Three treasures cherished by Proust’s greatest muse, Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe

From the late 1880s through to the 1920s, Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe was the uncrowned queen of French high society. Dark-eyed, auburn-haired and always magnificently dressed, she was renowned for her charisma and sovereign allure.

The author Marcel Proust wrote that ‘she is difficult to judge, perhaps because judging is comparing, and [nothing] in her [can be] seen in any other woman… The mystery of her beauty is in her glow… I have never seen a woman as beautiful.’

Greffulhe moved between masked balls, formal dinners and evenings at the opera. She also hosted Paris’s most famous salon, at her townhouse on the Rue d’Astorg, bringing fellow aristocrats together with esteemed figures from the arts, science and politics. That house was such a hub for the French elite that it became known as ‘the Vatican’.

As will be revealed below, however, there was more to the countess than her social life. She helped the two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, for example, finance the construction of the Radium Institute in Paris — a research centre into radioactivity and its possible applications in medicine.

Elisabeth was also the inspiration for a major character in what is perhaps the greatest novel of the 20th century, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).

On 18 November 2025, three items once owned by her are being offered in The Exceptional Sale at Christie’s in Paris. These are a sculpture by Auguste Rodin entitled Appel aux Armes (The Call to Arms); a Louis VXI ormolu-mounted mahogany desk, circa 1780, by the Parisian ébéniste Roger Vandercruse Lacroix; and a portrait of the countess by Paul César Helleu.

Elisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay was born in Paris in 1860, into a family of Belgian princes (on her father’s side) and French nobles (on her mother’s). She learned to play the piano to a high standard. While still a teenager, she married Count Henry Greffulhe, the scion of a rich banking family.

Henry was no ideal husband. He kept dozens of mistresses, whom he visited so often that his horse learned to stop at each of their doors without prompt. Married life for Elisabeth, initially, was marked by loneliness and boredom — though she countered this by indulging her love of music and arranging small concerts.

As time passed, those concerts grew bigger and more frequent, and the countess extended her activity to include operatic performances, too. In 1890, she launched the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales, an entity that encouraged her friends and peers to offer financial support for the staging of musical productions — particularly works that were new to French audiences. Edmond de Rothschild and the country’s president, Sadi Carnot, were among the early supporters, with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and Richard Strauss’s Salomé among the works that duly received French premieres.

Greffulhe’s celebrity was such that when she attended performances, she sometimes asked for the house lights to be dimmed — to direct the audience’s attention away from herself and onto the performers.

Her sense of fashion goes some way to explaining the public interest. Greffulhe wore eye-catching dresses and gowns by Mariano Fortuny, Jeanne Lanvin and the day’s other leading couturiers. In many cases, she worked with them on their creations for her — for example, when she had Jean-Philippe Worth convert a court robe (given to her by Emperor Nicholas II of Russia) into an evening cape.

Greffulhe described Paris as her ‘kingdom’ and said that, on meeting someone, ‘I want that person to carry away from our encounter an image of prestige like none other.’

In 2015-16, a large number of her dresses were shown in La mode retrouvée, an exhibition at Palais Galliera, the Paris fashion museum. This later transferred to the Museum at FIT in New York, under the title of Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe.

One standout exhibit was the ‘Lily Dress’, designed by the House of Worth. Long, close-fitting and made of black velvet, it boasts silk satin appliqués in the form of lilies, embroidered with glass pearls. Greffulhe was captured wearing it in a shoot with the society photographer Paul Nadar in 1896.

A number of painters also produced portraits of the countess, from Carolus-Duran to Philip de László, who executed a striking canvas of her in 1909.

Elsewhere in the field of visual arts, Greffulhe acted as patron to Rodin and James McNeill Whistler. She did the same for the composer Gabriel Fauré, who dedicated his work Pavane to her. The countess’s most significant connection with a creative figure, though, was undoubtedly with Proust.

Eleven years her junior, Proust was born on the western outskirts of Paris in 1871, the son of an epidemiologist. As a young man, he had vague literary ambitions but penned little more than a handful of essays and stories that few people read. His fellow writer André Gide dubbed him a ‘dilettante’ who ‘frequented the houses of Madames X and Z’.

This reflected the fact that, in the early part of his career, Proust’s main interest seemed to be to enter high-society circles. The women to whom Gide was alluding were the likes of Greffulhe, Georges Bizet’s wife Geneviève Straus and Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné (aka Laure de Sade) — each of them the host of a renowned Belle Epoque salon.

Proust was especially struck by Greffulhe, whom he described as ‘divine’. The pair first met in the mid-1890s, with the writer later admitting: ‘I can’t tell how many times I went to the opera, just to admire her bearing as she went up a stairway.’ (Proust was gay, so his attraction to Greffulhe shouldn’t be considered sexual.)

His entry into her orbit was slow. According to Caroline Weber — in her book about the three aforementioned socialites, Proust’s Duchess — it only really began in 1904, the year Greffulhe’s daughter Elaine married Proust’s friend, the physicist Armand de Gramont.

‘From then on,’ Weber writes, the countess ‘deigned to let him fill an empty seat in her box at the opera or function at her dinner parties as a “toothpick”: a person brought in after the meal, for the amusement of more important invitees’.

By this time, Proust was writing occasional columns for the newspaper Le Figaro, and perhaps this increased his status in Greffulhe’s eyes, too.

What’s clear is that, as time went on, and the more he was exposed to high society, the more disillusioned Proust was by it. His experiences weren’t in vain, however. He adapted many of them for inclusion in A la recherche du temps perdu, his sprawling seven-volume masterpiece written between 1908 and 1922.

His first literary work of note, it was semi-autobiographical and told the story of its narrator Marcel’s journey from boyhood to middle age, culminating in the discovery of his vocation as a writer. A key part of that journey charts Marcel’s entry into the haute société realm of the Duchess de Guermantes, a character inspired chiefly by Greffulhe (alongside elements of both Straus and de Sade).

Early on, the narrator is infatuated, describing her as ‘a queen among all other women’. Like Proust himself with Greffulhe, however, Marcel comes to find the duchess’s world shallow and lacking in meaning, when finally he gains admittance to it. All that glitters turns out not to be gold — and he finds inexcusable the gaps in her knowledge about the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. (‘To think, that’s the woman I walked miles every morning to see,’ he says, referring to youthful strolls he had taken in the duchess’s neighbourhood in the hope of bumping into her.)

To be fair to Greffulhe, her range of interests and achievements was much broader than that of her fictional counterpart. We haven’t even considered the part she played in bringing Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dance company to Paris in the years immediately before the First World War; or the fact that, during that conflict, she designed and helped distribute uniforms for French soldiers.

Proust died in 1922, aged 51. Aristocratic authority was declining in France by that point, and the prestige Greffulhe possessed during the Belle Epoque had also waned. She spent increasing time in the countryside.

The countess passed away in 1952, at the age of 92. Her final years had been filled with unwelcome visits from admirers and biographers of Proust’s, hoping to be treated to memories of the author. Far from impressed with the Duchess de Guermantes association, she (falsely) told people that she had barely known him. He was ‘a displeasing little man’, she said, ‘who was forever skulking about in doorways’.

The Exceptional Sale is on view until 18 November 2025 as part of Classic Week at Christie’s in Paris