![]() ![]() Proust organised a dinner at his parents’ home to celebrate her success. Madame Bulteau kept her promise and at age 22, Anna’s poetry was published in La Revue de Paris. Astounding the world would always be her own way out. Too cerebral to be fulfilled by a life of frivolity and pleasure, Anna attempted to reconcile the contradictions within her with her dazzling wit and conversation each time she went out or received guests at her new home at 109 Avenue Henri Martin. But she was also a writer with aspirations, even ambitions. Proust, who had started writing Jean Santeuil,modelled his character the Countess Gaspard de Réveillon on Anna.Īnna was now a countess as well as the daughter of a prince, and lived in luxury. She became a Belle Époque darling, the kind that inspired writers. The young couple became the darlings of Paris’s salons but it was Anna and her eloquence that shone. After a long courtship, Anna finally agreed to marry him. Just one glance at a ball and a 23-year-old aristocrat, Matthieu de Noailles, fell madly in love with her. Small and thin, her peculiar beauty started turning heads. Her big black round eyes and cascading black hair contrasted with a very pale complexion to give her an intensity enhanced by her romantic and passionate personality. It wasn’t just her poetic talent that made Anna popular, however. A talent scout in her spare time, Bulteau said she would help publish Anna’s poems. Anna, a keen poet, showed her work to Madame Bulteau, a columnist for the literary pages of the daily newspaper Le Figaro. Like Proust, she chose sides in the Dreyfus Affair, convinced as she was of the Jewish officer’s innocence. ![]() At 16, politics and mysticism interested her in equal measure. She was happy to return to life in Paris and her friends, among them Marcel Proust, who she started spending holidays with. Ten-year-old Anna happily took it all in, but soon missed France. The sudden death of her father in 1886, led to her mother, a young and attractive widow not yet forty, taking Anna and her sister Hélène on the Orient-Express for a year-long tour of the Bosphorus, Austria, Romania and Greece. Her intellectual curiosity continued throughout her childhood. And she inspired generations of aspiring poets. ![]() In thirty years, she published four novels, an autobiography, hundreds of articles and fifteen poetry collections and anthologies, while leading a very intense socialite’s life. She was also the first female writer to be elected at Belgium’s Académie Royale de Langue et Littérature. She founded the first literary prize dedicated to female writers, today known as Prix Femina. She was the first woman to be made Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur. Republican and revolutionary ideals would never leave Anna. Like her father, she was absorbing the young Third Republic’s ardent ideals: on Bastille Day, the family always celebrated by dancing and mixing with the people in the streets, among them their own concierges, Monsieur et Madame Philibert. However, it was French that Anna felt the most affinity with. Romanian on her father’s side, Ottoman Greek on her mother’s, Anna was taught three more languages: French, English and German. This early love of both socialising, impressing her guests, and writing became running themes in the life of Anna de Noailles, as the Romanian-French writer, poet and a socialist aristocrat later came to be known. ‘The look on their face’, she wrote in her diary, later in life. It was something she particularly enjoyed watching. There was also an Algerian fumoir where male guests smoked cigars after dinner and stained-glass windows filtering the light in every room, giving it a rich orangey glow.Īs for the crimson and golden salon, with its two grand pianos placed on either side of an imposing palm tree, the effect it had on first-time visitors, even the most reserved ones, was never lost on small Anna. He boasted a collection of Japanese art objects and liked having guests for supper in his medieval-inspired dining room. His daughter grew up in a bonbonnière of a home filled with oriental carpets, Venetian mirrors, rich tapestries hanging from every wall, and console tables displaying silver ewers and incense burners. The date was 1879 and the wealthy Romanian prince had embraced Belle Époque interior fashion with passion. Anna had just turned three when her father, Prince Gregory Bibesco Bassaraba de Branconvan, moved the family to an hôtel particulier at 34 avenue Hoche in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysées. ![]()
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