French writer Jean Lorrain was born on this day in 1855. Lorrain was a master of fin-de-siècle snark, using both novels and articles to take down many of the public figures of his day – sometimes with just cause, sometimes in service of pure sensationalism, as we saw in his treatment of poor old Mathilde de Morny. Having recently read Jean Lorrain, ou le Satiricon 1900, in which Philippe Jullian memorably describes Lorrain as “Sodom’s ambassador to Paris”, I was hoping to expand upon this bête noire of the Belle Époque. But every time I tried I found his essence eluding me.
I will definitely return to Lorrain, a figure who embraces much that is dear to Strange Flowers. In the meantime, a troll through contemporary images of Lorrain might prove just as instructive. He was one of the most-oft caricatured men of the age, his peculiar physiognomy, pompous air and aura of vice giving much for artists to work with. The “swollen” body and “amphibian” eyes remarked upon by Robert de Montesquiou (another victim of Lorrain’s journalistic cluster bombs) are certainly apparent. Lorrain had – to quote Ann Widdecombe (four words I never thought I’d type) – “something of the night” about him.
A number of these works are by the great French caricaturist Sem, whose early career owed much to Lorrain’s patronage. Sem was evidently disinclined to return the favour by flattering his mentor, although Lorrain in his declining years, when he used makeup to mask the effects of sickness and drug use, would have been a challenge to the most obsequious illustrator.
French poet Count Robert de Montesquiou was born on this day in 1855 and would come to exert an enormous influence on his age through every facet of his life except his poetry. His fastidiously cultivated tastes and obsessively refined self-presentation were the ne plus ultra of Belle Époque sophistication, famously inspiring characters created by Huysmans and Proust.
And Montesquiou’s hands — slim, pale, elegant, well-dressed — were the count himself in manicured microcosm. Portraitists, photographers and caricaturists were all drawn to the expressive richness of the long, tapering fingers, whether adorned with rings, gloves, or nothing but perfumed air. Whistler focussed on just one hand (the other obscured by a chinchilla cape) in his famous 1892 portrait, Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. Brandishing a cane, it extends a spectral welcome to the viewer from the darkness of the rest of the picture even as the count’s head — cocked, aloof, wary — seems bent on staying in the shadows.
The blue-tinted image above, taken by an anonymous photographer in 1885, bears the title Les mains de Robert de Montesquiou and the biblical inscription “In manus tuas, Domine!”. It comes from one of the count’s own albums of photographs, indicating that he was well aware of the appeal of his exquisite extremities. Also from that album is a curious image (detail below) which has Montesquiou “en tenue de sport”, gripping his staff like a potentate brandishing his scepter. The fingers are either unfavourably placed or else they moved during exposure; either way it results in a strange claw-like apparition. Montesquiou playfully subverted his own magnificence by crudely painting in a sunflower.
Further images from this album along with contemporary lampoons and portraits by artists like Boldini, Gandara, Doucet and the aforementioned Whistler follow below. Oh, and if you’re unfamiliar with the rest of Montesquiou, have a look here.
One of the recurring motifs on Strange Flowers is the phenomenon of real-life individuals appearing in works of fiction, in varying levels of disguise. There are the obvious examples: Robert de Montesquiou‘s afterlife in the novels of Proust and Huysmans, Ganna Walska‘s rebirth as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, the numerous Bright Young Things who took Brideshead in camouflage. Or of course yesterday’s subject Marie Menken, captured by Edward Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and so magnificently ventriloquised by Elizabeth Taylor when the play became a film. Over the months and years my fascination with these characters has only grown as I’ve discovered more and more examples. What interests me above all is the idea that there are people so extraordinary that, often in their own lifetimes, they slip the bonds of drear existence and drift into artifice.
You’ll find many of these parallel existences under the category ‘Stranger than fiction‘. I’m going to look more closely at this idea in a feature called ‘Doubles’, holding up the original and the model, looking at their similarities and differences and the process by which flesh-and-blood becomes embedded in fiction. Of course this isn’t an exact science. Fiction is fiction and writers inevitably pick and choose attributes from their models, or construct a composite based on two or more people, and sometimes it is a matter of dispute whether there’s a connection at all. Not every roman comes with a clef but sorting the fact from the fiction and the fiction from the biography is – for me at least – a pursuit of almost inexhaustible fascination.
First up tomorrow is a man who himself often dressed his associates in fictional drag: Ronald Firbank.
Thanks to Front Free Endpaper (now celebrating seven years of blogging, which is 415 lifetimes in real terms, or something) for highlighting this catalogue, written in French and English and detailing rare publications relating to Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. He was, you may recall, the French Decadent aristo-poet who moved to Capri after his “at homes” were revealed to be less of the macarons-and-small-talk variety and more devil-worship-and-homoerotica. Some years after the baron died in obscurity in 1923 his reputation was revived by his countryman Roger Peyrefitte.
The catalogue offers much to gladden the heart of anyone interested in queer/Decadent undercurrents of the Belle Époque. Naturally almost all of Fersen’s own work is represented, largely in the form of very rare first (and usually only) editions, as well as issues of his literary journal Akademos (partly bankrolled by Mathilde de Morny). There are also original works by contemporary writers, some commenting on the Fersen scandal, others riffing generally on gay themes. They include (deep breath, pause for emphasis) Alfred Jarry, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou (with a letter in the count’s own hand), and outre-Manche representation from the likes of Marc-André Raffalovich and Oscar Wilde.
Basically it’s Strange Flowers’ letter to Santa, bound and illustrated.
The Belle Époque, christened in hindsight after the carnage of the First World War, looked back to its own imagined golden ages as much as it looked to the future. Although the monarchy was never to return, there were followers who viewed it through rose-coloured glasses for both political and aesthetic reasons.
At the dawn of the 20th century, two buildings named Palais Rose were completed within two years of each other – one in Paris and one nearby – both inspired by the Grand Trianon at Versailles, built over two centuries earlier. Each housed an aristocratic figure noted for his elegance and extravagance: Count Robert de Montesquiou and Marquis Boni de Castellane.
Unlike the marquis, Montesquiou did not have his made to order. It was commissioned in 1899 by an engineer named Arthur Schweitzer on a plot of land in Le Vésinet, now an outlying suburb of Paris. Schweitzer never got to live in it and Indian billionaire Ratanji Jamsetji Tata – whose family’s name can still be seen on a bewildering array of vehicles, machinery and products in India – snapped it up when he went broke.
Seen from the road, the Palais Rose appears as an elegant, relatively modest pavilion atop a grassy rise, but the building is more extensive than it seems. Montesquiou first laid eyes on it in 1908 and announced that he would die, die if it were not his the following day. Well, it took two days to secure a sale agreement but the silly old drama queen somehow managed to cling to life. He gave it the name it bears to this day as well as a separate building, “l’Ermitage”, to hold his huge book collection. In the garden, meanwhile, was an even more concrete memento of his nostalgia for the ancien régime: he erected a rotunda to house a large bath once owned by Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, Madame de Montespan (this water feature, which inspired poems by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Jean Lorrain, is now back at Versailles).
