Charles Haas (1832–1902)
Charles Haas was a Parisian man of the world, remembered above all as one of the models for Swann. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, he belonged to the intellectual and aristocratic elite of late nineteenth-century Paris. He never pursued a formal profession, yet he was renowned as a man of wit, refinement, and a conversationalist much esteemed in the salons.
Haas was a familiar figure at the gatherings of Mme Straus or the Comtesse Robert de Fitz-James, in the foyer of the Comédie-Française, and in the studio of Edgar Degas. He maintained a passionate liaison with the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and also fathered a daughter with the Marquise Adélaïde d’Audiffret.
He was a member of the exclusive Cercle de la rue Royale, a Parisian gentlemen’s club founded in 1852. Composed chiefly of aristocrats and men of influence, the circle provided its members with luxurious surroundings for sociability, conversation, and the cultivation of networks, reflecting the lifestyle and values of the mid-nineteenth-century upper classes.
In 1868 he was appointed Inspector General of Historic Monuments. For his conduct during the Franco-Prussian War he received the medal for bravery, an honour that opened to him the doors of the ultra-snobbish Jockey Club, whose only other Jewish members were the Rothschilds. Haas’s true passion was for the eighteenth century and for paintings of the highest refinement. Proust encountered him around 1890 in the salon of Geneviève Straus, and a correspondence between the two men began in 1897. Mme Straus herself noted the resemblance between Swann and Haas, coining the hybrid name “Swann-Haas.”
Haas was, in Proust’s own words, “the point of departure” for Swann, though not in such a way that the novelist merely transposed him directly into fiction, but rather by investing him with “a different humanity.” In The Prisoner (published posthumously in 1923), the narrator even hints at the identity behind the character of Swann:
”And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was so young and you near the grave, it is already because the one you must have considered a little fool has made you the hero of one of his novels, that people are starting to talk about you again and that perhaps you will live. If in Tissot’s painting representing the balcony of the Cercle on the rue Royale, where you are between Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people talk so much about you, it is because they see that there are some traits of you in the character of Swann.”*
Proust first met James Tissot through Robert de Montesquiou’s invitations in 1894. Tissot’s painting Cercle de la rue Royale (1868) is a group portrait from the end of the Second Empire. It was commissioned by the club, and each of the twelve figures depicted contributed a thousand francs towards its execution. Initially, the work was placed in the club’s salon, but it was later decided that ownership would pass by lottery to one of the financiers or their descendants upon the club’s dissolution. In 1916 the painting finally came into the possession of Baron Hottinger (who is seated on the sofa at the right in the image) and was acquired from his family by the Musée d’Orsay in 2011.
James Tissot: The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Public Domain.
The scene is set on the balcony of the Hôtel de Coislin, overlooking the Place de la Concorde. In the background is the Palais de l’Industrie, built for the 1855 World Exhibition. Among the figures portrayed, the most notable are, at the far right, Prince Edmond-Melchior de Polignac (seated), the Marquis de Galliffet, and Charles Haas (standing). Galliffet later became a fierce opponent of the Paris Commune of 1871.
The group portrait, combining elements of Neoclassicism and Impressionism, follows the model of the British conversation piece by situating the figures outdoors. The work not only depicts the lifestyle of the era’s aristocracy but also consolidated Tissot’s reputation as one of his generation’s foremost portrait painters.
Sources:
Lettres, pp.651-652,1289.
Haas, Charles (1832-1902). Proust.ink.com. Created by William C. Carter and Nicolas Drogoul. https://www.proust-ink.com/proustaz-h and “Tissot, James-Jacques-Joseph (1836-1902) French Painter.”
Stephen O’Donnell’s blog ”Gods and Foolish Grandeur” https://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.com/2018/02/le-cercle-de-la-rue-royale-group.html
Musée d’Orsay: Le Cercle de la rue Royale. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/le-cercle-de-la-rue-royale-160849
Painter 1971, Vol. I, pp.90-94,126.
Tadié 2000, pp.320-321,404,759,846.
Williams 1999, p.11.
*RTP, Vol. III, p.705.
Photo: Paul Nadar, 1895. Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris. Digitally colourised print. Public Domain.