Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus

Geneviève Halévy grew up in the artistic high-society of Paris; her father was the composer Jacques-Fromental-Élie Halévy. She encountered personal tragedy with the deaths of her father and elder sister as an adolescent. At age twenty, she married the composer Georges Bizet. When Bizet died six years later, Halévy began her life’s work as a salonnière, serving as maîtresse de maison first in her cousin’s parlor and later in her own home. In 1886, she married Émile Straus, a lawyer and art collector, and began hosting salons at their various homes. There Geneviève Halévy—then Madame Straus—received dozens of prominent artists, intellectuals, and socialites, among them Marcel Proust. During the Dreyfus Affair, leading Dreyfusards attended Straus’s salons, and as a result, she fell out of favor with the Parisian elite. Though no longer as fashionable, Straus’s drawing room continued to serve as a meeting place for artistic and literary figures past the time of World War I.