134 MARCEL PROUST
There were many reasons for Proust's flattery of the pathetic
count. One was amiable: Proust longed to be liked and loved to
give pleasure. Another was utilitarian: Montesquiou had the
power, and if suitably handled might have the desire, to introduce
him into the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Another was aesthetic, for
Montesquiou was a model for Proust's own ambition at this time,
to live simultaneously in the world of the imagination and in the
world of society. There was a psychiatric motive, for Montes-
quiou resembled a madman who can only be appeased by repeated
assurances that he is, in fact, Napoleon or Victor Hugo. But most
of all Proust felt that his own destiny was linked to Montesquiou:
as a person, Count Robert was a character in an undreamed-of
novel; as a writer he unwittingly possessed a clue to the recovery
of the Time which Proust had not yet lost.
It was not altogether easy to flatter him with success. Very soon
-in a postcard sent on 28 April 1893-he forbade Proust to use
the almost indispensable word 'nice' (gentille). He was inclined,
from unhappy experience, to be suspicious, and was known to
remark, as M. de Norpois did of the Narrator, that Proust was 'a
hysterical flatterer'. He also became aware, shortly after his young
friend's visit in mid-April to his exquisite house at Passy, that
he was viewed with a misplaced sense of comedy. The pride of
his garden in the Rue Franklin was a group of Japanese dwarf
trees, tended by a real Japanese gardener named Hata: and it was
a very mixed compliment to be told that his soul was 'a garden
as rare and fastidious as the one in which you allowed me to walk
the other day, except that it is not lacking in the tall trees of
France'. He would have been still more annoyed if he could have
foreseen that Proust's further remark, that his soul contained 'a
morsel of blue sky', would be adapted for the use of Legrandin in
Du Core de che, Swann.^1
The reasons for Proust's interest in Montesquiou were not
only aesthetic and social. Even without the bathroom photograph
of Larochefoucauld the acrobat, or the poems in Les Chauves-
Souris devoted to eminent inverts such as Louis XIII, Wagner's
Louis of Bavaria or Mr W. H., this keen diagnostician',could
detect that Montesquiou possessed the vice that he was himself
about to acquire. A few allusions in Proust's letters suggest that
in the early summer of 1893 Montesquiou administered the monu·
1 I, 120