Free The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust

Clermont-Tonnerre of whom much will be spoken later on, who
     was the daughter of Gramont, granddaughter of the famous secretary of state, sister
     of the Duc de Guiche, who was very much inclined, as we have seen, toward mathematics
     and painting, and Mme Greffulhe, who was a Chimay, of the famous princely house of
     the counts of Bossut. Their name is Hennin-Liétard and Ihave already spoken about the Prince de Chimay, on whom the Elector of Bavaria had
     the Golden Fleece bestowed by Charles II and who became my son-in-law, thanks to the
     Duchesse Sforze, after the death of his first wife, daughter of the Duc de Nevers.
     He was no less attached to Mme de Brantes, daughter of Cessac, of whom it has already
     been spoken quite often and who will return many times in the course of these Memoirs,
     and to the Duchesses de la Roche-Guyon and de Fezensac. I have spoken enough of these
     Montesquious, about their amusing fancy of being descended from Pharamond, as if their
     antiquity were not great enough and well-known enough not to need to scribble fables,
     and also about the Duc de la Roche-Guyon, eldest son of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld
     and ward of his two charges, of the strange present he received from M. the Duc d’Orléans,
     of his nobility at avoiding the trap that the shrewd villainy of the first president
     of Mesmes set for him and of the marriage of his son with Mlle de Toiras. One also
     very often saw there Mme de Noailles, wife of the eldest brother of the Duc d’Ayen,
     today the Duc de Noailles, whose mother is La Ferté. But I will have occasion to speak
     of her at greater length as the woman of the finest poetic genius her time has seen,
     who renewed, and one might even say enlarged, the miracle of the famous Mme de Sévigné.
     Everyone knows that what I say of her is pure fair-mindedness, it being well enough
     known by everyone what terms I came to with the Duc de Noailles, nephew of the cardinal
     and husband of Mlle d’Aubigné, niece of Mmede Maintenon, and I have gone on enough in its place about his intrigues against me
     to the point of making himself along with Canillac an advocate to the state councillors
     against people of quality, his skill at deceiving his uncle the cardinal, in criticizing
     the chancellor Daguesseau, in courting Effiat and the Rohans, in lavishly pouring
     the enormous pecuniary graces of M. the Duc d’Orléans onto the Comte d’Armagnac to
     have him marry his daughter, after having failed to snare the eldest son of the Duc
     d’Albret for her. But I have spoken too much of all that to return to it, of his dark
     schemes concerning Law, and of the matter of the gemstones, and also of the conspiracy
     of the Duc and Duchesse du Maine. Quite otherwise, and of quite a different breed,
     was Mathieu de Noailles, who married the woman in question here, and whom her talent
     has made famous. She was the daughter of Brancovan, reigning prince of Wallachia,
     which they call there Hospodar, and had as much beauty as genius. Her mother was a
     Musurus, which is the name of a very noble family, one of the foremost in Greece,
     made illustrious by numerous and distinguished ambassadorships and by the friendship
     of one of those Musuruses with the famous Erasmus. Montesquiou had been the first
     to speak of her verses. Duchesses went often to listen to his own, at Versailles,
     at Sceaux, at Meudon, and in the past few years women in town have been imitating
     them by a familiar strategy, and they invite actors over who recite them, with the
     aim of attracting one of those ladies, many of whom would go to the house of the Great
     Nobleman ratherthan abstain from applauding them there. There was always some recitation in his house
     at Neuilly, and also the concourse of the most famous poets as well as of the most
     respectable people and the best company, and on his part, to everyone, and in front
     of the objects of his house, always a flood of discourse, in that