One of Marcel’s loves: Jeanne Pouquet!
Translated from French.
One of Marcel’s loves: Jeanne Pouquet! 👧🏻👦🏻
Jeanne Pouquet (1874–1962) was an actress 🎭 and a friend of Marcel Proust since their youth 🏸. The wife of the playwright Gaston Arman de Caillavet, she was largely the inspiration for the character of Gilberte Swann in “In Search of Lost Time”. 👧🏻
Following Gaston’s death 🪦, she remarried her cousin Maurice Pouquet. Her pen name is therefore Jeanne Maurice Pouquet. 🖋️
In this volume, the author brings together her memories of her mother-in-law’s salon, that of Mme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models for Mme Verdurin in the Search. She places particular emphasis on the fate of Anatole France, one of Proust’s literary mentors and the model for the novelist Bergotte 📘. Anatole France, who might well have produced no works at all and remained, like Charles Swann, a ‘bachelor of art’ 🖼️, was taken under the wing of ‘la patronne’ and, within a few years, became one of the most prominent authors of his generation, even winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, whilst Marcel Proust was still alive.
I’m quoting @lagazettedrouot from @drouot_paris 🗞️👩🏻⚖️, which recently put up for sale a signed copy of the same book 📓🔖: “From her marriage to Gaston Arman de Caillavet, a single daughter was born, Simone, the main inspiration for Mademoiselle de Saint-Loup in “In Search of Lost Time”.”
Madame Arman de Cavaillet, his mother-in-law, was Anatole France’s muse and one of the models for Madame Verdurin in “In Search of Lost Time”. Her salon was highly prominent during the Third Republic 🎟️ and brought together the intellectual, social and political elite.” 🤵🏻♂️🎻
André Maurois, who married Simone de Caillavet, revived Proustian criticism in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when Sartre, in his journal “Les Temps modernes”, was renouncing Proust’s legacy 🥊. Maurois published “The Search for Marcel Proust”, wrote the preface to the first “Pléiade” edition (edited by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré) and acted as a bridge to the new generation of Proust critics, such as Henri Bonnet and Jean-Yves Tadié. 🥂
Jeanne Pouquet: a Proustian love story! 👨🏻📚🕰️
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