Caroline Weber, in conversation with Maurice Samuels and Elisabeth Ladenson
Genevieve Halevy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adheaume de Chevigne; and Elisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe, ”these were the three superstars of fin-de-siecle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives in their fabled salons and in masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.
