208 MARCEL PROUST
object ofLorrain's malice, however, which only made it the more
galling, was not Proust himself but Montesquiou.
Lorrain was a large, flaccid invert, rather in the manner of
Baron Doasan, who was a great friend of his. He drugged, painted
and powdered, and wore loads of jewelled rings on his fat, white,
fish-like fingers. His lips were moist and red, his eyes were as
blue as the circles that surrounded them; and over them hung
extraordinary, paralytic eyelids, 'like the hoods on the front of
an omnibus,' as Jules Renard said. Lorrain belonged to that
dangerous type of invert which tries to avert scandal by pretend-
ing to be virile and accusing everyone else of perversion. In I902,
the year of P elteas anti M ,lisantie, he attacked the admirers of
Debussy in an article shamelessly entitled 'Les Pelteastres'; and
in his volume of poems Le Sang des Dieux (I882) an ostentatiously
heterosexual sonnet-sequence beginning 'Filles adorables du revel'
was dedicated to Doasan, while another called 'Les Ephebes', on
the beautiful youths of classical antiquity-Ganymede, Alexis,
Hylas, Antinous and others-was addressed with equal in-
appropriateness to Flaubert. Lorrain had many respectable
friends, who forgave everything for his prose-style or pitied his
unhappy life, and was received by some easy-going hostesses,
though barred by most: "It's terrible," said Mme Germain, the
banker's wife, "I hear he gives little dances for young persons in
the artillery!" But he was a perilous acquaintance. On one occasion
he asked Heredia to come to Mme de Poilly's soiree: "I'd rather
not," replied Heredia lightly, "because, like Diana of the
Ephesians, she has several rows of breasts, one above L.e other."
Before long the poet was horrified to find his little joke quoted
word for word in an article of Lorrain's, but used of poor Mme
Aubernon, with whom Lorrain happened to have quarrelled,
and of whom it was equally true; and as Lorrain had a genuine
admiration for Heredia, he had added: 'as the great poet Heredia
has so beautifully put it'.
It was the sonnet on Antinous that established contact between
Lorrain and Montesquiou. Count Robert was so favourably
impressed by the lines
'He has the narrow forehead anti hroad 'Yes
Of passiye striplings loyed hy perverse gods'that he asked to be allowed to call. The causes of their subsequent