Academics the world over remain sniffy about Wikipedia. Yet
it is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most valuable triumphs of the
internet.
What prompted this thought was a rekindling of interest in
the extraordinary life of Misia Sert. Born in 1872, she was a pianist (her
teacher Gabriel Fauré),
who married three times. She was a close friend of the impresario Diaghilev and
became the cultural arbiter in Paris for several decades.
Proust enshrined her in two ways in his In Search of Lost
Time: as Princess Yourbeletieff (sponsor of the Ballets Russes) and as the
gruesome Madame Verdurin.
All this one can learn from the Wikipedia entry on Misia,
which I note has doubled in length and acquired a dozen footnotes since I last
googled it.
Ah well. Academia has been known to give the impression of catching
up with the rest of the world – sometimes at a distance of twenty years or so…
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