• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 571 0

as that which Nero had required, and who could be as sadistic as the Roman emperor if it was not forthcoming—was thirty-seven when Proust, just twenty-two years old, met him. In 1909 he gave a hint of his pretensions when he answered a questionnaire (“Who are you?”) by saying: “Related to a large part of the European aristocracy. Ancestors: Field-Marshals: Blaise de Montluc, Jean de Gassion, Pierre de Montesquiou, Anne-Pierre de Montesquiou, the conqueror of Savoy, d’Artagnan (the hero of The Three Musketeers), the abbot de Montesquiou, Louis XVIII’s minister, the General Count A. de Montesquiou, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp.” Proust admired this dandy with his leanness (“I look like a greyhound in a greatcoat,” he said of himself), his fabled friendships with legendary poets such as Verlaine and Mallarmé, and his cult of the beautiful conducted in his extravagant house, the Rose Pavilion. He had served as the model for the total aesthete des Esseintes in Huysmans’s novel Against the Grain, in which an aristocrat never stirs from his house, where he has created a sumptuous, totally artificial interior that evokes in each room a different epoch or climate. Des Esseintes never knows the hour of the day outside, since the lighting in his rooms is constant, and even the scents are controlled; to bring out the colors in his carpets he has studded with jewels the back of a giant sea turtle that is meant to lumber over the kilims—except the creature dies and begins to rot.

A bejeweled, rotting turtle was a good emblem for the new school of poets and novelists, the decadents, writers who celebrated death, sexual excess, and a withdrawal from the world. To be sure, Huysmans had never met Montesquiou or visited his apartments on the quai d’Orsay, but Mallarmé had given Huysmans a full report of his visit, and a gilded turtle certainly did occupy the premises, and the real Montesquiou did have a winter room decorated with polar-bear rugs, a sleigh, and mica-flake snow. Montesquiou was a grand seigneur, distinguished by such overweening pride that a society painter was once overheard saying about him, “There’s one good thing about the French Revolution. If it hadn’t happened, that man would have had us beating his ponds to keep the frogs quiet.”

In his high-pitched, grating voice Montesquiou was constantly reciting his own poetry from volumes with names like Hydrangeas, The Bats, and The Red Beads, or presiding over literary and musical soirées. No praise was too extravagant, and Proust knew how to lay it on thick. “You are the sovereign not only of transitory, but of eternal things,” Proust wrote him. On another occasion Proust (ridiculously) compared him to the seventeenth-century playwright Corneille, the father of French classical theater. But Proust was also the master of the nuanced compliment; after Montesquiou showed him his celebrated Japanese dwarf trees, Proust had the nerve to write him that his soul was “a garden as rare and fastidious as the one in which you allowed me to walk the other day. . . .” And Montesquiou heard that Proust kept his friends in stitches imitating his way of speaking, of laughing, and of stamping his foot. Most daring of all, Proust proposed to write an essay to be titled “The Simplicity of Monsieur Montesquiou,” who had never been previously accused of such a quality.

But Proust was impressed by Montesquiou’s combination of reverence for the arts and extraordinary social connections; the young man shared the first and coveted the second. As a literary duchess, Elizabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, wrote in her 1925 study, Robert de Montesquiou et Marcel Proust: “And then there are the endless tales, the flashing conversations, the magnificent stories. Montesquiou empties out his closets, hands over all his secrets. He talks, he talks, he unpacks his anecdotes, witticisms, characteristics. He dazzles Proust with sumptuous parades.”

Proust was much later to base his most memorable character, the baron de Charlus, on Montesquiou—on his tantrums, his preposterous pride in his social position and lineage, his