JULLIAN, Philippe

[288] pp.

Secker & Warburg

1967

8 3/4" x 5 7/8"

Jacket design by Bernard Higton

A noble name, a large fortune, a fine profile and an infinite endowment of wit and taste would have been enough to make Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855-1922) one of the most agreeable men of his time; but an intransigent passion for beauty as much as a pitiless insolence isolated this arbiter of poetic and social elegance in the midst of the fin-de-siecle festival.

Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fzensac (7 March 1855, Paris 11 December 1921, Menton) was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, painter, art collector, art interpreter, and dandy. He is reputed to have been the inspiration both for Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans' rebours (1884) and, most famously, for the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's la recherche du temps perdu (19131927). Some believe that he may even have been used by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.