Le Paon dans les Pyrénées

The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes (Penguin 2019)

When I posted Cornelia Otis Skinner’s witty and well-written “Portrait of a Peacock” at my other blog, I would have been pleased to know that within a few weeks I’d be reading a book in which the Peacock has a leading role. Alas, the anticipation would have proved better than the reality. Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the aristocratic French dandy, aesthete and literary butterfly, flits and flutters everywhere in Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat. But the book has two big flaws by comparison with Skinner’s essay. And one big flaw of its own.

The two big comparative flaws are that the book isn’t very well-written and isn’t mostly about Montesquiou, but a less interesting figure: the French-Italian surgeon and gynaecologist Samuel Pozzi, who’s the Man in the Red Coat of the title. The big flaw of its own is that it doesn’t have an index. Despite Barnes’ sometimes clumsy and banal prose, the book has many amusing and interesting anecdotes and asides. But if you want to re-read them after finishing the book, you’ll have to find them for yourself. Here’s one about the Peacock, who was on holiday in the Pyrenees when he received a telegram informing him that his favourite house, the luxurious and art-replete Pavilion “at Neuilly, on the edge of the Bois de Boulagne”, had been burgled:

As he travelled north, the Count’s apprehension deepened. He imagined his Whistler slashed to pieces. He remembered Flaubert’s phrase from Salammbô about the mercenaries destroying objects “whose meaning escapes them, and which, because of this, exasperate them.” When he got to Neuilly he found, to his relief and amazement, that his treasures were all intact and the “mercenaries” seemed to have left without any loot. Shortly afterwards, the burglars were arrested. At their trial, one of them was asked why they hadn’t stolen anything. He replied, “Oh, there wasn’t anything for us there.” Montesquiou described these words as “the most flattering of all that have been addressed to me in my entire existence.” – pg. 193-4

Montesquiou posing as the head of John the Baptist, flanked by lines of his own poetry

When the Peacock is on stage, this book is always interesting and entertaining. When he isn’t, it’s often much less so. And although it’s almost entirely about la Belle Époque and Francophones, it doesn’t have much French in it. Barnes is bilingual, so why didn’t he write more about Parisian slang and quote more of his dramatis personae in the original? Perhaps he was concealing the drabness of his translations. But he does describe and analyse art well. He notes, for example, that a turquoise cuff-link echoes the turquoise handle of the cane Montesquiou is wielding in Boldini’s famous portrait. That small but significant detail isn’t obvious in copies of the portrait I’ve seen on the net, so here’s a scan from the book:

Robert de Montesquiou by Boldini (1897) (open in new window for larger version)

And there are many more images where that came from. Many obviously come from Barnes’ own collection, including the free photo-cards of Célébrités Contemporaines included with bars of chocolate manufactured by “the grocers Félix Potin.” Maupassant, Wagner, Marie Curie and Kipling are there, which didn’t surprise me. But so is Montesquiou, which did surprise me. I thought he was a minor figure even at the time. He wasn’t. Indeed, he appeared on two cards in the Célébrités Contemporaines series. Barnes says this:

There is something eternally satisfying about the dandyish count – so superior, so exclusive, so aloof from the middle and lower classes, so removed from the normal materiality of the world – falling out of a chocolate wrapper as a free gift. And the anonymous drudge employed by Félix Potin to supply brief biographical notes sardonically observes that the Count is “the author of numerous verse pieces whose precocity is only increased by the wilful oddity of the titles he chooses to supply them with.” – pg. 92

Montesquiou as “Homme de Lettres” on a chocolate manufacturer’s photo-card

Yes, but I think the Count would have been pleased by the illustriousness of the company he was keeping. Just as I was pleased to see him appear in a book by a famous British writer nearly a century after his death. But I would have been more pleased if this had been a better-written book and had centered on Montesquiou rather than Pozzi. Alas, even if Barnes had written The Man with the Turquoise Cane instead, it wouldn’t have been as good as Cornelia Otis Skinner’s “Portrait of a Peacock”. Le Comte est mort! Vive le Comte!

Montesquiou and his secretary-lover Gabriel Yturri in Oriental costume