Like his previous properties – an apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, Pavillon Montesquiou in Versailles, Pavillon des Muses in Neuilly – the interiors of the Palais Rose were a virtuoso expression of the count’s discernment and refinement (all the black and white images here date from Montesquiou’s tenure). Its distance from the city matched the count’s own arm’s-length relations with society, but visitors still made the effort, including Gabriele d’Annunzio, the Marchesa Casati, Colette, Jean Cocteau and Harry Graf Kessler (Marcel Proust once made out for the palace but turned back after an asthma attack). Montesquiou, an arch elitist accustomed to getting his own way, engaged in years of correspondence with the local authorities, complaining about the noise of proletarian merriment coming from the annual municipal fair which took place on a plot next to the Palais Rose. Le Vésinet’s councillors doubtless breathed a sigh of relief when Montesquiou left in 1921, never to return; he died in Menton toward the end of the year.
The next noted resident would be a woman not only well known to the count, and a guest at the palace, as we have seen, but one with whom he had numerous points of intersection: the Marchesa Casati. They had both been painted by Giovanni Boldini (who also painted ibises in the Palais Rose’s garden); Montesquiou enjoyed a fervid bromance with Gabriele d’Annunzio, Casati’s lover; and both count and marchesa had a morbid fascination with the much-photographed Second Empire courtesan Countess de Castiglione.
Casati turned Montesquiou’s library into a portrait gallery, but there was only one sitter: each picture bore the striking features of the Palais Rose’s chatelaine. The extravagance of the gesture was typical. The marchesa had burnt through a huge fortune chasing the dark rush of fleeting aesthetic fulfilment. She had also hosted some of the great parties of the era and in the Palais Rose she set about trying to once more build an event out of the random magic of her life. But her last party would turn out to be a damp disaster and a portent of decline. The theme was “famous couples in history”, with many guests drawing on the same Bourbon nostalgia which had first inspired the Palais Rose. But like the Marquis de Cuevas’s post-war blow-out it was woefully ill-timed, scheduled in the middle of a general strike which had inflamed an already fractious France, leaving it in no mood to indulge dragged-up retro-toffs buzzed on champagne and entitlement. Those same working class neighbours who had disturbed Montesquiou’s repose now peered avidly over the walls under menacing skies as the spectacle came spectacularly undone. The musicians never arrived (most likely on strike). There was no Casati; she was meant to appear as “Eve” but lost her nerve. And her garden was certainly no Eden. In The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s, William Wiser describes a scene which could have been directed by Buñuel:
While the assembled guests wandered the gardens like untethered livestock, deprived of an orchestra, no hostess in sight, the crowd on the wall and from upper-storey windows applauded the fiasco as if staged for their benefit.
The folly culminated in a sudden downpour that scattered guests and audience alike, the costumed women lifting the mille-feuilles skirts of their ball gowns as they ran shrieking for the shelter of cars and carriages to end the night’s misbegotten affair.
Next morning a team of bailiffs arrived to confront the absentminded marquise at the behest of her debtors, but there was nothing in the way of collateral to offer them except Eve’s papier-mâché fig leaf and the somnolent snake “Adam” had refused to carry to the garden party.
Ibis del Palazzo Rosa a Vesinet (Giovanni Boldini)
Casati was finished in continental society and fled to London.
The Palais Rose’s last illustrious inhabitant we know of was Charles de Gaulle, who was briefly quartered in L’Ermitage in 1940. Towards the end of her life Josephine Baker expressed a desire to buy the property, although she died before anything came of it. The palace remains a private residence, although it is unclear who lives there now. It was listed as a historic monument in 1986, a status clearly powerless to prevent unsympathetic renovations. At least it fared better than Boni’s Palais Rose, which fell to the wrecking ball in 1969.
We may laugh at the prudery and hypocrisy of Victorian England, but Belle Époque France was little better. Reputations were dragged into the press and left bloodied and twitching, but as long as the perpetrator observed a minimum of decorum – that is, if victim and assailant were unidentified, even though enough details were supplied to make their identity clear – all was well. It was a pantomime in which each player wore a mask bearing their own features.
For his most scathing takedowns, Jean Lorrain (already a pseudonym) used further pen-names while popularising the blind item in use to this day. Duly camouflaged, he advanced on the arriviste, the gauche, the démodé. Even Lorrain’s literary criticism was peppered with personal attacks and his novels crowded with barely fictionalised versions of his prey.
But these defilements were not without consequence; numerous victims of his fictional and journalistic works fought back. In 1896 an actress by the name of Madame Bob Walter, slighted by one of Lorrain’s articles, launched a vicious physical assault. This time however the writer won the public’s sympathy and it was this incident which first brought him fame well beyond the chattering classes of Paris. Depending on which report you believe, the tireless Mme Walter followed up her attack by sending either faecal matter or used sanitary napkins in the post. Suffice to say it was something one would sooner not find on the end of one’s letter opener.
Even a positive write-up by Lorrain was not always welcome: as Philippe Jullian says “he soon gained a reputation for being a fearsome enemy and a compromising friend, because his praise had an air of complicity”. It’s impossible to understand Jean Lorrain without acknowledging his self-loathing. He excoriated himself as “abnormal…a fool…prey to only the most ignoble instincts”. A masochistic streak led him to provoke the ire of those he admired as much as the objects of his disdain. Mathilde de Morny was of the former category. She sensibly mistrusted him (calling him “a man who is never satisfied with the abyss”) and, as we saw, almost faced him in a duel.
Others were provoked to the same conclusion, including fellow Fécampois Guy de Maupassant, who was more or less a family friend, and Claude Debussy. Even Paul Verlaine sent his seconds, and Lorrain was avowedly a fan of the aging poète maudit. In fact it was only Mme Walter’s onslaught which prevented him from attending his funeral.
But Lorrain couldn’t dodge the bullet forever. In 1897 Lorrain wrote a dismissive review of Marcel Proust’s first novel which additionally alluded to the author’s private affairs and sexual tastes – tastes which, naturally, Lorrain shared. Proust demanded satisfaction, and so the diseased, ether-soaked reprobate and the hypersensitive, asthmatic recluse squared off in a field (in fact Proust fought at least half a dozen duels in his life; for a wheezy shut-in the bitch was fierce). Shot followed shot, each wide of the mark, honour was satisfied and it wasn’t until half a century later, at the Lifar-Cuevas set-to, that two more unlikely dueling opponents faced each other.
Lorrain’s anguished relations with his exact contemporary Robert de Montesquiou perfectly illustrate his gift for alienating potential allies. In 1886 the count had refused a dedication in one of Lorrain’s volumes of poetry. Wounded, Lorrain petulantly labelled him “Grotesquiou” but he was conscious that he could never compete with the poet’s slim elegance. In fact with his own dandyish affectations, Lorrain was described by one associate as “the poor man’s Montesquiou”. It’s a contrast Philippe Jullian plays up in his respective biographies of the two men (Montesquiou is “prince 1900” to Lorrain’s “Satiricon 1900”). Lorrain’s hatred was exacerbated, claims Jullian, “by the assurance of having more talent and the fear of having less taste.”
Sarah Bernhardt had to step in to halt hostilities, but they flared anew when Lorrain asserted that Montesquiou had used his cane to beat women out of the way to escape a blaze at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897 (which also claimed Sissi’s sister). In fact, the count had been nowhere near the fire. Lorrain couldn’t resist Montesquiou’s magnetism for long, and would return in his 1901 novel Monsieur de Phocas which borrowed from the count, just as Huysmans had done and Proust would later do.
