"Robert De Montesquiou A Prince Of The Nineties" 1967 JULLIAN, Philippe
$125
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-Fézensac (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' À rebours (1884) and, most famously, for the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927). Some believe that he may even have been used by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.