Marcel Proust: A Biography

MARCEL PROUST
what she meant; for Albert Wolff, the art and theatre critic 01
Le Figaro--'a creature of no religion, no country, and no sex', the
anti-Semite Drumont had written in La France Juiv&---"-was a fat,
fluting, corseted, rouged caricature of Wilde the pervert. Robert
de Billy, now back in Paris at the Foreign Ministry, remembered
Wilde confessing: "I find an ever-growing difficulty in expressing
my originality through my choice of waistcoats and cravats"; and
Billy was not sure that Oscar had not had some part, during a
previous visit, in the selection of a dove-grey cravat for the well-
known portrait which J. E. Blanche had painted of Proust two
years before. Wilde even visited 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, where,
like the Baron de Charlus,1 he commented adversely on the
furniture, much to Proust's annoyance: "I don't think M. Wilde
has been well brought-up," he said afterwards. On the young
Andre Gide, Proust's elder by two years, the influence of Wilde's
conversation in preparing him for moral and spiritual liberation
had been crucial; for Wilde is Menalque, the genius of heroic
hedonism, in Les Nourritures Terrestres and L'/mmoraliste. He
failed to impress Proust: yet perhaps Wilde's glorying in his vice
may have taken some effect in that spring of r894. Possibly there
is a little of Wilde in Charlus; and there is, more probably, some-
thing of the dangerous, beautiful Lord Alfred Douglas, who
accompanied Wilde, and was sometimes to be seen at the Revue
Blanche office in the Rue Laffitte, in Charlie Morel.
In August Montesquiou was at Saint-Moritz, which he
appreciated less than in the two previous years. "Switzerland is a
hideous country," he told the young Elisabeth de Gramont, Duc
Agenor's daughter and a future friend of Proust, who was staying
at the same hotel; "on the rare occasions when one does come
across a possible view, it's invariably blocked by an enormous
notice-board that says 'Hotel Belle-Vue' 1" But Proust was staying
at Mme Lemaire's chateau in the Marne, Reveillon, with Reynaldo
Hahn.
Hahn was a young man of nineteen, the favourite pupil of
Massenet at the Conservatoire, and already a singer, pianist and
composer of some distinction. He was a Jew, born at Caracas in
Venezuela, and now lived in Paris with his parents and several
sisters; he had brown eyes, pale brown skin, austerely handsome
features and a little dark moustache. Proust met him early tllis
1 III, 387