Jacques Bizet (10 July 1872 – 3 November 1922) was a French physician and businessman best known for his long friendship with novelist Marcel Proust.

[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.

[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 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.

[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.

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.

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.

Bizet wrote several subsequently forgotten theatre pieces, influenced by the plays of Pierre de Marivaux and Oscar Wilde.

[9] By the end of 1893, however, while still rebutting the unwanted advances of his friend Marcel Proust, Bizet had distanced himself from the literary scene.

During his second and, as matters turned out, final student year, he joined with Jacques-Émile Blanche to set up a Théâtre d'ombres review.

According to several commentators, there he found a rich pool of characters from who he would draw for his novels, without much modifying their habits and features.

[5] Like Proust, Bizet signed the famous pro-Dreyfus petition which appeared in Le Temps on 15 January 1898, in response to Émile Zola's incendiary open letter under the headline "J'Accuse…!

[11] The heightened political and social polarisation provoked by the Dreyfus affair was followed by a decline in popularity for the salon of Mme.

[12] Bizet joined the bandwagon, becoming a director of "Taximètres Unic de Monaco", a substantial taxi business that had been founded by the Rothschilds.

[9] Proust scholars consider Agostinelli to be the model for the character of "Albertine", who features prominently in several volumes of "À la recherche du temps perdu".

In 1909 Salomon left to set up business independently of Richard: Bizet joined with him to establish the automobile manufacturer known as Le Zèbre.