Marcel Proust: A Biography

'44 MARCEL PROUST
one kind of music would suit his mood that afternoon, namely,
the barrel-organ; and he carried them off to the nearby fair at
Viroflay, where they wandered dejectedly among the booths,
while the diabolical count listened in pretended ecstasy to the
strains of the hurdy-gurdy. Soon the kind-hearted Yturri felt
Mossou Ie Connte had gone far enough: "You're always the
same, why don't you try to be nice to people I" he whispered
crossly. So they returned, and Montesquiou, finding that the
young man 'played with incomparable virtuosity, though he sang
with the voice of a cat run over by a cab', decided the recital had
been intended not as a practical joke but as a sincere tribute to his
genius. He took Delafosse into his favour: "I venture to believe
that your settings of my poems will last as long as the poems
themselves," he prophesied sublimely and, alas, truly. A few days
later he visited Delafosse and his doting mother in their huge,
gloomy apartment near the Rue d' Antin, with its dining-room
adorned only with a seating-plan of the Salle Erard and a grand-
piano, 'like an ebony dolmen,' said Montesquiou, 'gleaming with
the blackened blood of a paying public'. On '1.7 April, when
Delafosse gave his opening recital at the Salle Erard, many of
Montesquiou's friends were in the audience; and the critic from
Le Menestrel wrote: 'Simplicity, charm, elegance and distinction
are the chief qualities of this brilliant young virtuoso.'
Leon Delafosse was a thin, vain, ambitious, blond young man,
with icy blue eyes and diaphanously pale, supernaturally beautiful
features. Proust had nicknamed him 'the Angel'. "How annoying
it would be not to be famous," Delafosse would say-"an
annoyance which he has frequently experienced since I threw him
over," said Montesquiou after their subsequent breach. When he
was playing, 'this little face, with its silly laugh, became trans-
figured with superhuman beauty, and took on the pallor and
remoteness of death'; but once the music stopped, Montesquiou
almost disliked him. "Try to ensure," he would warn him, "tha!
my love for your art may always prevail over my distaste for your
person." The young pianist was clearly an important original of
Charlie Morel. But the model for the suffering and moral ruin
brought upon Charlus by Morel came from Baron Doasan and
his Polish violinist, not from the relationship between Montes-
quiou and Delafosse. Montesquiou loved in his proteges only
himself as tyrant, impresario, Maecenas and SvengaJi; and we