Word: verdurins
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...within what seems a short span of time, Swann must plead for Odette's affections. He pursues her as the rejects him in favor of the wealthy bourgeoise, Madame Verdurin (Marie-Christine Barrault). In desperation, Swann searches Odette's room for elusive voices. He torments himself with details of her lesbian attachments. Foreboding music adds to the tension. Swann's frustrations build to such a pitch that a crash seems inevitable...
...became two people, Princess Yourbeletieff, the young sponsor of the Ballets Russes: "One might have supposed that this marvelous creature had been imported in their innumerable baggage, and as their most priceless treasure, by the Russian dancers." Proust also used her as one of the inspirations for Mme. Verdurin, the far less sympathetic social climber. Then the magical synthesizer introduced his Misias to each other: "Mme. Verdurin's strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble that she used to take for her faithful, the marvelous dinners that she gave for them alone ... a sort of official...
...international successes whose canvases Gertrude could no longer afford. The interesting new arrivals in Paris were writers, and Gertrude courted them too. But she was older, more rigid and more jealous of writing talent. There began to be in her a shadow of Proust's tyrannical salonkeeper Mme. Verdurin. Any small slight to Gertrude, even an appearance at a party in someone else's salon, was enough to send Alice to the phone with the cutoff call...
...passion into social climbing. The life of the salons provides Author Painter with the most fascinating and amusing section of his book. The Parisian wits skewered each other like shish kebab. At Mme. Aubernon's (a fat, lively little woman and the chief model for Mme. Verdurin in Remembrance), the subject for conversation was announced days in advance. "What is your opinion of adultery?" she asked Mme. Straus (a Duchesse de Guermantes model) when that was the theme. Mme. Straus replied, "I'm so sorry; I prepared incest by mistake...
Someone ought to do for Gaylord [Babbitt] what Proust did for Madame Verdurin.* It would be a public service to publish a catalogue of the dreary cliches of so-called avant-gardism, and to point out that old George, with his uncomplicated enthusiasm for baseball and civil philanthropy, was no more hostile to genuine intellectual independence than Junior, with his exhibitionistic juggling of the phrases of psychoanalysis and wine tasting...