France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

Madame de Montebello had a great friend who tried hard to launch her into the society of the Faubourg St. Germain. It was the Comte Joseph de Gontaut Biron, the son of the former French Ambassador in Berlin, the Vicomte de Gontaut Biron, and one of the most popular men in the whole of Paris, who usually did the honours of the city when Russian Grand Dukes visited it. The Comte de Gontaut was the only handsome member of a very ugly family which had redeemed its want of beauty by unusual cleverness. He had been married to a Princesse de Polignac, whose heart he had very soon broken, and whose fortune he had quite as soon squandered. The Gontauts occupied a privileged position in the Faubourg St. Germain, thanks to their numerous alliances and to their many relatives. The elder members of the family, such as the Comtesse Armand, or the Princesse de Beauvau, tried to maintain the traditions of their race, and could be classified among the hautes et puissantes dames of their generation, but the younger members had mixed freely with the other elements of Paris society, and had assimilated their characteristics as well as those of their own circle.

I have spoken of the Comte Boni de Castellane, the former husband of Miss Anna Gould. His father, the Marquis de Castellane, had at one time played a part in French politics, when he had been a member of the first Assemblée Nationale, which had elected M. Thiers as President of the Republic, or rather the Executive power as it was called at that time. Unpleasant incidents of a private nature had obliged him to leave public life, and also to retire from several clubs of which he had been a member. But he had contrived to keep afloat in the Faubourg, and was rather feared there on account of the sharpness of his tongue and the ill-nature with which he repeated all the gossip which he spent his time in collecting. He was extremely intelligent, and had none of the foppery which made his son so thoroughly disagreeable; he would certainly have been a man who could have made his way in the world had he only tried to conform to the tenets of society.

His second son married the widow of Prince Furstenberg, who was a cousin of his, being the daughter of the old Duc de Sagan and of his second wife, Mademoiselle Pauline de Castellane, and considerably older than himself. The Comtesse Jean de Castellane is at the present moment one of the leading hostesses in Paris. She is clever, with excellent manners, with tendencies to pose as a woman of culture, and not disdaining to write now and then little articles in the daily papers, which are always accepted with pleasure on account of the signature which accompanies them. She could never be taken for anything else but a lady, but I doubt whether one would at once call her a grande dame in the sense in which this word was understood formerly.

I think I have mentioned the name of the Comtesse de Trédern. That lady certainly deserves more than a passing mention. She was a Mlle. Say, the sister of the Princesse Amedée de Broglie, and she had married when quite young the Marquis de Brissac, the eldest son of the Duc de Brissac, who was killed during the Franco-German War. Left a widow with two children, she began first to restore the castle of Brissac in Anjou, which is considered one of the finest private residences in France, and which she bought from her father-in-law. Then she married the Comte de Trédern, from whom she parted after a few years of troublous union. Since then she has queened it at Brissac, or in her beautiful house of the Place Vendôme, where she regularly gives sumptuous entertainments.

Among other hostesses I must say a word concerning the Duchesse de Gramont, a Jewess and the daughter of Baron Amschel de Rothschild of Frankfurt. She was one of the few really grandes dames of Paris. Clever, full of tact, and kind and good, as few women have been kind and good, she was essentially a great lady, and made for herself friends wherever she went. Her husband is now married to an Italian Princess, whom he took to his heart a few months after the death of the Duchesse Marguerite, but the latter is not forgotten by the world which she graced and adorned, and where her early death caused more sincere sorrow than is generally expressed in the circle to which she belonged.

Madame de Gramont had a sister who became the Princesse de Wagram, and who was also a favourite in Parisian society, where she won for herself a great position. Unfortunately she also died young, and with her disappeared one of the last great ladies in France.

Foreigners form an important contingent in Paris society. The gay town has always attracted wandering souls eager to find in strange places what they cannot get at home, and who have succumbed so well to its charms that they lack the courage to leave it. A numerous company of Americans and Russians met in society live in the new district about the Arc de Triomphe, and they visit all the houses where entertainments are going on. Polish emigrants and Polish aristocracy have found their headquarters in the Ile St. Louis at the Hotel Lambert, where Prince Ladislas Tsartoryski, the husband of Princess Marguerite of Orleans, opened the doors of his magnificent residence to them with unbounded hospitality.

Several members of the Radziwill family also settled by the Seine, after the marriage of one of them with the daughter of M. Blanc, the owner of the Monaco gambling house. He was the father of the present Duchesse de Doudeauville. The Counts Branicki and their connections bought themselves houses in the neighbourhood of the Rue de Penthièvre, where the chief of the race had settled. There hostility to the Russian Government was fanned by every possible device, and there hatred against Russia was preached with an energy worthy of a better cause.

The Russian colony was also an important one. It lacked, however, a rendezvous, and it had to submit to constant rebuffs on the part of its own Embassy and Consulate, where it is the fashion to repulse all the compatriots who call there unless they belong to the ultra-smart set which is in possession of influence in St. Petersburg official circles. Several Russian Grand Dukes, who had become constant inhabitants of the French capital, gave their colony an appearance of splendour which other foreign quarters lacked. Foremost among these scions of the Russian Imperial house was the Grand Duke Paul, who, after his marriage with the divorced wife of one of the officers of his own regiment, had left his fatherland and settled in Paris permanently. He goes about a great deal in society, where his wife, who has been created Countess of Hohenfelsen by the Prince Regent of Bavaria, is treated like a Grand Duchess, and in society given the precedence of one.

Life in smart Paris to-day is totally different from life as it was in the time of the Second Empire. Sport has entered into it, and is now one of its principal functions. Everyone who can, or who cannot, afford it possesses an automobile, and thinks himself obliged to make a show of it in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne, which is also invaded before lunch by a bevy of fair ladies who pretend they come there to do some walking, but who in reality want only to show themselves and to see others. It is there that all the gossip, which later on in the afternoon is spread at many tables, finds its origin, and where reputations are marred and lost. It is there that “accidental” meetings take place either at polo or at some exhibition, or at one of the numerous tea-houses that have sprung up on all sides lately, where the Parisienne comes to eat cakes, and not to drink tea, with which she is not yet sufficiently familiar. From ten to twelve o’clock everybody worth knowing is to be met in the Bois, where it is fashionable to be seen at that hour, and where no one would care to go later or earlier.