Émile Zola, a regular attendee, published his “J’Accuse” in the journal L’Aurore on Januthis fierce call for justice was supported the next day by the “Manifesto of the Intellectuals,” signed by Proust, Élie and Daniel Halévy, Jacques Bizet, and others. Geneviève Straus’s salon became the center for pro-Dreyfus forces. In October 1897 Joseph Reinach, a politician, lawyer, and longtime friend of Geneviève’s, announced at her salon that Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was the author of the seditious bordereau accusing Dreyfus upon hearing this defense of Dreyfus, salon habitués Edgar Degas, Jules Lemaitre, and Jean-Louis Forain left indignantly, never to return. In 1894 the French military captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was charged with espionage against the government. Her refined elegance and melancholic air were immortalized on canvas by Gustave Moreau, Giovanni Boldial, Auguste Toulemouche, and Jules-Élie Delaunay, and in the pages of Edmond de Goncourt’s journals and Guy de Maupassant’s Notre coeur (Our Heart). In 1908, Geneviève gave Proust a gift of five small notebooks, in which he began to sketch the fragments of his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) she provided one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes. In letters to her he ruminated about the shape of his characters and the quality of his prose. Over the years of their friendship Straus served as Proust’s muse and literary confidante. The Straus drawing room in Paris, decorated with paintings by Jean-Marc Nattier, Georges de La Tour, and Claude Monet, attracted an elegant society of artists, politicians, and nobility that captivated the young Marcel Proust, a schoolmate of Geneviève’s son. In 1893 the construction was finished on their villa, Le Clos des Mûriers, in Trouville, where Geneviève spent many summers. The couple moved first to 134 boulevard Haussmann, and in 1898 to 104 rue de Miromesnil. In 1886 she married Emile Straus (1844–1929), a wealthy lawyer to the Rothschild family and an avid art collector. She drew to her home a group of intimate friends whose company staved off her depression and her salon soon widened in scope and ambition. Bizet’s fame grew posthumously, and Geneviève inherited the fortunes of his success, as well as the rights to her father’s oeuvre after her mother’s death in 1884. Mere months after the premiere of his opera Carmen in 1875, Georges Bizet died of cardiac arrest Geneviève was left widowed at the age of twenty-six. Geneviève’s fragile nerves and her mother’s declining mental health only heightened the tensions. The Bizets’ marriage suffered because of their precarious finances, which were exacerbated by the economic chaos of the Franco-Prussian War. They lived at 22 rue de Douai with their son Jacques (1872–1922) and with Geneviève’s cousin Ludovic Halévy, his wife Valentine and their two sons, Élie and Daniel. Geneviève dismissed the possibility of converting to Bizet’s Catholicism, claiming that she had “trop peu de religion pour en changer” (too little religion to change it). Geneviève had met her father’s brilliant protégé Georges Bizet at one of her parents’ soirées although her family initially opposed her union with a man of humble economic origins, the two were married in 1869. The death of Geneviève’s father in 1862 and of her sister in 1864 precipitated a chronic melancholy, which was eventually mitigated by the creation of her salon. Geneviève Halévy and her older sister Esther (born in 1843) studied piano with Charles Gounod. His nephew, Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), a novelist and librettist, collaborated with Henri Meilhac on operas by Jacques Offenbach. Her father, Jacques Fromental Élie Halévy (1799–1862), was permanent secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the renowned composer of thirty-two operas, including La Juive (1835), a tragedy of religious intolerance between Christians and Jews. Her mother, Léonie Rodrigues-Henriques (1820–1884), was a sculptor and art collector of Portuguese Jewish descent. Geneviève Halévy was born in Paris on February 27, 1849.
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