Madame Lydie Aubernon de Nerville (1825–1899)
Mme Aubernon was one of the most famous salonnières of late nineteenth-century France, whose life and personality were unusual even within the colourful society of the Belle Époque. She was of bourgeois rather than aristocratic origin, yet she succeeded in building around herself a widely renowned and distinctive salon culture that attracted artists, writers, and social figures. Her personality combined eccentricity, intelligence, and theatricality, which made her at once impressive and amusing in the eyes of her contemporaries.
Mme Aubernon’s salon was located in a villa called Cour Brilée, near Trouville on the Normandy coast. It became one of those places where bourgeois refinement met the literary and artistic intelligentsia. At her dinners, discussions often revolved around pre-announced themes, and invited guests were instructed to prepare for them as if for a performance. This gave her gatherings the character of an intellectual play. She was a passionate supporter of Henrik Ibsen and even attempted to stage his plays in her salon, a sign of her ambitious cultural aspirations. Among her guests were Robert de Montesquiou and Madame Straus, who also belonged to Proust’s early circle.
Proust came to know Mme Aubernon in the late 1880s or early 1890s, most likely through Montesquiou or Madame Straus. Although he was not a close friend of hers, he observed her personality and behavior with great attentiveness. Aubernon was one of the key inspirations for the character of Mme Verdurin: her striking appearance, tendency toward social control, and idiosyncratic tastes were all traits that passed from reality into fiction.
Harold Painter recounts a caricatured yet vivid anecdote about Madame and her evening receptions: ”Mme Aubernon was a fat, lively little woman, with dimpled arms, and wore loud beribboned dresses and shoes with pompoms … The guests did not always take the custom as seriously as she wished. “What is your opinion of adultery?” she asked Mme Straus one week, when that happened to be the theme, and Mme Straus replied: “I’m so sorry, I prepared incest by mistake.” Labiche, when asked what he thought of Shakespeare, enquired: “Why, is he marrying someone we know?” … When Mme Laure Baignéres was asked the same question: “What do you think about love?” she could only reply, “I make it, often, but I never, never talk about it.” The dinners often ended in an icy silence. “The Faubourg never appeared there,” Painter writes. Proust, however, enjoyed his dinners at the salon, and Madame Aubernon declared: “Marcel’s epigrams are definitive.’’*
Aubernon’s salon was an example of how, in late nineteenth-century France, women could attain a visible position in society without noble birth or official status. She died in 1899, but her influence persisted in Proust’s literary world all the way to the final volumes of the novel cycle.
Sources:
Lettres, pp.1003,1011.
Tadié 2000, pp.217,288,453,548,741.
*In the novel, the scene is transposed to the salon of Mme de Villeparisis. RTP, Vol. II, p.492; Painter 1971, pp.99-100 and 85-86,104.
Photo: Paul Nadar, 1883. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Public Domain.