been to Paris, much less seen its streetlights gleaming on rainwet streets or enjoyed the burlesque shows—onstage and off—of its nightclubs. Then I realised my familiarity came from my obsessive reading forty-five years ago of Anais Nin’s diaries and novels, as well as books about Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, and their circle. I also spent some time a few years ago studying poet Hope Mirrlees, particularly her spectacular 1920 poem “Paris”.

Villars’s story is told by multiple narrators. There are letters to his parents from Gabor Tsenyi, a Hungarian photographer like Brassaï. We have memoirs from Tsenyi’s lover Suzanne, his wealthy patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and his best friend, the American writer Lionel Maine, seemly based on Henry Miller with his preoccupation with drinking and womanising. Finally, and providing much of the structure of the story, there are excerpts from a self-published biography of Villars by Nathalie Dunois, a relative of Tsenyi’s lover Suzanne.

Interestingly, we never hear directly from Lou herself, raising questions of identity and historicity. Given that we only learn about her through others, whose own reliability is dubious, we cannot help but consider the fallibility of memory and self-interested testimony. As readers, we are left to judge for ourselves how much to trust each of these sources.

I struggled with the first part of the book, as I tried to sort out the narrators, get a handle on the large cast of characters, and figure out where and in whom the story lay. I abandoned it for a while, but am glad I came back because it picked up about two-thirds of the way through. And I think the multiple narrators lift this book above the ordinary.

What fascinates me most in this story is the trajectory between good and evil. If we were only presented with Lou Villars in her later incarnation as traitor and torturer, we would think her a monster. But here we start with her as a child, devoted to her mentally ill brother. I don’t know who said it first, but a now-common piece of advice for writers is that even the villain thinks he is the hero of his story. What this means is that if we are to present them as fully realised characters, we must dig deep into our villain and try to understand why he or she thinks what they are doing is right.

In my recent review of Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, I said that these days I am absorbed by the question of how to live a good life, how to negotiate the inevitable choices and compromises we face. I think often of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where the two courtiers wonder if there was a moment where they could have chosen differently and, if so, how could they have missed it? Is it ever too late to go back and choose differently?

Through her melange of voices, Prose helps us understand Villars’s choices and compromises. It is a story that never grows old for me. As the world seems more and more to be taken over by dishonest and greedy people who laugh at the harm they inflict on others, I look to stories such as this to help me understand how a good person turns to evil.

Have you read a novel with multiple narrators? What did you think of it?