Caroline Weber - Prousts duchess: how three celebrated women captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris

Marcel Proust was never a morning person. But for a short while in the spring of 1892, he got out of bed early.

The routine was always the same. After quickly dressing he set out from his familys apartment near the place de la Madeleinein one of the luxury residential buildings that had sprouted up along the Parisian boulevards a few decades priorand headed west into the Faubourg Saint-Honor, the most prestigious neighborhood on the Right Bank.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, this was the province of the flneur, but Proust, then a twenty-year-old law student, was no dandy out for an idle stroll around town. He strode with purpose, in search of elegance, and while he didnt know her yet (for elegance was a woman), he did know where she lived. It was there that he hurried each morning, at some risk to his delicate health. As he would confess to her a quarter of a century later, I used to have a heart attack every time I saw you.

To make this perilous trip, he took a path he had christened my route of hope. It began with a sharp right out of the Prousts apartment building, a seven-story limestone wedge that cleaved the surging traffic of the boulevard Malesherbes like a ships prow slicing through choppy waters. This turn brought him straightaway into the funereal hush of the rue de la Ville-lvque, a short side street that led past a row of single-family mansions, or htels particuliers, as big as ocean liners and still as tombs. Approaching the Ministry of the Interior, Proust veered left down the block-long rue des Saussaies and into the place Beauvau, where he paused just long enough to take in the titles on display in the windows of the mile Paul bookstore. Then he made another right turn into quiet. Five more minutes of brisk walking led him to his destination: a narrow, four-story residential building at 34, rue de Miromesnil.

With its cheap stucco faade and its sooty dormered roof, this structure had nothing visibly special about it. Built a century earlier, it lacked the modern amenities Proust and his family enjoyed at home: an elevator, efficient ventilation, bathrooms with running water. But to him, the shabby sliver of a building was the Promised Land, holy because inhabited by the goddess whose exit he now, stationed on the sidewalk across from the front door, anxiously awaited.

Most mornings, he didnt have to linger for long before she stepped outside. A petite blond countess in her early thirties, she would give no indication that she had spotted the dark-eyed, dark-haired youth gawking at her from across the street, though the rue de Miromesnil being neither busy nor wide, he would have been hard to miss. As she made her habitual left turn toward the place Beauvau, Proust afforded her a brief head start before taking off at a trot behind her. Luckily for him, she tended on these jaunts to eschew the company of a liveried footmanan indispensable chaperone for most women of her class and a deterrent to precisely the sort of behavior in which Proust was engaging.

Every morning in the spring of 1892, Proust passed the mile Paul bookstore (far left), place Beauvau, on his way to Mme de Chevigns.

Dogging his ladys brisk, athletic steps around the quarter (she had a trim figure and liked to keep it that way), he loitered outside the imposing htels where she stopped to leave her calling cards, outside the boutiques where she did her shopping, and outside a ducal palace off the place de la Concorde where she paid two visits a day, the first and last stops on her busy social round. He jogged up and down her favorite promenade, the Champs-lyses, in her wake, dodging carriages and pedestrians so as not to lose the trail. From a discreet distance, he strained for glimpses of her aquiline profile and her bright, blue eyes, the color of the sky of Francealso the color of the cornflowers on her hat. Committing every last detail of her face and dress to memory, he marveled at the alchemy whereby she turned a simple morning walkinto a whole poem of elegance, the finest adornment, the rarest flower under the sun.

Quite obviously, a creature this transfixing couldnt be just anyone, and indeed she was not. The object of Prousts obsession was a celebrity mondaine (society woman): a friend to royals, a muse to artists, a cynosure of the nobility, the darling of the social columns, a fantasy to strangers, and the quintessence, he wrote, of the singular elevating glory otherwise found solely in white peacocks, black swans,queens in captivity. But these qualities also made her maddeningly inaccessible to her young admirer, for while he and his mondaine lived in the same part of town, their social milieuxhers the haute noblesse, his the haute bourgeoisielay worlds apart.

Still, Proust nurtured the hope that one day she would take him under her wing and bear him aloft to a realm of pure, ineffable glamour. And so he trailed along behind her each morning, a stray puppy imprinting on a swan.