Article from Number 44 - 2020 - From Monaco to Borneo, via London and Paris. Literary and artistic friendships around princess Alice and prince Albert I of Monaco
University exegesis means that Princess Alice of Monaco inspired Marcel Proust for the character of the princess of Luxembourg in In Search of Lost Time. At the very least, she went to Geneviève Straus’ ‘Proustian’ salon and, in London (with the complicity of the rani Margaret Brooke) as in Paris, counted numerous friends in the world of letters and arts: Pierre Loti , Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, Isidore de Lara, Hugues Le Roux, Sarah Bernhardt, etc. The annual exhibition of fine arts created in 1893 and the lyric programming of the salle Garnier during the Belle Époque were a great success thanks to Princess Alice. Albert I of Monaco and herself, for the duration of their married life, have been in fact at the heart of an apparatus of artists, figures from the press, opera or science who set up a cultural lifestyle so important to the reputation of the Principality, between 1880 and 1902.
Text in French