Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [2]
It had gotten very late. I bid my farewell to Piero Tosi, fascinated and intrigued by his stories about this mysterious, obsessive collector.
Early the next morning I was awakened by a ringing telephone. It was Tosi, polite, discreet, to the point: “I found the calling card. Guérin; the fellow’s name was Jacques Guérin.”
JACQUES GUÉRIN.
Chapter III
At their first meeting in 1947, the writer Violette Leduc fell hopelessly in love with Jacques Guérin. Jean Genet had brought him to her small studio on rue Paul-Bert, a few steps from the Bastille, a single room whose sole window overlooked a row of trash cans. Genet entered with a tall, impeccably dressed man who had a slight tic: he would repeatedly resettle his glasses on his nose. Leduc noticed then that the man had beautifully groomed hands and that small gold buttons in the shape of chestnuts were sewn onto the cuff of his jacket sleeves. A soft mass of short black hair framed a handsome, elongated face with dreamy blue eyes. He hid his natural shyness behind extremely polite manners, which made him seem a bit aloof; he appeared to be well educated.
Apart from a few photographs, Leduc’s account of Guérin provided me my first description of him. Her love for Guérin proved to be futile, given his preference for men. Yet Leduc, the author of La Bâtarde, recognized something of herself in Guérin—both had been children born out of wedlock. As a result of the stigma each experienced, an emptiness developed that proved impossible to fill.
Guérin was born in Paris, the son of a beautiful woman, Jeanne-Louise Guérin. In 1890, she had married Jules Giraud, an affluent wine merchant. Though very much in love with his wife, Giraud was impotent, incapable of sexual consummation. In due course, Jeanne-Louise became the mistress of her husband’s close friend, Gaston Monteux, the “king” of Raoul Shoes, a wealthy Jewish man who was already married and head of a family.
In 1900 Jeanne-Louise decided to live on her own, and separated from Giraud. Although she bore two children by Monteux—Jacques in 1902, and another son, Jean, in 1903—she could not keep them with her. Social norms would not allow it. The boys grew up on the outskirts of Paris, under the watch of a nanny from the West Indies, but they saw both their mother and father on a regular basis.
According to what Guérin told writer Carlo Jansiti (his friend and my primary source for this story), his parents loved each other passionately and, even though they didn’t live together, they saw each other every day. When Gaston Monteux’s wife died in 1924, Guérin, a conventional son at heart, tried unsuccessfully to push his mother and father into marriage. His parents’ correspondence gave testimony to an extraordinary sexual liaison; Guérin destroyed their letters when his mother died.
Jeanne-Louise Guérin, outfitted by the fashionable couturier Paul Poiret, lived in a large art-filled apartment near Parc Monceau, frequented by an artistic crowd. Erik Satie composed his song “Tendrement” for her. Gaston Monteux also loved the company of artists. A photograph shows him at his house on the Côte d’Azur, in a garden adorned with Modigliani sculptures. On one side is his son Jacques, on the other, his friend Picasso.
Jeanne-Louise was anything but conformist. After the scandal she caused at the time of her divorce, she transformed herself into a formidable businesswoman. In 1916, in association with Théophile Bader, a founder of the Galeries Lafayette department store, she took over the French perfume company known as Parfums d’Orsay, at a time when Coty and Guerlain dominated the market. But Mme Guérin was a shrewd manager and her business prospered. She soon decided to expand and moved her base of production from Neuilly to a château at Puteaux-sur-Seine, once the home of a great dandy, the Chevalier d’Orsay. On the site of this enchanting property stood a two-story building situated in a park of ancient