Debussy's modest background and social climb

It seems counterintuitive to discuss relations within the Bardacs’ and Osiris's world of banking when considering the life of Claude Debussy, a composer from a humble background who lived in garrets far removed from anything the Bardac family would have encountered. He was born on 22 August 1862 to Manuel-Achille and Victorine Debussy, who sold china in the rue au Pain, Saint-Germain-en-Laye. At the time of Emma's first marriage (both she and Debussy were, after all, only seventeen years old in 1879) he was still a student at the Paris Conservatoire living with his parents in the rue Clapeyron in a very modest two-roomed apartment. This year did, however, bring him his first taste of a world of inconceivable luxury and wealth. Upon the recommendation of his piano teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, Antoine Marmontel, he acquired a summer holiday job as resident pianist to Marguerite Wilson-Pelouze, who lived in the château of Chenonceau which spans the river Cher, once the residence of Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici. Her father was Daniel Wilson, a Scottish man responsible for introducing gas-lighting to Paris, and her husband was Eugène Pelouze, an official in her father's company. Madame Pelouze provided Debussy with a certain insight into high society and a brief encounter with the world of politics, for at the time of his residence at her château she was the mistress of Jules Grévy, President of the Republic. Marguerite was known to be a fervent admirer of Wagner and she enjoyed listening to her own chamber group, as a member of which Debussy had been employed to play. For a poverty-stricken seventeen-year-old, the opulent environment must have seemed unimaginably inaccessible, but was no doubt an early trigger of his penchant for acquiring items of luxury which he could ill afford.

Debussy was fortunate to find his next holiday job (and, indeed, for the two following summers) with another prosperous and influential woman who required a resident musician, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, a widow, mother of five boys and six girls, whose husband, like the Bardac family, had made his vast fortune by investing in the Russian railways.