Ballets Russes

The Ballets Russes are presented as a force that makes artistic novelty visible and socially desirable in Paris. Their importance lies not only in the works and artists associated with them, but also in the way their success reshapes the appearance of fashionable society: a hostess long established in private now seems, to the aristocracy, to have arrived with the Russian troupe itself.

Artistic Innovation and Public Fashion

The account evokes the Ballets Russes through the “prodigious flowering” that brought Bakst, Nijinsky, Benois, and Stravinsky’s genius successively to public attention. Their prominence gave Princess Yourbeletieff, described as the youthful sponsor of these new figures, a conspicuous place in the cultural scene. Her immense, quivering aigrette was so novel that Parisian women sought to copy it. The detail makes artistic fashion tangible: innovation appears not only in artistic names, but in the ornaments and styles that audiences adopt.

The troupe’s prestige also created a story about its own social origins. It was widely supposed that Princess Yourbeletieff had been brought into Parisian society among the Russian dancers’ most precious possessions. The impression captures the troupe’s power to make people associated with it seem newly arrived, as though artistic novelty could confer social novelty as well.

Mme Verdurin and the Appearance of Arrival

Mme Verdurin appears beside Princess Yourbeletieff in a stage box at every performance of the “Russians,” seated like a fairy godmother. To aristocratic observers who had not known her, she too could seem to have entered the country with Diaghileff’s troupe. But the narrator corrects that impression: Mme Verdurin had existed through different periods and social avatars, and this new phase was the first to bring the success she had long awaited, now advancing with increasing speed.

The contrast distinguishes sudden visibility from actual beginnings. The Ballets Russes furnish the occasion and the image of a fresh arrival; Mme Verdurin’s presence at the performances marks a new public success for a hostess whose earlier social existence had gone largely unrecognized by the aristocracy. Her elevation is therefore both real and belated: novelty describes the moment when society notices her, not the moment when she began.

Cultural Prestige and Social Competition

The troupe’s emergence belongs to a broader account of how fashionable circles follow intellectual and artistic developments. Salons do not remain fixed portraits of their hostesses; they move with changing tastes, as people seeking the latest cultural interests gravitate toward circles that promise freshness. The Ballets Russes exemplify the force of such a moment: new artistic figures become objects of collective curiosity, and their associates acquire reflected attention.

That reflected attention does not make all the salons equivalent. Mme Verdurin’s growing visibility is contrasted with Mme Swann’s more individual, literary salon, which had crystallized around Bergotte and his sudden fame. The Ballets Russes, by contrast, appear as a collective artistic phenomenon whose arrival helps frame a shift in fashionable attention. Their significance in this passage is thus social as well as artistic: they help expose how cultural distinction circulates, and how society can mistake a newly successful public identity for a newly created one.