There one could meet, together with some of those who frequented the salon of Madame de Caillavet and other Republican hostesses of the same kind, persons belonging to other classes, and forming part of the aristocratic circle of Paris. Academicians frequented it, and diplomatists were generally eager to be introduced to Madame Ménard Dorian, where they ran no risk of meeting people they would not have cared to become acquainted with, and where they could, on the other hand, get an idea as to what was going on in Republican circles. Madame Dorian had been a Dreyfusard, but she had been so moderately and in a ladylike way. Her salon was something like the one of Madame Geoffrin in the eighteenth century, with the exception that no one would have dared to say about it what the Marquise du Deffand had told of the former, that it was “une omelette au lard.” One gossiped in it, in a mild way, and became interested in the literary movement of the day, perhaps even more than in the political one.
M. Ménard Dorian used to put in an appearance at his wife’s receptions now and then, when he was not too busy to do so. He was a quiet, pleasant little man, liked by everybody, and especially by ladies, who always found him most polite and amiable to them. An evening party or dinner given in the Hotel de la Rue de la Faisanderie was always sure to be a meeting place for intelligent and clever people, and no one who had once been asked ever regretted it, but on the contrary was always most eager for the invitation to be repeated.
M. Ménard Dorian is now dead, and his widow only sees her friends occasionally, and in a quiet fashion, having refrained from opening again the hospitable doors of her house so freely as in former years. But she has remained the same amiable woman she always was, and certainly among the Republican ladies of the present day she deserves to rank first. She would have graced the Court of any European monarch.
Madame Dorian had one daughter who had been married to Georges Hugo, the grandson of Victor Hugo. That marriage ended in a catastrophe and a divorce, after which the young Hugo married the first cousin of Mademoiselle Dorian, who had attracted his fancy one morning when he had met her at his mother-in-law’s, together with her husband, the sculptor Ajalbert.
The daughter of the charming Madame Dorian had a curious personality; she seemed to take a vicious pleasure in thwarting her parents, and making herself disagreeable to them whenever she found the opportunity. She occupied a flat in their house, the Hotel de la Rue de la Faisanderie, and on the evenings when her father and mother gave receptions at which the partisans of Captain Dreyfus, such as Colonel, later on General, Picquart, the Zolas, and their circle of friends were honoured guests, Madame Hugo used to invite people such as Drumont and the strongest anti-Semites of Paris, so that several times queer situations arose, and the staunchest Dreyfusards entered by mistake the apartment of one of their worst enemies, whilst one evening Henri Rochefort himself, who for the world would not be seen at Madame Ménard Dorian’s, was ushered into her drawing-room by a footman who did not know him by sight.
That sort of thing, however, could not go on for any length of time, and when Pauline Hugo left the house of her parents, her departure was a relief to them. But even after her marriage to Herman Paul, after her divorce and Paul’s, she did not become reconciled to her father and mother.
Georges Hugo’s sister, Jeanne, was also a strange kind of person. She married when quite young, Leon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet, and very soon ran away from him with the explorer Charcot. It was said that Daudet was delighted when he divorced her, as they had scarcely been a single day without quarrelling since they married, and, although a fervent Catholic, he hastened to take to himself another wife.
The mother of Leon Daudet, Madame Alphonse Daudet, is also a celebrity in her way, and gives receptions at which the best society of Paris can be met. She has entirely renounced her bourgeois origin, and only talks of Dukes and Duchesses. She labels herself a Clerical by conviction and a Royalist by sympathy, and frequents the houses of great ladies, such as the Duchesse de Rohan or the Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles. Her second son, Lucien Daudet is a devoted admirer of the Empress Eugénie. Among Republican hostesses I haven’t yet mentioned Madame Psichari, the daughter of Ernest Renan. She has inherited the intelligence and the art of conversation of her father, and is one of the most distinguished women of modern France. At her house can be met most of the members of the French Academy, and nearly all the prominent literary men in Paris. Her receptions are perhaps a shade dull, and more or less solemn, but always instructive and always interesting. Her personality was always singularly attractive, and inspired great respect, because her errors of judgment when they occurred were always sincere.
Madame Psichari was one of the victims of the divorce mania that has lately taken hold of Parisian society, and, to the great astonishment of her numerous friends, after more than thirty years’ matrimony she applied for a decree. She had one son, who occupied for a few days the attention of Paris, when at twenty years old he married the daughter of Anatole France, nearly seventeen years his senior, to the chagrin of both their families.
Madame Zola, also, used to receive her friends on Saturdays in her little flat in the Rue de Rome. At her house could be met all the principal actors in the Dreyfus drama, including its hero. I must here mention one fact that is very little known, that Zola, far from making money out of the Dreyfus affair, as it was said everywhere that he had done, lost a great deal by his attitude in regard to it. His novels, instead of being read more than had been the case formerly, were on the contrary boycotted, and several important papers for which he wrote articles, and which published his works before they came out in volume form, closed their doors to him after the letter “J’accuse,” for which he was sent before a jury at first and to exile afterwards.