As the century wore down to its nub the demands of living down to his own standards had left Lorrain exhausted. As well as regular stints of rehab in the Pyrenees he journeyed farther and more frequently and in so doing essentially established an itinerary for the gay man of letters with Decadent sensibilities. He was one of the first Western writers, for instance, to seek sensual respite in the Maghreb. He visited Capri, and although that island’s most notorious resident Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen was not at home, Lorrain caught up with him in Venice, where he shared his debauches. Lorrain went on to visit the historicist creations of Ludwig II, a hero to the French Decadents.
In 1900, a newspaper announced that Lorrain was to marry courtesan Liane de Pougy, whose career he had done much to advance. But there was only room in his life for one woman, his widowed mother who lived with him and fussed over him as she had over the young sickly Paul. Mme Duval was far happier with her son’s patronage of telegraph boys and stevedores than the rivalry of another woman, no matter how lavender the marriage. In any case Lorrain broke with the capital, moving to Nice, which he called the “city of refuge for those with compromised health, damaged reputations, finished talents”.
Even former allies were turning away. J.K. Huysmans, now in monastic seclusion, refused to act as character witness for Lorrain in a defamation case involving the artist Jeanne Jacquemin. One wonders if Huysmans’ embrace of Catholicism wasn’t first triggered by the shock of seeing the demonic creatures of his imagination come to life as Lorrain celebrated the launch of his novel Là-bas with a party, which he attended in drag accompanied by Lucifers, de Sades, Sapphos and hemaphrodites.
Bitter, absurd, Lorrain was now himself feeling démodé, and lashed out at the young. Ill his whole life, by 1905 he was already signing his works “The Cadaver”. On a trip to Paris in 1907, in a turn of events his more moralising enemies may have found satisfyingly apt, Jean Lorrain died after an enema went wrong and punctured his colon. His last words: “You have defeated me, Paris!”
Sadly only one of Jean Lorrain’s books is readily available in English: Monsieur de Phocas, published by the wonderful Dedalus Books, who have done so much to expand the Anglophone reader’s appreciation of continental Decadence. Meanwhile the ideal starting point for French speakers wishing to explore the writer’s life and works is the exhaustive jeanlorrain.net.
From November 2009, the inexhaustible fascination of La Castiglione. You can also discover the countess’s cinematic outings here, explore her influence on Marchesa Casati and Ganna Walska, visit her last home and daub yourself in her scent.
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A countenance of sculptural quality, with imposing proportions, bold lines, and rigid planes, in which the brow, magnificent and broad, attracted my eye and held it, as a focus of light…what struck me, in this cast of features, during this rapid minute and the memory that it left me of them, was that it seemed less supernatural than superhuman, almost without sex; that one could just as well have taken it to be that of a great man, an illustrious captain, or a famous poet.
- Robert de Montesquiou, La Divine Comtesse
Saints are generally commemorated on the day they die. Because that day, providing the post-life paperwork goes through and the candidate is verified as being in the company of You-Know-Who, is when they really go to work: listening to prayers, interceding, guest-starring in visions.
The Countess de Castiglione clocked on as an aesthetic divinity on this day in 1899 and has had a hectic afterlife, her legacy rich in dark glamour and layers of meaning for an image-obsessed age such as our own. Because unlike most saints she had gone to great trouble to create her own iconography, and by staging tableaux which recreated key scenes in her life, her own hagiography as well. Today, curating one’s own image is a pursuit available to anyone with a Facebook account and a digital camera; this phenomenon arguably began with the countess in Second Empire France.
Born Virginia Oldoini in Florence in 1837 to a venerable aristocratic family, she was married at just 16 to the Count di Castiglione. Soon after, the countess was sent to Paris on a mission by Italian Prime Minster Count Cavour to curry favour with the imperial court, and in 1856 she landed the boss himself, Napoleon III, as a lover.
From the same year dates her first encounter with the relatively new medium of photography. Working with photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson over almost 40 years, she created an unparalleled body of work in which she would pose as historical figures or in the manner of famous paintings, or simply lie languidly under the camera’s gaze. Castiglione was considered one of the great beauties of her day (though with downturned mouth, sharp nose and dark-ringed eyes more suggestive of insomnia than sensual allure, her look is definitely of its time). But she was by no means a mere model; she determined the costumes and poses and had many photographs hand-coloured to her specifications. Pierson’s contribution is comparatively minor.
Following an attempt on the emperor’s life carried out by Italian agents but in which she was entirely blameless, Castiglione retreated from public life, separating from her husband and returning to Italy, though in 1861 she was once more in Paris and soon in imperial favour again.
As her looks began to fade, Castiglione retreated once more, and towards the end of her life she rarely left her apartment on the place Vendôme, whose black-painted walls were devoid of mirrors. She nonetheless returned, half mad, for a few last sittings with Pierson before her death in 1899.
The company Castiglione kept after death gives you some idea of her personality. Above all, it was narcissistic aesthetes who were drawn to her cult and saw themselves reflected in her; three examples will suffice to illustrate this thesis.
Chief among the postulants was poet Count Robert de Montesquiou. The opening quote records his thoughts as he saw the countess in her coffin; note his conjecture that her features could just as easily be those of “a famous poet”. Despite a couple of close calls Montesquiou never got to see Castiglione in life, but his obsession with her became all-consuming and resulted in the book La Divine Comtesse in 1913. In the meantime he had collected a huge amount of her relics, and most of the extraordinary pictures which we admire today were once in his possession. He also imitated Castiglione’s artistic feat with his own staged photographs. The count borrows much from his beloved countess: historical costume, impersonation of literary characters, hand-colouring.
The barefoot contessa
Then there was the Marchesa Casati; most of the Castigliana not snapped up by Montesquiou seems to have fallen into her hands. Living in a palace once inhabited by Montesquiou (wheels within wheels…) Casati identified to an unusual degree with her countrywoman and in 1924 appeared at a ball in Paris dressed as the countess in a costume made by Erté.
Finally there was Ganna Walska, whose operatic career we recently examined, and who also coincidentally commissioned one-off pieces by Erté (…within wheels…), and bought most of the photographs of Castiglione which had belonged to Montesquiou (…within wheels). She also played the countess in a 1929 musical based loosely on her life in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, which her husband Harold McCormick had thoughtfully bought for her.
“She retreated into herself rather than retreating into God,” said Montesquiou of the countess. And in the afterlife, the woman he called “the Carmelite of her own beauty” continues to exert a deathless fascination through her eternally compelling portraits.
Strange Flowers gots mad luv for L2. This example comes from August 2010, as does this snowbound trek around one of his palaces. Brian Sewell definitely gots mad luv as evidenced by this interview, and the camera can’t get enough of the Bavarian king as you can discover here and here.
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It’s been very German around here lately, hasn’t it? Four of the last five posts relate to natives of my host country, and today things take a further turn for the wurst as we visit the ultimate German eccentric of the last, oh, 200 years or so.
