130 MARCEL PROUSTis a Basque word meaning a spring of fresh water, and the particle
was added at Montesquiou's suggestion. Yturri was born on 12
March 1864 at Tucuman in the Argentine, brought up in Buenos
Ayres, and emigrated at the age of fifteen to Paris. Baron Doasan
found him serving behind a counter at the Magasins du Louvre, and
persuaded him to become his secretary, only to have him stolen
by Montesquiou-hence the undying enmity between the count
and the baron. For twenty years, from 1885 till he died in harness
in 1905, Yturri was the loyal friend and factotum (as was Jupien
of the Baron de Charlus) of 'Mossou Ie Connte', as he called him
in his indelible rastaquouere accent. At first his status and ante-
cedents were difficult to explain. "From which house does M.
d'Y turri derive?" asked the blue-blooded Comte Aimery de La
Rochefoucauld, Montesquiou's cousin by marriage, only to be
told by a malicious informant: "He derives from a 'house' in the
Rue de Boccador !"I When Count Aimery pursued his enquiries
by asking Y turri himself, the reply was even less satisfactory:
"Why, I was ze secretary of ze Baron Doasan!" cried the young
man with visible pride. But Y turri was so good-natured and
faithful, and lasted so long, that in the end he was universally
accepted and even liked. He was short, handsome and excitable;
he had coffee-coloured eyes, a deathly pale olive face, a con-
spicuous mole tufted with hair, and a tendency to baldness against
which he fought with desperate unsuccess. He exuded a strange
odour of chloroform and rotten apples, which no one realised
until too late to be a symptom of diabetes. His relationship with
Montesquiou was clouded only by occasional tiffs and sulks, and
by the fact that it was impossible to discover just where he went
on his bicycle. Once there was a more prolonged absence, by
train, and the poor count could only reply to an enquiring friend:
"Gabriel has gone to Monte Carlo with a young person who
seems to have an extremely bad influence on him."
In one respect Montesquiou's character stands in need of no
defence. He invented and kept his own astonishing rules of life:
1 Such was the rumouf, all the more illuminating for being apocryphal.
The truth of the story, as told by Montesquiou himself, is simply that, on the
occasion of Montesquiou's duel with Henri de Regnier, Comte Aimery
(anxious lest his cousin should be fighting a mere commoner) asked Y turri:
"To what house does M. de Regnier belong?", and Yturri, deliberately
misunderstanding) gave him Regnier's address: "No.6 Rue du Boccador!'