Henri Greffulhe (1848–1932)
Henri Greffulhe, who appears in Proust’s novel in the guise of “Basin,” the Duc of Guermantes, was born in 1848 into a wealthy and highly influential Franco-Dutch family whose fortune had been built largely through banking and successful investments in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. His father, Louis-Charles Greffulhe, was a prominent banker, and his mother, Joséphine de Riquet de Caraman, came from an old Belgian-French noble family. Thus Henri inherited both considerable wealth and a high position in French high society. The Greffulhe fortune was vast: it included extensive landholdings, canals, and railways, as well as investments in French and English industry.
Henri Greffulhe did not take an active role in day-to-day business affairs but rather conducted himself as a grand seigneur type of landowner and social figure. For most of his life, he devoted himself to preserving the family’s wealth and social standing. His principal interests included horse racing, the patronage of the arts, and influence in political society.
His father, Charles Greffulhe, had been one of the original founders of the Jockey Club together with Charles Laffitte (a relative of Baron Doasan). Despite the security of wealth and social prominence, the family’s noble status was relatively recent: the Greffulhes were ennobled only in 1818 as a reward for Henri’s grandfather’s support of the Bourbon Restoration.
Henri’s social circle was wide, encompassing names from both the old and the new French aristocracy, as well as leaders in industry, banking, literature, and the arts. His wife, Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, Comtessee Greffulhe, was in fact far more famous and influential than he. She presided over glittering salons that attracted artists, writers, politicians, and aristocrats alike. Henri, by contrast, kept to the background, his temperament being distant and reserved – a sharp contrast to his wife’s dazzling and highly public role. According to Tadié, the marriage between Henri and Élisabeth was a “Balzacian union”: “The wealth of a handsome man with a blond beard and numerous conquests in exchange for charm, refinement, and high birth.”
Of the pair, it was Élisabeth who captivated Proust. He observed her with admiration, and she became one of the inspirations for Oriane de Guermantes in À la Recherche du temps perdu. Henri himself, on the other hand, embodied for Proust a stiff, cold, and somewhat stereotypical figure of the old aristocracy – an object of little personal interest. When Proust attempted to penetrate the Greffulhes’ circle, he met with distance and reserve, both from the Comtessee and from her entourage. According to Weber, Proust later even resorted to paying the Greffulhes’ household staff in order to obtain insider knowledge of the household’s goings-on – evidence of how inaccessible this world remained to him.
Though Henri Greffulhe as an individual is not mirrored in Proust’s characters as directly as his wife, the cautious, distant, and formal type of aristocrat he represented left its imprint on many of Proust’s portraits. His marriage with Élisabeth also exemplified the broader pattern whereby economic and social capital were joined in spectacular yet emotionally impoverished unions – an institution Proust scrutinized critically in his novel.
Sources:
Lettres, pp.305-307,699-700,784-785,1003,1005.
Tadié 2000, p.318.
Weber, Caroline, Proust’s Duchesse: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, pp.42,51-52.
Painter, George D., Marcel Proust: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Vol.I., p.148.
Photo: Paul Nadar, 1881. Wikimedia Commons. Digitally colourised print. Public Domain.