Word: charlus
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Dates: during 1932-1932
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...Change. Throughout the years Proust traces, things and people have slowly altered, but it took the war to give the final impetus for the complete reversal of the Paris society, the society of the "Guermantes set," he pictures. From the time that the narrator sees the stricken M. de Charlus bow like a slave before Mme. de Sainte-Euverte, a woman he had always refused to recognize, till the author decides to write this work, it is the change that has come about that he emphasizes. The unevenness of two stones in the Prince de Guermantes courtyard, for instance, brings...
...catching cold, he wore a heavy pelisse. An impressed English visitor to Paris said that Proust was "really the only man I ever saw dining in a fur coat." Some of the lions Proust tamed: Prince de Polignac, Count Robert de Montesquiou (chief prototype of Proust's "Baron de Charlus"), Baronne Alphonse de Rothschild, Edmond de Goncourt, Massenet, Saint-Saens, Anatole France, Prince Antoine Bibesco and his cousin Marthe. No coward, Proust fought a duel with a journalist who had reviewed him unfavorably. He was a Dreyfusard when merely to be a Jew in France was dangerous...