126 MARCEL PROUST
and became an ailing, frightened little boy, bullied by his father,
schoolfellows and Jesuit teachers. In 1871, at the age of sixteen,
he met Charles Haas, and was impressed by his wit and easy
elegance: Proust, exaggerating a little, for Haas was more than
twenty years Montesquiou's senior, made Charlus and Swann
friends in their schooldays.l Desiring to surround himself with
beauty, as a fitting mirror of the beauty he so admired in himself,
he became a fanatic of interior decoration, a collector of bric-a-
brac. He met Mallarme late in the '70S, and in 1879 brightened the
fatal illness of the poet's little son Anatole wiili the gift of a
cockatoo named Semiramis. Mallarme told Huysmans of this
fantastic young aesthete, and the decadent novelist constructed
A Rehours (1885) and the character of Des Esseintes about him.
Mallarme was perturbed lest the ultra-susceptible Montesquiou
should be annoyed: but no, he was delighted. Yes, it was perfectly
true iliat he had a room decorated as a snow-scene, with a polar-
bear rug and a sleigh and mica hoar-frost ("when you went into
that room you felt f-r-r-rozen!" his dear secretary Yturri would
say). And yes, he did inlay the shell of a pet tortoise with
turquoises, of which the poor creature died; and he had been
known to wear a white velvet suit, with a bunch of violets in the
neck of his shirt instead of a cravat. If anything aggrieved him,
he revealed, it was that Mallarme should have paid him only a
single visit in search of material.
In ilie 1880s he met Edmond de Goncourt, and there are
admiring glimpses of him in the Goncourt Journal, of a delicious
absurdity only surpassed by the parody of the Journal read at
Tansonville by the Narrator. There is an accidental meeting on
6 April 1887 with Montesquiou at Passy, 'in all the correctness of
one of his supremely chic suitings': he was carrying what looked
like a sumptuously bound prayer-book, but turned out to be a
. copy of one of Goncourt's own novels-'which is some slight
compensation for all the setbacks I have had lately,' remarks the
poor diarist. There is a visit on 7 July 1891 to Montesquiou's
house in the Rue Franklin at Passy, where Proust was to visit
him in April 1893. It was 'crammed with a hodge-podge of in-
congruous objects, old family portraits, Empire furniture,
Japanese kakemonos and etchings by Whistler'. But the most
amazing room of all was the bathroom, decorated with represen-
I III, 299