It’s hard to know what there is left to say about Bavarian king Ludwig II; Luchino Visconti’s sprawling four-hour 1972 epic Ludwig tells you all you need to know about him (and, frankly, quite a deal more). Ludwig continues to exert a fascination disproportionate to his political achievements and is today better remembered than most of the sabre-rattling Prussians, doughty Saxons and myriad dull princelets of the geo-political patchwork which would, during Ludwig’s reign, form the German Empire.
If you’re not familiar with Ludwig’s CV, here it is in outline. He was born on this day in 1845, and ascended the Bavarian throne in 1864, his subjects initially smitten with the handsome young king. But it soon became apparent Ludwig was more interested in his private obsessions than the drear business of ruling. Chief among the king’s enthusiasms was the composer Richard Wagner, on whom Ludwig lavished state funds.
In 1867, Ludwig was engaged to his cousin Sophie, sister of Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria), but the engagement was broken off, with the real reason – Ludwig’s homosexuality – naturally figuring nowhere in official announcements. Ludwig became ever more withdrawn and stopped taking part in official functions. He spent enormous sums on fanciful palaces, much to the alarm of government officials. In 1886 he was deposed on flimsily substantiated grounds of insanity, and died by drowning a few days after his deposition in circumstances which have never been convincingly explained. The official verdict of murder-suicide (a doctor died with him) remains controversial.
It is those very castles which so distressed his courtiers which have ensured his posthumous legend. Superficially Ludwig and his kindred spirit Sissi may have adopted the frock-coats and crinolines of their more prosperous subjects, like many European royals chastened by almost a century of sporadic proletarian revolt. But both wilfully refused to conform to their roles and used their positions to retreat from the world and its nuisances, to construct their own fantasy kingdoms. “It is essential,” proclaimed Ludwig, “to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live”.
Ludwig’s “sanctuaries” included his imitation of Versailles at Herrenchiemsee, the less literal French Rococo pastiche of Linderhof, and – most famously – the Wagnerian medieval medley of Neuschwanstein, now visited by over a million people a year. His castles in the sky became castles of bricks and mortar, historicist confections removed from their apparent function for a ruler who wanted the trappings of kingship without the grunt work.
The enduring question about Ludwig remains: was he mad? Certainly building a to-scale replica of Versailles, the Death Star of the ancien régime, is something we might rather expect of an unhinged Central African despot than a constitutional monarch. And madness most definitely ran in the family; his brother Otto, for one, was literally barking mad (his impersonation of a dog was among the episodes which prompted his removal from public life).
Ludwig also had an obsessive need for solitude. One example among many: he had an elaborate mechanical table built which meant his food could be served without him coming into contact with servants (cf. Des Esseintes’ arm’s-length relations with the help in J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours). He wished to be gloriously, utterly alone in a nocturnal world with only the ghosts of Wagnerian heroes and French monarchs for company.
All of this, along with his sexuality, was enough to have him labelled insane. But as he protested when confronted with the diagnosis, “How can you declare me insane? After all, you have never seen or examined me before.” A fair, and indeed lucid comment, you’d have to agree, and ultimately Sissi’s description of him as “only an eccentric who lived in a world of ideas” seems the most fitting.
Both Ludwig and Sissi took the abstractions of Romanticism and not only made them reality but practised them at the level of an extreme sport. In so doing they inspired the Decadent writers who furthered the Romantics’ cult of self. Ludwig, particularly, was a shibboleth of French Decadent sensibilities. Apart from Huysmans, Ludwig’s self-imposed exile to the dominion of dreams inspired writers such as Catulle Mendès, Paul Verlaine, Robert de Montesquiou and later Jean Cocteau and Philippe Jullian. Alongside his obvious appeal to such precious spirits, Ludwig arguably served as a prism for their fascination with an absolutism still too contentious to directly engage with in republican France.
In his time and after, Ludwig received numerous epithets, including The Dream King, The Swan King, The Virgin King and – less tactfully – The Mad King. Montesquiou imaginatively labelled him the “13th Caesar”, but it is the poet’s description of him as Rex Luna which serves him best; not quite lunatic, but driven by compulsions which scorned the light of day, making sense only in the moonlit realm of reverie and illusion.
Sissi (Elisabeth) and Ludwig II should need no introduction to regular readers. The Austrian empress and the Bavarian king were cousins and – as we see below – might have been in-laws as well if Ludwig hadn’t broken off his engagement with Sissi’s sister Sophie. But even greater than bonds of blood and wedlock was their shared sensibility – wilful, reclusive, eccentric, otherworldly. This as much as what they did or said or created is what inspired writers and artists of their own and later ages, and it is above all these secret legacies which I have tried to map here. This requires some abridgment – see here, for example, for the full rundown of Ludwig-inspired cinema – but hopefully it captures the royal cousins’ major points of psychic intersection with kindred spirits.
Published in 1918, Colour Studies in Paris consists of recollections by English writer Arthur Symons regarding his encounters with the literature, personalities and atmosphere of Paris. As we saw recently, Symons’ first such rendezvous would come to have a profound impact on the course of English literature throughout the 1890s. The book’s essays span almost the entire Belle Époque and encompass many of the most fascinating literary figures of the time including – naturally – Robert de Montesquiou (who died on this day in 1921). Here, in a chapter liberally dusted with untranslated French and entitled “The Poet of the Bats”, Symons engages with the count, his poetry and his double life as a fictional character. He puts the “fun” back into “funambulesque” (my new favourite word); the anecdote about the quarrelling help is one of the best things I’ve read about Montesquiou:
Visitors to the Salon du Champ de Mars cannot fail to have noticed a full-length portrait by Whistler, the portrait of a gentleman of somewhat uncertain age, standing in an attitude half chivalrous, half funambulesque, his hand lightly posed on a small cane. There is something distinguished, something factitious, about the whole figure, and on turning to the catalogue one could not but be struck by a certain fantastic appropriateness in the name, Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, even if that name conveyed no further significance. To those who know something of the curiosities of French literary society, the picture has its interest as a portrait of the oddest of Parisian “originals,” the typical French “aesthete,” from whose cult of the hortensia Oscar Wilde no doubt learnt the worship of the sunflower; while to readers of Huysmans it has the further interest of being a portrait of the real des Esseintes, the hero of that singular and remarkable romance of the Decadence, A Rebours. It is scarcely likely that many of the people, or indeed any of the English people who saw the picture, knew that it was also the portrait of a poet, the poet of the bats, Les Chauves-Souris, an enormous volume of five hundred closely printed pages.
The Comte de Montesquiou, though living, and a personage, and of late a fait divers in the papers for purely mundane reasons, is none the less a legendary being, of whom all the stories that are told may very likely be true, of whom at all events nothing can be told more fantastic than the truth. Has he, or had he, really a series of rooms, draped in different tones, in one of which he could only read French, in another only Latin? Did he really gild the back of the tortoise, and then inlay it with jewels, so that it might crawl over the carpet in arabesques of living colour, until the poor beast died of the burden of its unwonted splendour? Did he really invent an orchestra of perfumes, an orchestra of liqueurs, on which he could play the subtlest harmonies of the senses? He certainly at one time possessed an incredible wardrobe, from which he would select and combine, with infinite labour, the costume of the day ; apologising, on a certain misty afternoon, for not employing the Scotch symphony which had once before so perfectly suited a similar day: “but it takes my servant so long to prepare it!” On one occasion a distinguished French writer, one of the most recent of Academicians, was astonished, on opening a letter from the Comte de Montesquiou, to find along with the letter a manuscript copy of Balzac’s Curé de Tours, written in an illiterate hand. Nothing whatever was said about it, and on meeting his correspondent, the Academician inquired if it was by oversight that the manuscript had been enclosed. “Oh, no,” was the answer, “the fact is, my cook and my butler are always quarrelling, and in order to occupy them and keep them out of mischief, I give them Balzac’s stories to copy out; and I send the copies to my friends. Père Goriot I sent to Leconte de Lisle : I only sent you a short one.”
