Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/449

Rh edge of Montesquiou (which he did not possess) as on his own idea of the complete aesthete. In Edmond Rostand's Chantecler, the Peacock, "Le prince de l'adjectif inopiné," was more directly inspired by the same model, but this is only a slight sketch and a caricature at that. Even his own recently published Memoirs in themselves give only an incomplete picture of the man, though they form a document as fascinating as would be the recollections of Volpone or the diary of Alceste. Montesquiou found, as Barrès prophesied, "son inventeur et son apologiste"; but by a pretty irony he will owe the immortality for which he so deeply cared, to a writer whose art he neither admired nor understood, Marcel Proust.

There was little of the eventful or publicly dramatic in the life of Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. He was born in the year 1855 of one of the oldest and most noble Houses in France. There was hardly a Duchess with whom he did not call cousins, and the first volume of his Memoirs is entirely occupied with his ancestors: Montluc, a great soldier of the sixteenth century, d'Artagnan, whose life Dumas so scandalously garbled, the Maréchal de Montesquiou, whose rivalry with Villars over the victory of Denain fills some pages of Saint-Simon, and the Abbé de Montesquiou, the first patron, and perhaps even the father, of Théophile Gautier. Robert de Montesquiou's great-grandmother was the gouvernante at Schönbrunn of the Roi de Rome, his grandfather was a prolific writer of undistinguished verse, and his mother was a converted Protestant from the petite noblesse of Geneva. He gives delightful accounts of his old homes Courtenvaux and Charnizay, of the Abbé Papillon who was his childhood's tutor, of the domestics, and of his immediate family. Even when describing the closest of his relations he does not omit the touches of feminine malignity which-are habitual to his pen. Of particular interest is the description he gives of his first cousin, who was known as "Place à table" owing to the importance he attached to the questions of precedence. It was he who, when told at a party which he was enjoying, that a near relation of his had just died, dismissed the inopportune news with the words "On exagère." (Good Proustians will remember the Duc de Guermantes.) The chapter devoted to Montesquiou’s schooldays he entitles Mes Prisons, and he applies to himself Stendhal's description of Julien Sorel, "Il ne pouvait pas plaire—il était trop différent," and Baudelaire's phrase, "le plaisir aristocratique de dé-