Marie-Geneviève Raphaëlle Halévy-Bizet-Straus (26 February 1849 – 22 December 1926) was a French salonnière who was the wife of Georges Bizet. She inspired Marcel Proust as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes and Odette de Crécy in '' À la recherche du temps perdu''.

Life

Geneviève Halévy was born in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

as the youngest daughter of the composer Jacques-Fromental Halévy and his wife Léonie (née Rodrigues-Henriques), both

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

. Geneviève Halévy's youth was sad: She lost her father when she was 13 years old, her elder sister when she was 15 years old, and her mother suffered from periods of mental instability. In 1869, she married Georges Bizet, a pupil of her father, and gave birth in 1871 to their son Jacques, who became a school friend of Marcel Proust. Bizet died suddenly of a heart attack in 1875. Shortly after his death, Geneviève and Élie-Miriam Delaborde, a close friend of both her and Bizet, signed a marriage contract. Despite this, they never went through with the marriage. There have been speculations by scholars that Geneviève and Delaborde were having an affair during her marriage to Bizet, a theory seemingly confirmed by their marriage contract a year after Bizet's death. Weber, Caroline. Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018. Geneviève moved to live with her uncle, Léon Halévy, and opened a salon for her cousin Ludovic Halévy, where she helped him in receiving the artistic society of the time. This was known as ''Ludovic's Thursdays'' (Les jeudis de Ludovic). After a few years, she opened her own salon where distinguished society members, such as Baron and Baronness Alphonse de Rothschild, Comtesse Potocka, Duchesse de Richelieu, and Comtesse de Chevigné (née de Sade, another model for the Duchesse de Guermantes) could meet with writers and intellectuals such as

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, Henri Meilhac,

Georges de Porto-Riche Georges de Porto-Riche (20 May 1849, Bordeaux, Gironde – 5 September 1930, Paris) was a French dramatist and novelist. Biography Georges was born into a Jewish-Italian assimilated family. At the age of twenty, his pieces in verse began to b ...

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, Paul Hervieu, Joseph Reinach, and her cousin Ludovic. In 1886, she married the lawyer Émile Straus, an acquaintance of the Rothschild family, and her salon became increasingly fashionable: She received

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and his cousin Comtesse Greffulhe, painters and journalists. Many supporters of Dreyfus socialized at Mme Straus's salon, including Marcel Proust, who was one of the first intellectuals to sign a petition in '' L'Aurore'' at the time of the

Dreyfus Affair The Dreyfus affair (french: affaire Dreyfus, ) was a political scandal that divided the French Third Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "L'Affaire", as it is known in French, has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francop ...

. After the Affair, the salon became less prominent. After 1910, Mme Straus became increasingly depressed, and removed herself from society. Her son committed suicide in 1922. A few weeks later, Proust died. She died in 1926 in

, aged 77.

References

Sources

*Andrée Jacob, ''Il y a un siècle, quand les dames tenaient salon'', Paris, Ed. Arnaud Seydoux, 1991 * Painter, George Duncan: ''Marcel Proust: a biography'', London, Chatto & Windus, 1959 {{DEFAULTSORT:Halevy, Genevieve Halevy, Genevieve Halevy, Genevieve Halevy, Genevieve Halevy, Genevieve Halevy, Genevieve