Jacques Bizet

Jacques Bizet was born in Paris to composer Georges Bizet and his wife Geneviève Halévy. He was named for his father's patron and his cousin and grandfather, Jacques-Fromental Halévy. He was of Portuguese-Jewish descent through his mother.[4]

Georges Bizet died suddenly when the boy was three, and he became particularly close to his mother. About ten years later, she remarried in 1886. Her second husband was Émile Straus (1844–1929), a wealthy lawyer and passionate art collector.[3] According to one source, when someone asked the vivacious widowed socialite why on earth she had married the ill-tempered balding attorney, she replied that it had been "the only way to get rid of him".[5]

Geneviève Straus ran a lively literary and arts salon, which helped to stave off the depression towards which she tended. Her son seemed to have inherited that tendency.[6] While she was hosting the salon, Jacques came to know many of the Parisian artistic and literary celebrities of the day.[3][7]

His father Georges Bizet had been virtually unknown at the time of his death, but the posthumous success of his work, and in particular the huge success of his opera Carmen, meant that by the time Jacques was enrolled at an exclusive primary school, he was known as the son of a famous composer. His school followed the curriculum created by Marie Pape-Carpantier.[8] Bizet's cousin and contemporary Daniel Halévy started at the same school at the same time: he was a large child and soon established himself as the school bully.[7] Another student, a year senior to the cousins, but physically relatively puny, was Marcel Proust.[8] In some ways all three boys had similar backgrounds: at a time when racial identity was becoming an issue in society, they would all have been regarded as half-Jewish. The parents of each boy had him baptised into Christian churches.[7]

When the time came for secondary school, the cousins moved on to the prestigious Lycée Condorcet. Contemporaries who later achievd a measure of notability included Robert Dreyfus and Fernand Gregh. One year ahead, as before, was Marcel Proust.[7] The relationships between the cousins and the future novelist were affected by Proust's curiously guileless homosexuality. He wrote a succession of letters to the cousins expressing his feelings with an openness that shocked and unsettled them. There was no sense that his feelings of attraction were ever reciprocated. The result in the immediate term seems to have been that, more than ever, Proust became a target of mocking, mistreatment and bullying by Bizet, Halévy and the gang that formed around them. In his diary entry on a poem by Proust which he perceived as homoerotic, the young Daniel Halévy confided that he thought Proust "more gifted than anyone", but the talented poet was also "young and weak, [and] not enough of a boy for us".[7] At one point Geneviève Straus became so exasperated by Proust's homoerotic fixation on her son and his cousin, that she refused to allow the gifted young writer admission to the literary salon that doubled as her family home.[9]

The relationship between the cousins and Proust was sustained by other, more positive ways. Proust seems to have been somewhat in awe of the cousins' family connections and social prominence. Daniel's father, Ludovic Halévy, was a versatile author and dramatist whose fame among Parisian intellectuals at the time would have been quite as great as that of composer Georges Bizet. As a teenager Proust may already have become aware of how he could make use of the physical, psychological and behavioural traits of his school contemporaries and their family members in his future novels.[7][8] For their part, Halévy and Bizet were awed by Proust's precocious and formidable talent. Their family backgrounds predisposed them to a love for literature: they were not without their own ambitions in that respect.

By the time the boys left school, they had stopped the bullying. As adults the three were each destined to inhabit the same haute-bourgeois milieu of Parisian intellectuals: the friendship between Marcel Proust and Jacques Bizet would endure. Before that, while still at school Halévy and Bizet teamed up to found two small-scale literary reviews, Revue Verte and Revue Lilas. Proust and Gregh joined in with the projects.[9] Three years later Fernand Gregh founded another review magazine, Le Banquet, which was published monthly between March 1892 and March 1893.[10] Leading members of the twentieth-century literary establishment were among the contributors, including Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Robert de Flers Daniel Halévy and Marcel Proust. Another contributor, Léon Blum, later became Prime Minister of France. Jacques Bizet wrote a number of the articles. The sudden closure of Le Banquet after only a year came as a surprise. Bizet wrote several subsequently forgotten theatre pieces, influenced by the plays of Pierre de Marivaux and Oscar Wilde. [9]

On 1 June 1898 Jacques Bizet had married a distant cousin, Madeleine Breguet, in Paris.[17] She died on 15 October 1900 while undergoing an operation by surgeon-gynecologist Samuel Jean de Pozzi. (He was a former lover of Bizet's mother.)[18]

Several years later Bizet married again in 1904, to Alice Franckel. She had also been married before. Born in Hamburg, at some time she moved to Paris. In 1919 the Bizet couple divorced without having children.[17]

According to at least one source, Bizet had been crushed emotionally by the loss of his father and disruption of his early family life. During his final years he became an alcoholic and morphine addict. He committed suicide, fatally shooting himself, ostensibly over matters involving his mistress. As it happened, a couple of weeks later, his longtime friend Marcel Proust died of illness.[1][19]