Until a year or two ago, the Comte de Montesquiou indulged in the luxury of enjoying an artistic reputation without having done anything, or at least without having published. It was known that he wrote poems, but no one had seen them; he had resolved to out-Mallarmé Mallarmé, and he succeeded so well that it was generally supposed that these vague, shrouded poems were the quintessence of what was perversely exquisite in spirit and in form, probably few in number, but no doubt not less faultless than original. All at once the veil was dropped; the huge volume of the Chauves-Souris appeared, and the reticent and mysterious poet was found soliciting press-notices, paying actresses to recite his poems, giving receptions at his “Pavillion” at Versailles, and buttonholing distinguished poets, to ask them what they really thought of his poems. It is a little difficult to say what one thinks of these poems. They are divided, according to an apparently rigid but entirely unintelligible plan, into a great many divisions, of which these are the principal: Zaimph, Demi-Teintes (Préludes), Ténèbres (Interludes), Bêtes et Gens(Ombres Chinoises), Pénombres Office de la Lune (Litanies et Antiennes) , Clairière (Coryphées), Jets de Feu et Eaux d’ Artifice (Aqua-Teintes), Lunatiques, Vieilles Lunes et Lunes Rousses, Candidates (Néomenies) Syzygie (Ombre portée) Ancien Régime. All this is supposed to represent “une concentration du mystère nocturne,” and a prose commentary, which certainly makes darkness more visible, is added, because, the author tells us, “des sollicitudes amies veulent qu’un léger fil permette a des esprits curieux et bienveillants de reconnaître vite le labyrinthe, et, plus expressément, d’apprécier la division architectonique, voire architecturale, peut-être le meilleur mérite du poème.” Probably nothing more calmly crazy than this book – in which there is all the disorder without any of the delirium of madness – was ever written: the book certainly has its interest. The possibilities of verse for the expression of fluent, contorted, and interminable nonsense have never been more cogently demonstrated than in the pages from which I cull at random these two stanzas:
“Terreur des Troglôdytès,
Sur leurs tapis de Turquies,
Et de tous les rats de tes
Batrakhomyomakhyes,
Homere: Méridarpax
Voleur de portioncule;
Trôxartès et Psikharpax,
Par qui Pélèîon recule.”
This is quite an average specimen of the manner of the poet of the bats : if, however, one prefers a greater simplicity, we need but turn the page, and we read:
“La nuit tous les chats sont gris
Toutes les souris sont fauves:
Chauves-souris et chat-chauves,
Chats-chauves chauves-souris !”
It is not a quality that the author would probably appreciate, but the quality that most impresses in this book is the extraordinary diligence that must have been required to produce it. There is not a spontaneous verse in it, from beginning to end few would seem to have required thought, but none could have failed to demand labour. At its best it has that funambulesque air of the Whistler portrait ; when it is not playing tricks it is ambling along stolidly; but the quintessential des Esseintes, the father and child of the Decadence, well, des Esseintes has no rival to fear in the merely real Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.
You can read the whole of Colour Studies in Parishere.
After some days of sight-seeing in Paris, to which we were almost strangers, on an August afternoon, 1901, Miss Lamont and I went to Versailles. We had very hazy ideas as to where it was or what there was to be seen. Both of us thought it might prove to be a dull expedition. We went by train, and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest, though we constantly regretted our inability through ignorance to feel properly the charm of the place. My knowledge of French history was limited to the very little I had learnt in the schoolroom, historical novels, and the first volume of Justin McCarthy’s French Revolution. Over thirty years before my brother had written a prize poem on Marie Antoinette, for whom at the time I had felt much enthusiasm. But the German occupation was chiefly in our minds, and Miss Lamont and I thought and spoke of it several times. We sat down in the Salle des Glaces, where a very sweet air was blowing in at the open windows over the flower-beds below, and finding that there was time to spare, I suggested our going to the Petit Trianon.
So begins a book originally published in 1911, recording events which transpired on this day in 1901. An Adventure was credited to Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont, but its actual authors were Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain.
Their real identities are the least of the mysteries raised by the book. For what they claim to have witnessed once they made it to the Petit Trianon was nothing less than a time slip, a temporal slide to the ancien régime. The Petit Trianon, you may recall, was the modestly-proportioned mansion in the vast grounds of Versailles where Marie Antoinette played at being a bonne bourgeoise (when she wasn’t yukking it up as a milkmaid in her own private village).
Here the two English ladies claim to have seen courtly goings on, costumed cavortings as one might have witnessed there in the late 18th century, encountering, among others, a man and a woman whose descriptions match those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Ghost sightings, especially in such places of rich historical association as Versailles, are far from rare. What distinguished the “Moberly-Jourdain Incident” (as it became known) was that two people claimed to have witnessed the very same thing, and not just anyone, but Oxford academics with – it was presumed – little motivation to fantasise.
Astute readers noticed that the telling became slightly more embellished with each new edition of the book, which bore at least the trappings of scholastic rigour in the form of footnotes and appended maps. But the story retained its grip on the popular imagination and was examined from every angle, most thoroughly in Lucille Iremonger’s 1957 book The Ghosts of Versailles. Iremonger effectively outs the two (long-dead) women, neatly delineating their butch-femme roles (Moberly and Jourdain, respectively). Having deposited them beyond the bounds of prevailing morality of the time, it was no great stretch to characterise their experience as some kind of mutual hysteria.
Jean Cocteau wrote the preface to a 1960 French edition of An Adventure, hyping the story as “the greatest of all time” while lamenting the rational sciences’ resistance to the magic of such phenomena. The episode spoke to his wilful belief in the persistence of a poetic reality impervious to the illusions of the material world. The same year he produced his patchy, self-indulgent film Le Testament d’Orphée. Here the theme of time travel and the heavy, dream-like atmosphere of An Adventure which so captivated Cocteau are made manifest. Early in the film, Cocteau casts himself as a pre-revolutionary nobleman who slips through time to encounter a scientist at various stages in his life.
