Emile Zola died, relatively, a poor man, and his widow found herself reduced to almost embarrassed circumstances after his death. She sold a great deal of the furniture which he had collected, gave up to the State in return for a modest remuneration the villa of Médan, where he had lived for so many years, and arranged her existence on quite a different scale from that which had been her custom before her widowhood. Zola, as well as Captain Dreyfus himself, were the only two people who did not profit by the clamour which arose around them and around their actions.
Talking about Dreyfus reminds me of an incident in his story which, so far, I believe, has never been told. When he was languishing on the barren rock called the Devil’s Island, a Russian who had had occasion to approach the Tsar spoke to Mathieu Dreyfus, the Captain’s brother, and advised him to appeal to the Russian Sovereign to intercede in favour of the Captain. Mathieu Dreyfus said that he would consult his sister-in-law, and reply in a few days. When these days had elapsed, he came back and told the man who had made the proposition that neither Madame Dreyfus, nor himself, thought that they had the moral right to apply to a foreign Monarch, or to ask his intervention in a case that was too important for France not to allow her to dispose of it herself. In general the dignity displayed by the whole Dreyfus family cannot sufficiently be praised; they all unanimously showed themselves superior to the misfortunes which assailed them.
So far all the hostesses of whom I have spoken were long past middle age, but there was another lady, young and beautiful, with a shade of eccentricity in her manners, who also aspired to have a salon, and to be able to dictate to those who visited it, or at least to suggest to them the opinions they ought to have. It was the Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles, a Roumanian by birth, coming from the family of the Princes of Brancovan, whose mother had been very well known in London, where her father, Musurus Pasha, had occupied for long the post of Turkish Ambassador. The Princesse de Brancovan was one of the best musicians of her generation, and her wonderful talent for the piano was famous among her acquaintances. She had been handsome, and her daughters had inherited her loveliness as well as her intellectual gifts. The eldest one, whose large dowry secured her an entrance into the ancient aristocratic family of the Ducs de Noailles, has made for herself a name among the poets of modern France Her books have been widely read, and have had a great success, which they deserved, because there was some really genuine poetic inspiration in them. Madame de Noailles has succumbed to the vogue of eccentricity; she wears long floating white garments which trail out behind and give her the appearance of a fairy from the children’s tales. She speaks languidly, as if sick of a world she would really be very sorry to leave, and looks disdainfully at humanity in general.
The Comtesse de Noailles used to give parties, during which she recited some of her own poetry, and allowed her great friend and admirer, the Comte Robert de Montesquieu, to read his. She did not trouble much about her guests, merely smiled on them when they arrived, and softly sighed when she saw them going away. She glided about her lovely rooms, as the ghost of something too beautiful to be real, and she seemed to be interested in nothing that did not concern her personally, or that had no association with her books or poems.
Her receptions were singularly eclectic. Apart from the family, friends and relations of the Noailles, one met people who belonged to an entirely different grade—journalists, artists, politicians, even those of an advanced shade; members of the Republican government, and diplomats or foreigners happening to be in Paris. She received them all with the utmost grace, and liked to see them surround her, like the satellites of her fame and of her high social position. In its way her vanity was as remarkable as it was charming.
Madame de Noailles composed poems, the Comtesse de Greffuhle wrote operas and sonatas with decided talent. Madame de Greffuhle has played, and is playing still, a very important part in Parisian society. She was by birth a Princess de Chimay, and had married, without dower, the Count Greffuhle, whose fortune was supposed to be one of the largest in France, and had at once begun to exercise a considerable influence in the circles in which she moved. She was beautiful, intelligent, had great tact, and a considerable knowledge of the world, liked to surround herself with artists and musicians, to organise exhibitions of works of art, and to help her neighbour as much as she could.
Her salon was not the meeting-place of the pure Faubourg St. Germain, neither was it, on the other hand, exclusively Republican. But it afforded a neutral ground to men belonging to both parties, and her receptions were never dull nor banal, but on the contrary always interesting and pleasant. She possessed a lovely country place near Paris, called Bois Boudran, where she entertained most sumptuously, and where she often welcomed foreign Sovereigns or members of Royal houses, when they happened to come to France. Madame de Greffuhle was a woman essentially made for society, who could never have lived outside it. She described herself better than anyone else could have done one day when she was asked to write her name on the visitors’ book of the Phare d’Ailly, near Dieppe, where some friends had taken her. She signed “Chimay Greffuhle, dame de qualité,” thus admitting that she had no pretensions to be considered a grande dame.
The Baron Henri de Rothschild was also “un écrivain amateur,” with more pretensions to literary talent than perhaps that talent deserved. He had married Mlle. Weiswiller, who is supposed to be one of the best-dressed women in Paris, and whose name appears prominently in all the chronicles of the Figaro or the Gaulois. The couple entertain with the hospitality for which their family has always been famous, and the Baron has made for himself a name among the benefactors of the Paris poor, for whom he does a great deal. He has studied medicine and even practised it with all the zeal of a millionaire who believes himself to have a vocation for some kind of science.
Baron Henri is an exceedingly pleasant man, cultured, and well read, capable of most entertaining conversation on a variety of topics. The receptions which he gives, and of which his wife helps him to do the honours with an exquisite grace, are the meeting-place of almost all the distinguished men of scientific and literary Paris. Members of the government can be met at them, but though his salon is known to be Liberal in its opinions, it is yet one at which politics have never played a part or been discussed. The guests succeeded in avoiding them even at the time of the Dreyfus affair, during which the Rothschilds adopted an entirely passive and impartial attitude.
Talking of politics makes me think of a house where they were always very prominent, and almost the only subject of conversation. It was the house of M. Rouvier, one of the ablest politicians whom France has seen in recent times, who had occupied, more than once, important State positions, and who was always spoken of, among his friends, as a possible President of the Republic. M. Rouvier’s was a most complicated mind. He had considerable capacity, an intelligence far above the average, great ambition, and absolutely no vanity, perhaps because he had a full consciousness of his strength and of his worth, in presence of the lesser intelligences with which he was surrounded.