Geneviève Halévy

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Geneviève Straus, née Halévy

Geneviève Halévy , also Geneviève Bizet or Geneviève Straus (born February 26, 1849 in Paris , † December 22, 1926 in Paris) was a Parisian salonnière . Her first marriage was to the composer Georges Bizet and her second marriage to the lawyer Émile Straus.

Geneviève Halévy is regarded as one of the role models for Odette de Crécy and for the Duchess of Guermantes in Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time .

Life

family

Geneviève Halévy was born in Paris as the second child of the French composer Jacques Fromental Halévy and his wife Léonie Rodrigues-Henriques (1820-1884). Her mother was of Portuguese- Sephardic origin. The father was a successful opera composer, held the post of permanent secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and was a member of the Institut de France . She herself had been trained as a sculptor, took part in several Salons des Indépendants from 1877 and collected art. Geneviève's older sister was a piano student of Charles Gounod . Her cousin Ludovic Halévy was a writer. He was friends with the librettist and playwright Henri Meilhac and with Jacques Offenbach , for whom the two authors wrote libretti.

Childhood, youth, first marriage

When Geneviève was 13 years old, her father died, and two years later her only sister died. From then on, mother and daughter remained mentally unstable and repeatedly suffered periods of depression. At the age of 20 she married Georges Bizet , one of her father's favorite students, whom she had met at a soirée . Two years later the only son Jacques Bizet was born, who attended the Lycée Condorcet on Boulevard Haussmann with Proust and who was a lifelong friend of Marcel Proust.

Probably because of precarious financial circumstances, the family lived with the family of their uncle Léon Halévy in his house at 22 rue de Douai in the 9th arrondissement . In 1875 Bizet died of a heart attack and Geneviève was a widow at the age of 26. Geneviève inherited the rights to the works of her husband, whose opera Carmen had become a box office hit, and her father, which subsequently made her a financially independent woman.

The salonnière

Geneviève Halévy-Straus, by Jules-Élie Delaunay , Musée d'Orsay (1878)

In her uncle's house she opened a salon called Les jeudis de Ludovic , in which she received guests every Thursday and which was primarily intended to promote her cousin. In October 1886 - 11 years after the death of Georges Bizet - she married the lawyer Émile Straus (1844–1929), who worked for the Rothschilds . The couple moved into a floor in a house on 134 boulevard Haussmann. They received artists and intellectuals in their salon, which was furnished with paintings by Nattier , Quentin de la Tour , Monet and with their own portrait painted by Jules-Élie Delaunay , Politicians, members of Jewish banking and business families and representatives of the French aristocracy.

Among her guests were the nobility of the Faubourg Saint-Germain , such as the banker Alphonse de Rothschild and his wife Leonora de Rothschild (1837–1911), Robert de Montesquiou , the Comtesse Delfina Potocka (1807–1877), friend and supporter of Frédéric Chopin and Zygmunt Krasiński , Alice Duchesse de Richelieu , the future Princess of Monaco, the Comtesse Laure de Chevigné (1859–1936), a née de Sade and great-niece of the famous Marquis and her husband Adhéaume de Chevigné (1847–1911), the Princess Mathilde as well as the art patrons Winnaretta Singer - married to Edmond de Polignac -, the Comtesse Greffulhe , the Comtesse de Pourtalès , Charles Ephrussi and many others.

In addition to Proust and her cousin Ludovic, the authors Paul Bourget , Paul Hervieu , Jules Lemaître , Guy de Maupassant , Henri Meilhac , Georges de Porto-Riche and Joseph Reinach (1856–1921) or artists such as Edgar Degas , Jacques-Émile Blanche and Jean-Louis Forain , the actors Lucien Guitry (1860–1925), Sacha Guitry's father, Gabrielle Réjane (1856–1920), who gave the actress Berma traits in Proust's novel, or Emma Calvé , one of the most famous opera divas of her time . The guests were the politicians d'Arenberg (1837-1924), Léon Blum , Lord Lytton and the English art critic George Moore .

During the Dreyfus affair , Geneviève Straus' salon became the meeting point for Dreyfus supporters, including Proust from the start, who otherwise showed little interest in politics. Émile Zola, who published his open letter J'accuse in the magazine L'Aurore on January 13, 1898 , also visited her salon regularly. As Proust wrote in an undated letter to Geneviève Straus in September of the same year, a group led by journalists Fernand Labori and Anatole France had drafted a petition to Clemenceau in favor of Dreyfus, asking them to use their connections to find more Get people to sign the letter. Proust himself was one of the first to sign.

At the beginning of the new century, her salon lost its importance. After 1910 Geneviève withdrew almost completely from public life. Her son committed suicide in 1922, a few weeks before Marcel Proust's death. Geneviève Straus died in Paris in December 1926.

Geneviève Halévy and Marcel Proust

Geneviève Halévy had known Proust, who was attending the Lycée Condorcet at the same time as her son Jacques Bizet, from a young age. Jacques and Proust were lifelong friends, and Proust was a frequent guest of the Straus on Boulevard Haussmann, where the Prousts also lived, Geneviève ran their salon, which fascinated the young Proust from the start. In 1908 Geneviève gave him five notebooks in which Proust began to write down sketches and drafts for the planned novel. Geneviève and Proust exchanged extensive letters. In these letters Proust discussed literary and stylistic problems, among other things, or reflected on the characters of his novel. The correspondence ended only a few weeks after Proust's death.

Letters

  • Marcel Proust: Correspondance with Madame Straus. préface de Susy Mante-Proust (1903-1986). Correspondance générale de Proust. Vol. V.2. [Paris: Plon 1936]. Paris 1993 edition, ed. by Jean-Claude Zylberstein. Collection 10/18 suivi de lettres de Marcel Proust à Emile Straus et en appendice, treize lettres de Geneviève Straus à Marcel Proust.

literature

Web links

Commons : Geneviève Halévy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Halévy (1872–1962). Nel mondo di Marcel Proust - amici e connoscenti , accessed January 8, 2015.
  2. ↑ Shira Brisman
  3. ↑ Genealogy
  4. ↑ Shira Brisman
  5. ^ Zola dans l'affaire Dreyfus , accessed January 9, 2015.
  6. ^ Proust and the Dreyfus Affair , accessed January 9, 2015.
  7. ↑ Shira Brisman
personal data
SURNAME Halévy, Geneviève
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Straus, Genevieve; Bizet, Genevieve
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French salonière
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1926
Place of death Paris