THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 13Smental wigging on which the quarrel between Charlus and the
Narrator in Le Cotl de Guermantes is based. It is very possible
that Proust detected beneath the count's anger the notes of
despised love; but the whole tenor of their subsequent relation-
ship shows that his advances, if they were made, were veiled and
unsuccessful. Montesquiou must have realised, like Baron Doasan
before him, that his new friend was (or would soon be) like
himself an active, not a passive invert, a rival huntsman, not a
possible prey. The ostensible grounds of the dispute, both in real
life and in the novel, were a report that the disciple had been
talking scandal about the master. Montesquiou had good reason
to be touchy: in March 1895 the loyal Yturri felt compelled to
challenge Blanche to a duel on a charge of gossiping about his
relations with the count; though Blanche was soon able to con-
vince Yturri's second, Henri de Regnier, that it was all a trick
of the malicious Comtesse Potocka and her friend Georges
Legrand. Charlus's speeches in the quarrel-scene, as elsewhere,
are a brilliant parody of Montesquiou; but several of the baron's
sayings in this episode are known to be favourite tags of the
terrible count's: Proust's letters show that they were uttered to
him at some time in the early 189os, and it may well be that it
happened on this very occasion. One is: "Words repeated at
second-hand are seldom true"; another is "I have submitted you
to the supreme test of excessive amiability, the only one which
separates the wheat from the tares"; and another is Montesquiou's
infuriating quotation from Psalms ii, 10, with which he invariably
accompanied a warning or a complaint: "Et nunc erudimini"-
'Be ye now instructed.'
The quarrel with Montesquiou did not last long. In August
Proust made the best of two very different friendships by visiting
Saint-Moritz with Louis de la Salle, his companion at the
Finalys' the summer before, and Montesquiou. With the count
was one of his adored lady-friends, Mme Meredith Howland, an
intimate of Charles Haas and one of the very few Americans then
admitted to high society1; she and Montesquiou had been there
the previous year at the same time as Billy and Aubert, though the
1 In Le Temps Retrouye, when the Narrator reminds the Duchesse of a
hostess who had spoken ill of Mme Howland, Oriane bursts out laughing:
"Why, of course, Mme Howland had all the men in her salon, and your
friend was trying to lure them to her own I" (Ill, 1016).