A Chance Encounter With Proust’s Goddaughter Unraveled a History of Antisemitism

One bright spring day in Paris, the man who would years later become my husband and I walked over a stone bridge onto the Ile St Louis to meet a distant cousin of his grandmother. In the dark, smoky, wood-lined interior of a tiny bistro, this princess from another world removed her chinchilla coat. I tried to restrain myself from asking her too quickly if it was true that she was Marcel Proust’s goddaughter. She said that she was.

Princess Priscilla Bibesco did not remember anything about her godfather, who died when she was two. But from the cork-lined bedroom into which the novelist had retreated (to block out noise, dust, and all other distractions) he wrote to Priscilla’s father in 1920: “It is in this little girl that all we know now continues.” And here she was: the only child of Proust’s handsome, charming, aristocratic friend, the Romanian diplomat, Prince Antoine Bibesco. It was Antoine, with whom Proust had a secret language and on whom Proust based the figure of the Marquis de Saint-Loup in In Search of Lost Time.

After lunch, we stepped with her across the cobbles to 45 Quai Bourbon, where her first-floor apartment faced the Seine from the end of the island like the prow of a ship sailing towards Notre Dame. This apartment in itself told a story of grandeur and decline. At one point, the proud Bibescos owned the whole house, a golden limestone palace with the Seine as its moat. But by now, with the other apartments sold off, the princess had retreated into the piano nobile.

We climbed up the winding back stairs into a light-flooded expanse of polished parquet floors, gilt-tooled leather-bound books, Louis XVI furniture, rugs, Édouard Vuillard paintings, and John Singer Sargent charcoal drawings of women. Most beautiful of all was the way that everything—the walls, the silk curtains—reflected water and sky in a pale shade of eau de nil, the river bouncing sunlight through the glass. The Belle Epoque, that retrospectively-named period when the Third Republic was rebuilding the city into the “capital of the nineteenth century” (as Walter Benjamin would call it), had captured my imagination.

Somewhere in the same dreamscape was the Impressionist art I had seen—paintings such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Mme Charpentier and her children, hanging in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in which Mme Charpentier’s kindly face watches over her two frothily dressed children. Proust wrote about this painting that Renoir had depicted “the poetry of an elegant home and the beautiful dresses of our time.” (Mme Charpentier wears black and white couture from the House of Worth.)

Renoir made his fortune in America, when his dealer took his work to New York. But before America fell in love with his work, it was Paris’s “haute juiverie” (Jewish elite) who had supported and encouraged Renoir and his fellow Impressionists. Proust’s friend, the influential art critic and patron Charles Ephrussi, the third son of a Jewish banking-and-grain family from Odessa, secured commissions for Renoir when the artist most needed them. One was from Ephrussi’shis fellow art-lover (they built collections of Oriental art together) and actual lover, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, née Morpurgo, herself a friend of Proust.

The mesmerizing Louise held a salon in which artists met patrons, writers, and publishers. (She helped edit the works of the novelist and critic Paul Bourget, while inspiring Guy de Maupassant and others.) A salon was no easy undertaking; they were a competitive and rigorous cultural force. A friend of Louise’s hosted the French première of part of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example. At Ephrussi’s bidding, Louise Cahen d’Anvers commissioned Renoir to paint first her elder daughter, Irène, and then, a year later in 1881, her two younger girls, Alice and Elisabeth, together.

These daughters of a prominent Jewish banking dynasty emerged on Renoir’s canvases. Irene appeared as Little Irène, or The Girl with the Blue Ribbon, wistful, against a background of dense foliage, blue silk ribbon in her flaming hair. And Alice and Elisabeth were immortalized in Pink and Blue, four-year-old Alice’s feet sweetly fan out as she sticks a chubby thumb in her sash and six-year-old Elisabeth firmly holds her sister’s hand. Renoir, an occasional fashion illustrator, who studied the drapery of clothing all his life (his father was a tailor, his mother and wife seamstresses), paints the belle fabric of the Belle Epoque better than anyone.

In the 1890s the Dreyfus affair tore France apart by turning its underlying antisemitism into a form of civil war. Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, had been falsely convicted of treason and, as the evidence mounted that he had been framed, half of France refused to accept his innocence. The Cahen d’Anvers’ response was to demonstrate their deep love and loyalty to France by buying and restoring the glorious wreck of the Chateau de Champs sur Marne outside Paris, once home to Madame de Pompadour. Their son-in-law (Irène’s husband), Moïse de Camondo, built a house in the spirit of Le Petit Trianon and filled it with Sèvres porcelain and Beauvais tapestries. Moïse’s cousin Isaac de Camondo gave over 800 art works to the Louvre. In the 1930s the Cahen d’Anvers gave their chateau to the French nation (it is now open to the public) and Moïse de Camondo, too, left his house as a museum. Their generosity was extraordinary.

As I researched the lives of the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, I realized that their whole lives were colored by the antisemitism they faced. As grown women they had the chance to change their identities through marriage. They took it: Irène divorced her first, Jewish, husband and became a Catholic, an Italian Contessa. Alice married an English soldier. Elisabeth also became a Catholic and married two Frenchmen.

But this was not to save them. Elisabeth was murdered in or on the way to Auschwitz, betrayed by the local mayor, a French aristocrat who had known her family for generations. Irène’s daughter Béatrice, son-in-law Léon Reinach, and her grandchildren, Fanny and Betrand Reinach, all perished there too. Gaston Bernheim de Villiers, Renoir’s Jewish dealer, who by now owned Pink and Blue, suffered as his son Claude was deported and murdered in Auschwitz too. Many Bernheim pictures were ransacked and never returned. All that life, that evocative finery, and so much else besides had been swept aside in the brutal, unthinkable violence of the Holocaust.

As I researched the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, as I sought to understand how the golden age of France could tumble into the horror of the Second World War, these lost families of Paris appeared before me. The salonnières, collectors, chateau-restorers, patrons, and hostesses of those Jewish families made Golden Age artistic life flourish with their patronage and commissions. Beatrice Ephrussi (nee de Rothschild) left her pink palace in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat; the Reinachs their Grecian-style villa, nearby in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the Villa Kérylos. These clans had either emigrated or perished when France turned against them during the years of the Vichy regime; their surnames no longer exist in France.

Priscilla died in 2004 and never knew that she, and those Renoir portraits, were the catalyst of a three-fold desire: to capture the flavor of Belle Epoque life, to tell a family story, and to portray the importance of contemporary discourse. The antisemitism that lay beneath the surface of that era of course came back with such barbaric force in 1940. There was such tragedy and courage in the lives of those Impressionist children in their party dresses.

Catherine Ostler is the author of The Renoir Girls, which is out this week.