Let's meet people (not all) who served as models for characters in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (my favorite novel).
The title is also given as In Search of Lost Time--a more accurate translation of Proust's title than the Shakespeare-based Remembrance of Things Past.
Don't seek exact resemblances. Characters were LOOSELY based on real people. Proust took inspiration from more than real people. He was inspired by literary characters, for example.
Readers find a mix of realism and imagination, but some identities are only thinly veiled.
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu consists of 7 titles:
1) Swann’s Way
2) Within A Budding Grove
3) The Guermantes Way
4) Cities of the Plain
5) The Captive
6) The Sweet Cheat Gone
7) Time Regained
The work was written between 1906 and 1922 and published between 1913 and 1927. The longest sentence has 844 words.
For speech and mannerisms, Robert de Montesquiou was a model for Baron de Charlus. This minor poet sent a book of his poems to Proust, who responded with flattery in a letter dated June 25, 1893.
Baron de Charlus is stout. Robert de Montesquiou was not. A touch of Oscar Wilde is in the character of Charlus.
Another model for Charlus is Charles Guillaume Fréderic Boson de Talleyrand-Perigord (1832-1910), later the duc de Sagan.
Laure de Sade was one inspiration for Oriane, the Duchesse de Guermantes. Through marriage, Laure de Sade became Countess Adhéaume de Chevigné. She was born Laure Marie Charlotte de Sade in 1859. This French socialite died in 1936.
Geneviève Halévy, later Geneviève Bizet and Geneviève Straus, was a French salonnière. She was another model for the Duchesse de Guermantes--and a model for Odette de Crécy.
Marie Anatole Louise Élisabeth--Countess Greffulhe--was another inspiration for the Duchesse de Guermantes. Countess Greffulhe lived from July 11, 1860, to August 21, 1952. She was viewed as the queen of the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris.
Count Henry Greffulhe (1848-1932) was a model for the character of the duc de Guermantes.
Laure Hayman was a model for Odette de Crecy, who takes the name Odette Swann upon marriage.
Odette, described as defying the laws of chronology, comes off as insensitive, unintelligent, and vain.
Laure Hayman was mistress to Proust's great-uncle Louis Weil.
Proust’s uncle George Weil lived at 22 place Malesherbes (today place Général-Catroux), where Proust as a teenager met Laure Hayman.
Uncle Adolphe was based on George Weil and on Louis Weil (brother of Proust's maternal grandfather).
Charles Haas (1832-1902) was a Parisian socialite now remembered only as one model for Charles Swann. Charles Haas belonged to the selective Cercle de la rue Royale as well as to the Jockey Club (he was the sole Jewish member).
Charles Ephrussi (1848-1905) was another model for Swann. Like the novel's Swann, Charles Ephrussi was a Jewish-French critic, art historian, and art collector.
