Mme Verdurin and the Princess Sherbatoff

Mme Verdurin and the Princess Sherbatoff share a friendship that gives the Verdurin circle its most steadfast member and gives the Princess a substitute for the wider society from which she is excluded. Their attachment is intimate and sustained, but it also becomes a social ideal: the Princess’s constant presence answers Mme Verdurin’s fear that even the most devoted guests will eventually leave.

The Princess’s isolation and the path to the salon

The Princess has been ostracised for years and is estranged from her family and exiled from her native land. Her remaining social connections include the Baroness Putbus and the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, but neither relationship grants her ordinary access to society. The Grand Duchess receives her only in the early morning, when other visitors will not encounter her. For the last three years, the Princess has gone from that visit to Mme Verdurin’s home, where she stays for the rest of the day. The sequence makes the Verdurin household less one invitation among many than the principal place in which the Princess can remain among people.

Her loyalty is magnified by the exclusions and interruptions that ordinarily govern Mme Verdurin’s circle. Even its most assiduous members may travel, become ill, serve a month in the army, or leave to attend a dying parent. Mme Verdurin resents such absences and insists that her circle should take precedence over other obligations. Against this pattern, the Princess’s unusual lack of competing ties makes her fidelity appear both exceptional and, for Mme Verdurin, almost unattainable.

Fidelity as attachment and ideal

The Princess does more than attend regularly: she organises her life around the Verdurins. She lives in a boarding-house and moves whenever they move; she accompanies them on their holidays. On New Year’s Eve, when Mme Verdurin fears being left alone and asks whether the Princess will stay, the Princess replies that there is nothing to prevent her from doing so on any day of the year, adding that the next day is one for staying home with family and that Mme Verdurin is her family. The exchange gives the friendship its clearest expression: a household bond offered by choice in place of the family from which the Princess is estranged.

The narrative presents this constancy as a fulfilment of Mme Verdurin’s long-held ideal. She had treated it as almost impossible for a faithful guest never to defect, however briefly; the Princess now embodies the loyalty the hostess had supposed unattainable. The Princess’s isolation is thus not merely background to their friendship. It is the condition that allows her to remain with Mme Verdurin when others’ lives and obligations draw them elsewhere, and it makes the salon’s claim upon her seem singular.

That ideal takes a lasting form in their promise about death: Mme Verdurin makes the Princess promise that whichever of them survives the other will be buried beside her. The wish extends their allegiance beyond the ordinary calendar of visits and absences. It also reveals Mme Verdurin’s concern to secure one of her faithful even after death, turning their living companionship into a pledge of continued proximity.

Public identity and the circle’s shared fiction

The Princess describes her social world as if it were the result of deliberate preference rather than exclusion. In the presence of strangers, she represents her three friendships—with the Grand Duchess, the Verdurins, and the Baroness Putbus—as the connections she has freely chosen, not the few relationships that survived the destruction of the rest. She says that she sees nobody else and visits only three houses, presenting limitation as a self-imposed rule. The distinction matters: the account preserves the gap between the loneliness that has narrowed her life and the composed identity she presents to others.

The Verdurins help that account take root among the faithful. Their guests come to believe both that the Princess could have accepted thousands of invitations but chose the Verdurins alone, and that the Verdurins, despite aristocratic overtures, made a single exception for a great lady more intelligent than the rest. The friendship therefore supports a reciprocal fiction. The Princess appears to have selected the salon freely; the salon appears to have selected her uniquely. Her real attachment and the circle’s self-image reinforce one another, even as the account conceals the social isolation that made the bond so necessary.

A place in the salon and its public display

The Princess’s wealth and position give her a visible part in the circle’s cultural life. For every first night, she engages a large ground-floor box and, with Mme Verdurin’s agreement, invites the faithful and no one else. Yet she reserves the least prominent box, sits at the back, and pays no attention to the rest of the theatre. She keeps the group close and bounded rather than using her resources to pursue prominence in the wider audience. Shortly before a performance ends, the faithful withdraw in her wake, making the Princess a quiet centre of the circle’s collective movement.

Her presence also gathers distinction around the Verdurins. Brichot, Cottard, and, later, Palamède de Charlus are among the eminent men associated with her, yet the Princess’s public manner remains one of humility and apparent withdrawal. Society observers admire her influence and imagine that exceptional intelligence and generosity explain why such men remain around her. But her behaviour is not simply indifference: the narrative describes the circle as a refuge from a living world that she desires but cannot know. Her apparent retreat helps preserve the image of chosen isolation even as the salon gives her a restricted form of belonging.

The friendship’s significance lies in this double structure. Mme Verdurin receives the unwavering allegiance she has wanted from her guests; the Princess receives a household and a small community after exclusion from family and society. The bond is emotionally consequential, yet its public meaning is carefully managed through rules of attendance, selective invitations, and the story that each party has freely chosen the other. Their companionship thus makes the Verdurin circle’s promise of belonging inseparable from its boundaries.