But what actually happened on August 10, 1901? The most astonishing part of the story is that the Misses Moberly and Jourdain may not, in fact, have invented their testimony, that they in all likelihood saw exactly what they claimed to have seen. Only, it wasn’t a previous age they had stumbled across, but a kind of retro drag fête galante, starring another French poet and frequent guest to Strange Flowers. The mystery, which endured for over half a century, was solved by Philippe Jullian in 1965:
[Robert de] Montesquiou and [Gabriel de] Yturri spent their days in the Trianon gardens, enticing elegant ladies and poets to listen to [Pierre de] Nolhac and Montesquiou himself; Mme [Élisabeth] Greffuhle organised a costumed charity fête in the Dairy. They were truly at home here and so they might represent an explanation for the singular encounter made in the gardens of the Petit Trianon by two extremely sensible Englishwomen, teachers at an Oxford college. Under the title An Adventure, these ladies published an account of apparitions and personalities in strange costumes, mysterious music to which they were both witness. Perhaps these people, whom they took to be Marie-Antoinette and her courtesans, were simply Madam Greffuhle dressed as a shepherdess, rehearsing a divertissement with her two friends. Or maybe Mme [Marquise] d’Hervey de Saint-Denis, of whom Robert owned numerous photographs showing her dressed as Marie-Antoinette.
Montesquiou’s penchant for dressing up and his nostalgia for pre-revolutionary France are well documented (one of his homes was based on the Petit Trianon’s big sister, the Grand Trianon). Marie Antoinette, according to Jullian’s explanation, was if not the French queen at least a French queen, most likely one of Montesquiou’s friends in drag.
Terry Castle deals extensively with the case in her 1995 book The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. She is dismissive of Jullian’s theory, saying “it was alleged that Montesquiou had at one time lived in a house at Versailles and held fancy-dress parties there”. Had she researched further she would have discovered that Montesquiou had most definitely lived in Versailles (in the “Pavillon Montesquiou”), but that at the time of the Moberly-Jourdain Incident he was living in nearby Neuilly. While essentially returning an open verdict, Castle’s closest guess is remarkably close to Iremonger’s pseudo-psychoanalytical conclusion that the ghosts of Versailles which Moberly and Jourdain witnessed were the result of a “folie à deux“.
Since 1921, Montesquiou has himself been a ghost of Versailles, buried there next to his lover Yturri.
OK, that’s a lie. I use it all the time. I used it two hours ago to describe a particularly eye-catching cloud I saw on Tempelhofer Feld. But from now on my gold standard of “amazing” will be Figures Contemporaines.
Which is what exactly? Well last month a reader got in touch, enquiring about an image of Rachilde (reproduced above) which I used in an old post about the great French Decadent writer, who incidentally died on this day in 1953. I couldn’t recall where I had found it, but further enquiries revealed the original source, and it is – indeed – amazing.
First, let’s examine the handwritten text beneath the portrait:
The Decadents/Have no talent/So they tell me!/Oh! Not at all!/Me, I say/That they have genius/All things considered/Because the most exhausted/Are remade/(and remake us)/With a bottle/Of Mariani wine.
A bottle of what now? “Vin Mariani”, it turns out, was a hugely popular over-the-counter tonic whose popularity was not unrelated to the fact that it was laced with cocaine. And Figures Contemporaines was a compendium of testimonials that the French company behind Vin Mariani published every year or so throughout the Belle Époque and beyond. In fact they evidently made many people’s époque significantly beller if their fulsome first person avowals are to be believed.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that someone like Rachilde, whose writing addressed gender reversal, sado-masochism and other outré piquanteries, would be induced to shill for what was essentially a blow spritzer. But Vin Mariani also found favour with such upstanding literati as Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola and Alexandre Dumas. And as the series wore on the endorsements poured in from the highest circles of power: President McKinley, the Kings of Sweden, Spain and Cambodia, a Shah of Persia and not one but two popes. And if any of Queen Elisabeth of Romania’s contemporaries wondered how she combined her royal duties with a prolific literary career, writing numerous novels in different languages under the name Carmen Sylva, she was happy to (effectively) tell the world: I’M BUZZED OUT OF MY FREAKIN’ BRAINBOX.
Each subject in Figures Contemporaines was allotted three pages, two of which detailed their achievements, the third featuring a portrait and a testimonial in the subject’s own hand. And that went for the lowliest bohemian or the Supreme Pontiff himself – here the underworld really did meet the elite, and it was quite the party. This was not simply a case of luminary x accepting cash in return for a feigned fondness for product y (and presumably crowned heads did not ordinarily take money for such things), but an extremely modern, symbiotic relationship between brand and celebrity.
Doctors lined up in their dozens to salute the health-giving properties of Vin Mariani while the company’s own marketing text spoke of a wondrous elixir which miraculously dissolved the maladies of the condition humaine. It was particularly recommended for “women exhausted by maternity”, as well as athletes, who apparently found it far better for “developing vigour and maintaining endurance” than any amount of training (no shit). Of course it wasn’t the only product of its age which brought the “restorative” effects of the coca leaf to the consumer, and we already know of cocaine’s effect on figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Queen Victoria. But never has a product been so resoundingly endorsed by such a distinguished set of personalities.
The selection below is a pot pourri of fin-de-siècle creative professionals, as well as celebrity gynaecologist and Sargent subject Samuel Pozzi, who probed some of the most prestigious lady gardens in Paris. Graphic artists, including Odilon Redon, caricaturist Sem and Raymond Roussel’s favoured illustrator Henri-Achille Zo, often embellished their entries with original images. Alphonse Mucha, for instance, provides a graphic accompaniment to his claim that “even the mummies stand up and walk when they drink Vin Mariani!”
The writers whose pens were quickened by Vin Mariani include our old favourite Robert de Montesquiou, cross-dressing mystic Joséphin Péladan, lesbohemian poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, the scandalous Octave Mirbeau and Parnassian eminence Catulle Mendès (as well as his one-time lover, composer Augusta Holmès). And they could hardly omit the man whose life was essentially a cocktail of drugs, alcohol and notoriety: take a bow Jean Lorrain (sadly only available in low-res).
Those are the ones who caught my eye, anyway; devotees of obscure Belle Époque notables whose curiosity has been piqued are directed to Europeana which hosts most editions of Figures Contemporaines.
An anecdote dating from the Belle Époque tells us that one night at the theatre, Count Robert de Montesquiou was greatly struck by a young man he saw in the audience. The stranger bore a startling resemblance to the writer Alfred de Musset, who had died when Montesquiou was an infant and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, along with a number of the count’s illustrious ancestors. After the performance Montesquiou invited the doppelganger to dinner and swept him up into his night’s ensuing revelries. Finally at dawn the count apologised to “Alfred” for detaining him in this realm for so long and deposited the perplexed young man – not at his home, but at the gates of Père Lachaise.
Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac died in Menton 100 years ago today. He was buried in Versailles at the side of his lover, Gabriel Yturri, who had died in 1905. An angel with a finger to its lips guarding their shared tomb counsels discretion – a don’t ask/don’t tell, do-not-disturb sign on their eternal lodgings. Montesquiou chose not to mingle with the bones of his storied forebears, who included an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, a Maréchal on tu terms with Henri IV and one of the Three Musketeers.
Born in 1855, Montesquiou wore baby clothes that once clad Napoleon’s son, the ill-fated King of Rome, whose governess was the count’s great-grandmother. At boarding school, young Robert subsumed his adolescent longings into poetry whose recondite imagery contrasted with the strict formality of their settings. He became an assiduous curator of his own elegance. He gained the favour of his schoolmates with bitchy aperçus and impersonations; all of these habits persisted into adulthood.
