7 - Renovations

Summary

After Edmond's interment in the Singer crypt in Torquay, Winnaretta returned to Paris. On 31 August, she invited the most gifted of memorycollectors, Marcel Proust, to come see her in the evening. Winnaretta reminisced at length, recalling her first meeting with Edmond's family members, whom he had nicknamed “the Big Reds” (les gros rouges). They had never understood him, and had told her that she was marrying an unbearable maniac. But to the contrary, she mused, she had never known someone so easy to live with, so fearful was he of being a bother to anyone. Proust was moved by the unusual emotional outpouring of this woman who had always hidden herself so carefully behind a wall of unapproachable reserve.

Just at that time a newly published novel sought to unmask the private life that Winnaretta was purported to lead behind the circumspect public image. Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas was a sensationalist tale of a young man fascinated by and attracted to the world of Parisian sexual subcultures. The open disgust with which the author treated his homosexual characters was, in fact, a veil for his own closeted homosexuality. Montesquiou, for example, becomes the perfumed Comte de Muzarett, “the Narcissus of the inkpot,” who has just completed a new book, entitled Winged Rats. But Lorrain saves his particular venom for the character of the Princesse de Seiryman-Frileuse, a thinly disguised satirical portrait of Winnaretta de Polignac. The “ogress,” as depicted by Lorrain, is “interesting” and “very daring,” having contracted an honorary marriage with an elderly prince from an old and distinguished noble family.

She has presented him with eighty thousand francs so that she should carry his name while parading before the world her depravity and her independence. Princess Seiryman is beautiful in her perverse fashion— look at the bitter willfulness of her hard profile, and look how those hard and mournful grey eyes, the color of melting ice, shelter the energy of thought and obstinacy.

Whether or not she actually read it, Winnaretta surely knew about this lurid new book. Its release so close to Edmond's death must have sharpened the sting of the portrait.