102 MARCEL PROUSTMme Aubernon's, he remarked to Blanche: "These young colts
of 1889 are even more amazing than those of '79." He had been
the star of Mme Arman's salon before the famous schism when
she stole Anatole France from Mme Aubernon. He continued to
frequent both ladies, for he had the courage to announce that he
would abandon the first to forbid him to visit the other-
"Women are bitches, but that's no reason why men should be
puppets!" He was affiicted, like Brichot, by growing blindness
and paralysis, which were attributed by malicious people, rightly
or wrongly, to a discreditable cause. Brochard, peering through
his thick spectacles and talking unendingly, was the image of
Brichot.
"Brochard bores me, Doasan disgusts me," said Henri Becque.
Baron Jacques Doasan was a cousin of Mme Aubernon's, who
had been wealthy but had ruined himself for love of a Polish
violinist: once, it was said, he had the walls of a box at the theatre
covered with roses for this ungrateful young man. He was a tall,
portly invert of virile appearance, looking "like a knight-at-arms
in the Hundred Years War," said one of Mme Aubernon's
habitues; but his face was bloated, blotched and heavily powdered,
and newcomers were puzzled to find his hair and moustache
changing from jet-black to white, and from white to jet-black
again, though never simultaneously, for it did not occur to him
to dye both at the same time. Nothing horrified him more than
effeminacy in young men: "How I despise these little flunkeys of
Des Esseintes," he would scream, perfidiously alluding to
Montesquiou, who was reputed to be the original of the aesthete
Des Esseintes in Huysmans's A ReDOUTS. His perpetual, factitiously
hostile talk about homosexuality was particularly embarrassing
in public, on the little local train from the Gare Saint-Lazare in
which Mme Aubernon's week-end guests made their way to her
country-house, Cceur-Volant, at Louveciennes. "He can be witty
-for ten minutes at a time, when you haven't seen him for a
week," people said; but his wit, such as it was, was appallingly
malicious, and sometimes his victims would hint that the
Wednesdays might be more pleasant without him. "But don't you
see," Mme Aubernon would say, "he's terribly unhappy, he'd
starve if it weren't for me, and I find him so useful as a gentleman
in waiting!" So he remained an immovable 'sacred monster' to the
end, and was never relegated to what he called "the toy cupboard