MARCEL PROUSTwas Willie! 'Their elegance, like yours,' Proust wrote later, 'lies
not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies
seem to have received it, and to continue unceasingly to receive
it, from their souls: for it is a moral elegance.' Then, as he watched
another characteristic attitude of Willie's, the raised finger point-
ing to some heavenly enigma, the impenetrably smiling eyes, he
thought of another favourite picture in the Louvre, in which
spirituality, mystery and sexual ambiguity are even more intensely
mingled: Willie was very like Leonardo's John the Baptist. When
they began to talk in the green glade, it was of a plan 'to live more
and more together, in a chosen group of high minded women and
men, somewhere too far away from stupidity, vice and malice for
their vulgar arrows ever to reach us'. But before this project
could be carried out, on 3 October 1893, still in Paris, Willie
Heath died of typhoid. His resemblance to Edgar Aubert was now
complete.
Meanwhile the spring of 1893 had brought-along with Abbe
Vignot's Lenten sermons, and hallucinatory memories of the dead
Aubert, and Willie's friendship, and the new leaves in the Bois-
the annual resumption ofMme Lemaire's Tuesdays. On Tuesday,
28 March, the event of the evening was a recital by MIle Bartet
from the Comedie F ran~aise of poems from Les Chauves-Souris,
the first published volume of Comte Robert de Montesquiou-
Fezensac.^1 Moved by a mild interest in the verses and an intense
curiosity about their author, Proust joined the cooing ladies who
queued to congratulate the fluting count; and as Montesquiou's
appetite for flattery was only equalled by his predilection for
handsome young men, the new admirer was graciously received,
and his entreaty for permission to call was affably granted. Proust
was to meet many writers of more genuine talent, and a few of
genius; but in some ways this pseudo-poet and monster of vanity
was the most extraordinary person he ever met. For Count
Robert, as Proust perhaps obscurely realised as early as this very
Tuesday, had the makings of Palamede, Baron de Charlus.
Montesqwou, as he not infrequently explained, was a member
of one of the oldest families in the French nobility: it included a
1 It was most incorrect, however, to call him by his full name. As the
Narrator remarks, 'a guest in a drawing-room proves that he is unfamiliar
with society if he refers to M. de Montesquiou as M. de Montesquiou ..
Fezensac'. (II, 934).