August 20, 2020 17

day, he was filled with knowledge

and purpose, so, in the evening, he

was filled with grace and charm.

While there were reasons to envy Dr.
Pozzi, it is hard to think of any in the
case of Montesquiou. Barnes writes of
“a rare and unenviable fate” that

was already beginning to close in

on the Count: that of being con-

fused in the public mind—or at

least the readerly mind—with an

alter ego. His life, and afterlife,

were to be dogged by shadow ver-

sions of himself.

One of these versions was Huys-
mans’s. Barnes points out the differ-
ences between Montesquiou and Des
Esseintes (for example, “Montesquiou
is social, Des Esseintes a recluse”) but
writes:

Still Des Esseintes “was” Mon-

tesquiou: the world knew. And I

knew too, because when I bought

my Penguin edition of Against Na-

ture in 1967, the cover was a head-

shot from Boldini’s portrait of Le

comte Robert de Montesquiou.

Montesquiou also knew Proust,
who nicknamed him “the Professor of
Beauty” and in 1893 received a photo-
graph from him with the dedication “I
am the sovereign of transitory things.”
When Montesquiou went to dinner
at Proust’s parents’ house, the list of
guests would first have to be submitted
to him. “Flowers would be ordered,”
Barnes writes, “the cook harassed by

Mme Proust, and to keep their princi-

pal guest in good temper, he would be

asked to lecture about art and taste over

the dessert.” On one such occasion,

Montesquiou turned to Marcel Proust

and said, “How ugly it is here!”; so, too,

Oscar Wilde in 1891, on being invited,

remarked, “How ugly your house is!”

Proust offered Montesquiou a “par-

allel, invented [version] of himself”

as he created the figure of Charlus in

his novel, the first volume of which

was published twenty years after his

first meeting with Montesquiou. In

those years, Barnes writes, the novelist

“had copied the Count’s mannerisms,

hoovered up his stories of aristocratic

life... flattered him, dined him, quar-

reled with him, flattered him again.”

With the publication of À l’ombre des

jeunes filles en fleurs in 1919, in which

the figure of Charlus appears, Mon-

tesquiou, Barnes writes, discovered

the “final shadow self which would

accompany him to the grave and be-

yond.” A year before his death, he ob-

served, “I ought to start calling myself

Montesproust.”

There were, Barnes writes, “worse

fates to attend one after death than to

be taken for a major character in a mas-

terpiece.” One of these might be to be

taken for a minor character, a fate that

befell Prince Edmond de Polignac, that

third visitor to London in 1885. Poli-

gnac, whom Proust described as “a dis-

used dungeon converted into a library,”

had met Montesquiou in Cannes in

1875 when the latter was nineteen and

he was forty- one. They were both ho-

mosexual and closeted, with the doors

of Montesquiou’s closet, Barnes writes,

“decorated... with flowers and verses

and surprising colours, as if this were

normal.” Over sherry, they read to one

another. And they took walks together.

Later they fell out.

Polignac appears under his own

name in À la recherche du temps

perdu. While Leon Edel claimed that

“elements” of him went into Proust’s

“fashioning” of the character of Ber-

gotte, there is only a small amount of

evidence for this.

Barnes goes into detail about these

three men—Pozzi, Montesquiou, Poli-

gnac—not to demonstrate how much

Proust and Huysmans drew from life

in the making of their novels, or indeed

how little, but to meditate on the way

in which fact and fiction intermingle

and then diverge and how fragile and

perhaps even phony is the concept that

characters in fiction can be better un-

derstood by knowing who, in life, they

might be based on.

It is possible still to visit the apart-

ment on Bellosguardo above Florence

that was once inhabited by the Bosto-

nian Francis Boott and his daughter,

Lizzie, and to notice how close the

apartment and the gardens are to those

of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter,

Pansy, in James’s The Portrait of a

Lady. Lizzie was an only child, as was

Pansy; Boott was a widower and some-

thing of a dilettante, as was Osmond.

Lizzie, however, was more engaging

and less simpering than Pansy, and her

father was known to be kind, which

Gilbert Osmond was not. And unlike

Osmond, he was rich.

But how much or how little the fic-

tional characters and the real ones

had in common is hardly the question.

James made use of the apartment and

the garden as setting. He also made

use of the configuration of father and

only child—a daughter—in Washing-

ton Square and The Golden Bowl in

addition to The Portrait of a Lady. He

liked the shape of the relationship; it

was something he could work with.

Yet scene by scene and sentence by

sentence, his imagination was autono-

mous. He was not concerned to reflect

life or to bring the inner and outer

worlds of his friends to the page.

When The Portrait of a Lady began

to appear in serial form, one of James’s

friends wrote to say that she saw he had

used his dead cousin Milly Temple in

the making of Isabel Archer. James re-

plied loftily:

But the thing is not a portrait. Poor

Minny was essentially incomplete

and I have attempted to make my

young woman more rounded, more

finished. In truth everyone, in life,

is incomplete, and it is [in] the work

of art that in reproducing them one

feels the desire to fill them out, to

justify them, as it were.

James wished to be savored by read-

ers unsullied by base curiosity, not

to be pursued by literary detectives.

Barnes points out how rich a world

Proust created for the literary detec-

tive, how many Parisian doctors as well

as Pozzi could be mentioned if one were

searching for models for Dr. Cottard,

“and similarly half a dozen other social

hierarchs on whom he drew for Char-

lus.... There can be a trainspotter side

to this aspect of Proust- reading.” He

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