Our visual impression of Montesquiou is largely informed by the great 1890s portraits by Whistler and Boldini. But before them came a fascinating 1879 study by Henri-Lucien Doucet. Here, Montesquiou is not yet Montesquiou. His hands, much admired by his contemporaries, and later habitually clamped to a cane, are clenched in a gesture which suggests something other than the self-possession that the sitter would later whet to warlike acuity. Pale, handsome, with the suggestion of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth, he is still in his overcoat as though he has just arrived or is making to leave. There is a touching hesitation, an uncertainty, a sense that acclamation is desired and not merely assumed as it would be later. Even the background seems unfixed.
Within a few years – certainly by 1884 when his persona suffused J. K. Huysmans’s characterisation of Jean des Esseintes in À rebours – Montesquiou had become Montesquiou. But what does that mean? He was described as a “crank”, “literary lunatic”, “commander of delicate odours”, “sculptor of clouds”, “stringer of pearls”, “great genius of talk”, “grand duke of Sodom”, “professor of beauty”, “born poet”, “legendary friend”, “Apollo of mystery”, “poet of the bats”, “sovereign of transitory things”. Nominally commended to posterity as a poet, so completely does the count elude conventional compartments of fame that he functions more as a talisman of sensibility than an actual figure of history, literary or otherwise. Rare is the francophone masochist who would choose to read, say, his 1892 volume of verse about bats, jewels, fireworks and who knows what across 500 pages. At a time when far more obscure fin-de-siècle writers are available in English, there is a reason that Montesquiou’s works – “vague, shrouded poems … perversely exquisite in spirit and in form” in the estimation of Arthur Symons – remain almost entirely untranslated.
The description of “aesthete”, while nebulous, comes closer. Montesquiou approached aesthetics with cultish intensity, cultivating a freemasonry of ephemera of which he became the ultimate adept. He opposed the tide of industrialisation with Counter-Reformational zeal, a mania for rarity and raffinesse. As Baudelaire once said, “beauty always has an element of strangeness,” and as well as tending the curious blooms in the hothouse of his rarefied tastes, Montesquiou nurtured his eccentricities like spoiled children. He invited society friends to the christening of his cat, wore a ring mounted with a crystal enclosing a single tear, embarked for New York with his Great Dane in a white leather collar studded with turquoise. He had a pet bat which he announced to be the reincarnation of King Ludwig II. His costumed ancien régime play-acting with friends at Versailles was so authentic that two English lesbian academics on a day trip were convinced they had entered a wormhole. His hyper-refinement inspired an entire literary movement.
For it is easy to forget that Montesquiou – regardless of his own work – was not merely emblematic of Decadence, he was essentially patient zero in its viral spread. If Stéphane Mallarmé had not visited Montesquiou’s profoundly eccentric chambers on the Quai d’Orsay – Linderhof and Fonthill Abbey compressed beneath a mansard roof – and if he had not related his impressions to J. K. Huysmans, then À rebours and the entire Decadent movement might never have happened, thus no Picture of Dorian Gray – and so forth.
Of course, to some this would have been quite the more preferable outcome. As artist Richard Hawkins observed in the catalogue for a 2005 exhibition of latter-day Decadence, Montesquiou is “almost always characterised in biographies and histories of the period as the worst of the clichés and bad humour of the fin de siècle, as if everything unseemly of the period could be packed into one little 5-foot-7 faggy snit.” That we have a more rounded figure available to us than this unjust caricature is largely the work of writer Philippe Jullian. Just as the cult of Baron Corvo owes much to the work of biographer A. J. A. Symons, it was greatly to Montesquiou’s favour that a champion as insightful and sympathetic as Jullian came along while there were still (just) living witnesses to his subject’s life, including Princess Bibesco, Natalie Barney and the count’s only niece. His 1965 biography Un prince 1900 is as much evocation as description, reconstructing the recherché pleasures of the Belle Époque around the reader.
Jullian shows us that Montesquiou’s true lineage was not to be found in the names engraved in Père Lachaise but in a network of similarly narcissistic aesthetes, living and dead. Proust would imitate the mannerisms of Montesquiou, some of which he had cribbed from Whistler. Montesquiou communed with Ludwig II, Empress Sissi, Sarah Bernhardt (who, while not dead, chose to sleep in a coffin). As the 19th century came to a close, the count partook in the ultimate sacrament of these secret inheritances. He had long been obsessed with the Countess de Castiglione, the Second Empire courtesan who became the mistress of Napoleon III in 1856, at which point she began her astonishing artistic project of staging events in her life in photographs. They continued for four decades, as she lived out her half-mad dotage on the Place Vendôme, conducting a long funeral rite for her own beauty just as Des Esseintes had publicly mourned his virility.
The count had never encountered the countess in life, but as the news of her death circulated throughout Paris in late 1899, he seized the opportunity, hurried to the Place Vendôme and there caught sight of her corpse just as the lid was being lowered on her coffin. So profound was the impact of this moment that it took him over a decade to formulate it in words. By the time he published his tribute La Divine comtesse in 1913, he had collected many of the objects with which she furnished her solitude as well as a trove of those extraordinary photographs. He shared his obsession with his friend the Marchesa Casati, the “living work of art”, while the photographs would end up in the possession of much-married diva Ganna Walska. Each of them sought the mirror that only another narcissist can supply.
Like that opening anecdote, Montesquiou’s communion with Castiglione speaks to both the count’s parlour mysticism – his insistence that he was in touch with other planes – but also a life shaded with sorrow. Montesquiou was a high-functioning melancholic; his mother, he said, had given him the “sad gift of life”. He referred to himself as a “future corpse”, adding fin-de-siècle morbidity to the dandy’s habitual melancholy. Naturally Montesquiou aestheticised mortality, because Montesquiou aestheticised everything – posing as John the bodiless Baptist, carrying a photo of Sarah Bernhardt in her coffin, wearing an onyx death’s head as a scarf pin. “Robert de Montesquiou was to see the world as a place of vanities, in which, under a heap of roses, ivories and carved goblets, one discovered a skull of exquisite proportions.” These words are from Philippe Jullian, who goes on to evoke the lines from Platen which became the count’s motto: “He who looks Beauty full in the face/Is already dedicated to death”. It was not a slave whispering “memento mori” to Montesquiou, but a mirror; it isn’t difficult to trace the crepuscular traits of Des Esseintes.
But in contrast to Des Esseintes, Montesquiou maintained an active social life. Contemporaries invariably noted the hysterical high-pitched laughter which would follow his put-downs; he would hold his hand in front of his mouth to hide his rotten teeth – something he shared with his idol Ludwig II, although he never ran to fat like the Bavarian king. In fact Montesquiou was rejected for military service for being “excessively thin”, although he did win bronze in an equestrian event at the 1900 Olympics. For elegance and hauteur he had no podium rivals; in some caricatures his head is thrust so far back he looks like a gymnast about to embark on a floor routine. It was said he could dress in cabbage leaves and still possess un chic suprême. He could discern gradations of grey invisible to the lay eye. And in fairness it should be noted that he supported the work of younger writers and artists – Colette, Romaine Brooks, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Claude Debussy, Anna de Noailles and – to his lasting regret – Marcel Proust.
