1921-12-11

MARIE JOSEPH ROBERT ANATOLE, COMTE de MONTESQUIOU-FEZENSAC was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy, who died on this date (b: 1855); He is reputed to have been the inspiration both for Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours (1884) and, most famously, for the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. He also won a bronze medal in the hacks and hunter combined event (an equestrian event) at the 1900 Summer Olympics.

Robert de Montesquiou was a scion of the French Montesquiou-Fézensac family. His paternal grandfather was Count Anatole de Montesquiou-Fézensac, aide-de-camp to Napoleon and grand officer of the Légion d’honneur; his father was Anatole’s third son, Thierry, who married Pauline Duroux, an orphan, in 1841. With his wife’s dowry, Thierry bought a Charnizay manor, built a mansion in Paris, and was elected Vice-President of the Jockey Club. He was a successful stockbroker who left a substantial fortune.

One author provides the following verbal portrait of Montesquiou: “Tall, black-haired, Kaiser-moustached, he cackled and screamed in weird attitudes, giggling in high soprano, hiding his black teeth behind an exquisitely gloved hand—the poseur absolute.”

“Montesquiou’s homosexuality was patently obvious, but he may in fact have lived a chaste life. He had no affairs with women, although in 1876 he reportedly once slept with the great actress Sarah Bernhardt, after which he vomited for twenty-four hours. (She remained a great friend.)

Actually, not so chaste. Montesquiou had social relationships and collaborations with many celebrities of the fin de siècle period, including Alphonse  Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Gabriele d’Annunzio), Anna de Noailles, Marthe Bibesco, Luisa Casati, Maurice Barrès, and Franca Florio.
 
In 1875 he became the paramour of Prince Edmond de Polignac, who was two decades older than he. They shared many common interests (again, not so chaste), and Montesquiou helped arrange the mariage blanc (i.e a marriage of convenience) for Polignac to Winnaretta Singer, the lesbian daughter of Isaac Singer, founder of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Montesquiou, who felt Edmond owed him a debt of gratitude for effecting this 1893  marriage of convenience, felt slighted when Edmond was not sufficiently effulgent, and the friendship was irrevocably broken.
 

In 1885, he began a close long-term relationship with Gabriel Yturri, a South American immigrant from Tucuman, Argentina, who became his secretary, companion, and lover. After Yturri died of diabetes, Henri Pinard replaced him as secretary in 1908 and eventually inherited Montesquiou’s much reduced fortune. Montesquiou and Yturri are buried alongside each other at Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, Île-de-France, France.