THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN '))
irrevocably lost touch. If he had used his real sensibility and
intelligence to remain true to himself-as did Proust, who in some
ways was not unlike him-. he might have possessed the genius in
which he so firmly believed. Instead he only dressed, collected,
scribbled, quarrelled, fascinated and terrorised. He possessed little
of the Lear-like grandeur of Charlus: he was a pathetic, not a
tragic figure. The character of the Baron de Charlus is rightly
supposed to be, in some of its aspects, Proust's revenge upon
Montesquiou; but it is also a generous and sincere tribute to the
buried potentialities of Count Robert.
Early in April 1893, Proust received a copy of Les Chauves-
Souris inscribed with a line from one of its most revealing poems:
'[ am the sovereign a/the transitory.' In return he sent the first of a
series of flattering letters which was to continue throughout the
next twenty-eight years, until Montesquiou's death. 'You extend
far beyond the frontiers of the type of the exquisite decadent in
which you are usually depicted ... this supreme refinement was
never before linked with this creative energy, this almost
seventeenth-century intellectuality ••. you are the sovereign not
only of transitory, but of eternal things,' he wrote. Montesquiou
believed it, Proust half-believed it, and it is not wholly untrue;
for there are signs of all these qualities in Les Chauves-Souris,
although they serve only to polish the mirror of Montesquiou's
vanity. The poems are poetically worthless, but technically
dazzling; they have no depth of feeling or significance, but their
surface has a diamond-like hardness and brilliance. Their style is
influenced by Montesquiou's favourite poets, Hugo (Uyour
grandfather and I," he once shatteringly began to Georges Hugo),
Mallarme, Leconte de Lisle (who ironically called him 'the noble-
man ofletters'), Heredia; but he brought to it a shallow, arrogant
preciosity which is all his own. Even the eternal things are there.
The subject and method of Montesquiou's verses have some
affinity with those of Proust's novel: he pursued, with a prolifera-
tion of metaphor and unexpected adjectives, the timeless reality
which underlies the phenomenal world. The pursuit was always
diverted by his self-adoration: whenever he reached the holy of
holies it turned out to contain the graven image of a nobleman-
poet; and the metaphors and adjectives were always showy and
untrue. But he held, unable and unworthy as he was to turn it,
one of the keys to Time Regained.