But there was a venomous edge to Montesquiou’s tastemaking which recalls the axiom attributed to Gore Vidal (among others): “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” When Montesquiou hosted a party, for instance, he would draw up two lists – one of the invitees, the other of those knowingly excluded. “The truth of the matter is I prefer the parties themselves to the people I invite to them … I have always regarded them as an inseparable – shall I say unavoidable? – detail of any reception, but a detail that is, alas! all too often recalcitrant.” He further complained that guests didn’t “stand in the position suggested to them in a well-ordered gathering,” unlike his beloved bibelots.
At formal occasions, Montesquiou settled those awkward questions of precedence and placement with which his milieu busied itself by announcing “the place of honour is where I find myself.” He was largely repelled by the men of his class and their preoccupation with hunting (pheasants, soubrettes – it made little difference) but he would sometimes lend the more adventurous of their wives his queer eye. While Montesquiou excelled in malice, in part this was the tenor of his set. One night he was dining with fellow dandy Boni de Castellane and the painters Giovanni Boldini and Jean-Louis Forain, all of whom rivalled the count for waspish obloquy. So greatly did each of them fear leaving first, knowing that he would be the object of the remaining trio’s merciless aspersions, that they agreed to rise together and leave as one.
But Montesquiou’s mockery was never turned inward; his vanity and elitism were entire, self-enclosed and unabashed. When imitators tried to recreate the interiors so rapturously imagined by Huysmans, Montesquiou moved on. Mere refinement was insufficient; he had to be utterly original. When burglars broke into his Le Vésinet property but later attested in court that “there was nothing for us there”, Montesquiou accepted this as high praise. The count neither sought nor attained the attentions of the boulevard.
He didn’t need wider acclaim, of course, because he had the means and the social standing to fuss with his gewgaws as much as he liked. Unlike Jean Lorrain, who had risen to become the highest paid journalist in Paris. Philippe Jullian, who penned biographies of both men, claimed that Lorrain was driven “by the assurance of having more talent and the fear of having less taste” than Montesquiou. Lorrain spread a story that Montesquiou had been at the tragic fire at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897, and had used his cane to beat women out of the way as he saved his own skin. It was a terrible calumny; Montesquiou was nowhere near the blaze but the story gained purchase because people could imagine him doing such a thing.
Poet or not, Montesquiou was more comfortable with images and objects than words, and as well as sitting for an extensive body of photographs inspired by Castiglione, he was a sought-after subject for painters. In addition to Doucet they included Giovanni Boldini, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Antonio de la Gándara, Philippe de Laszlo and most famously James McNeill Whistler. The excursion to London to attain immortality under Whistler’s brush brought out the full spectrum of Montesquiou’s eccentricity. He travelled under elaborate aliases although, as W. Graham Robertson (another cane-wielding Whistler subject) commented, “he might have walked down Piccadilly accompanied by a brass band without anyone being much the wiser.” In the exacting sessions Montesquiou felt that Whistler was “emptying him of life”, and he availed himself of “Vin Mariani”,a cocaine-laced “restorative”; like everyone from Decadent provocateuse Rachilde to Pope Leo XIII, he also shilled for the makers. As the long sittings drew to a close, Whistler countered Montesquiou’s antsy impatience by appealing to his vanity; “Look at me for an instant longer, and you will look forever!” (“perhaps the most beautiful phrase ever spoken by a painter” reflected Montesquiou).
As the 20th century advanced, Montesquiou retreated further into the past, indulging his Bourbon nostalgia by buying a palace modelled on the Grand Trianon, the “Palais Rose” to match his rival Boni de Castellane’s similar residence in central Paris. Montesquiou was already overshadowed by Des Esseintes when in 1913 Marcel Proust issued Du côté de chez Swann, the first in what would eventually be a series of seven novels which included the character of the prodigiously homosexual Baron de Charlus. Proust had first met Montesquiou twenty years earlier at the home of Madeleine Lemaire, painter of floral studies (“only God created more roses” as Dumas fils maintained). Despite the author’s initial protestations, Charlus was largely inspired by the count. At this point the Montesquiou persona began to slip the surly bonds of mere existence and drift into undying artifice.
“Is it admissible,” Montesquiou once asked, “is it desirable, to see a fictional character overtake its model, to the point of relegating him to the background and almost replacing him in people’s memories?” He was speaking about the treatment of his ancestor d’Artagnan (at the hands of Dumas père), but could very well have been referring to himself. But surely it was better to front up to eternity in the more flattering guises tailored by Proust and Huysmans than, say, as the “Priest-Petronius and Mecaenas-Messiah, volatile volatiliser of words” in Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler, the “Duc de Fréneuse” in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas, “Jacques de Serpigny” in Le Mariage de minuit by Henri de Regnier (with whom Montesquiou fought a duel over the Bazar de la Charité slander) or “Montautrou” (“arse-climber”) in Lord Lyllian, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s roman à clef of Satanism and sodomy in high society.
The count continued to maintain an interest in the avant-garde of his day, and cultivated a friendship with the writer Raymond Roussel, something of a next-generation Montesquiou – handsome, gay, wealthy, dandyish and deeply eccentric. But a deceptively minor incident in the friendship between the two men is of unimprovable symbolic value in illustrating the difference in their artistic sensibilities and the simple passing of time and fashion. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Montesquiou gave Roussel a bloom meant only for the hothouse; Roussel earned the count’s ire by instead planting it in a windswept garden. The count’s carefully tended art, interior without true interiority, could not be transplanted to the great febrile landscapes that issued from the younger man’s mind.
They say “count no man happy till he dies” – may we count the count happy? He would probably have regarded conventional notions of happiness as appallingly petty bourgeois. But as he grew older and his health worsened the endless shades of grey tended to gun-metal. The return of Charlus in the second volume of Proust’s magnum opus in 1919 seemed to drain Montesquiou of much of his remaining vitality. His world of rare perfumes, neurasthenic décor and titled dowagers was gone, and he knew that he was at a remove from, as he put it, “Picasso’s artistic conceptions, from Czechoslovakian aestheticism or Negro art”. His luxury limited editions of corseted alexandrines could scarcely have been more apt to repel the attentions of the between-the-wars sophisticate if their pages had been pasted together.
Even the manner of Montesquiou’s demise was démodé, Beardsley-esque. Suffering from uremia, the sixty-six year old count decamped to Menton, where he died on 11 December 1921. Ten days later he was laid at Yturri’s side in Versailles in the company of Natalie Barney, Ida Rubinstein, Maurice Barrès and Lucie Delaure-Mardrus. Eulogist Paul-Louis Couchoud admirably evoked the count’s essential nature without planing away his sharp corners. “We shall no more see his tall figure thrust back, his princely brow, his deep and pensive eyes, his mocking and sincere mouth … At once the haughtiest and most candid of men, proud but sensitive, refining all properties and breaking all conventions, master of the art of pleasing and attracted by the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing, irritated to excess by the slightest baseness, infinitely exalted by the most obscure sign of spiritual grandeur, stating that the only bearable things are things in the extreme …”.
Montesquiou’s persona is captive in arts and letters of more talented contemporaries, and more recently evoked in Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat. This just leaves Montesquiou the man who was – as Arthur Symons pronounced in the ne plus ultra of fin-de-siècle shade – “merely real”.
