stenio solinas


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	*Stenio Solinas*

The delicate Marcel lives in the suburbs, among the four towers of the acknowledgment entitled to Mitterand, that very modern Bibliothèque nationale just inaugurated and already dated.

The haughty Robert instead you can find him downtown, guest of the Muséum d'Orsay, the railway station of the Belle Époque. The "delicate Marcel" is Marcel Proust, the "haughty Robert" is the Earl Robert de Montesquiou, the professor of beauty " of his youth, the passport of his modernity. Montesquiou was the body to whom Proust lent the soul or he took it away from.

The 1897 Giovanni Boldini' s portraits that open the exhibition "Robert de Montesquiou ou l'art de paraitre" includes a world and celebrates its embodiment. The metal grey of the dress, the white varnish of the gloves, the sea-water colour of the cuff links recalling the pommel of the walking stick, the disdainful profile and the anorexic physique tell about the society of the end of the eighteenth century, the pleasure for conversation an the ritual of receptions, the exhibitions and the detachment more and better than the history of custom. Montesquiou was a brilliant lecturer, an experienced polemicist, and a genius in disguising.

Loved and hated. In the "Souvenirs d'un journaliste", Lucien Corpechot describes him as a "varnished idol " for the use and misuse of wrinkle creams; other were ironical about the fact that the sole library he was fond of counts in really only ties but there's also who bears that even the tortoises of the house of the Montesquiou were gold painted... Munificent and choleric.

At the Pavilion of Versailles, on May 30th 1894, Robert de Montesquiou, who loves self-defining as the "sovereign of the transient things ", there's a party where Sarah Bernardt is one of the protagonists and Proust the emergent chronicler for Le Figaro. Among Japanese glasshouses, Chinese tapestries, dragons halls and art collections, the smart set is paraded the twenty-years-old Marcel would like to possess and know: "I'll ask you to introduce me some of the friends that more often evoke you: Countess Greffulhe, princess de Léon..." The article for the Parisian newspaper issues the meticulous listing of the aristocratic titles and fashion mise that the enraptured young aspirant writer goes on describing, and all that at completion of poetical recitals and musical exhibitions. For him the host is not an eccentric, is the fusion of art and life manifesting into a higher spirit. There's a kind of inferiority complex that sadistically will burst out in the "Recherche", where Charlus is the horrible caricature of a so admired model.

That does not mean that Proust is guilty of his own value or his vocation. But the building of the "Recherche" comes out when he is nearly forty and till then he has been a brilliant promise never became real.

Thirteen years of work, 95 schoolbooks, and some thousands pages. Exposed in the showcases of the exhibition, those notebooks along with the carnet of notes, the proofs and the renewed "paperoles", their remaking and the new insertions, long till two metres and cut-out and stick, are impressive, it takes shape in front of your eyes the idea of the "literary cathedral" over which the "Recherche" is modelled, the religious passion, fideistic, by which the writer rises his paper monument and gives it to posterity. Siding them, the Moreau's paintings, symbolic and distressing, the marines of Vuillard, the scenes of life of Caillebotte, Blanche and Tissot, the still lives of Chardin, and the landscapes of Vermeer concur to outline an ideal geography that well settles in the rhythm of an existence that since the childhood of the "magic lanterns" helping falling asleep at nigh, ends during maturity into the cork-lined room where secluding himself so to go on living.

Also the absences are meaningful. It lacks Poussin, there's not David, it does not form the game Delacroix and Ingres, Classic and Neoclassic, the Grand Siècle and the Age of Enlightenment seem to him they have never been. The aspect, historically grand, the paramount passions, the exemplary gestures, the extreme choices, the absolute negation and the sovereign statements are not enclosed in his world. Appealed by aristocracy, the bourgeois Proust catches it in its decay and fragile aspects, in its being the frame of something being not anymore, in the rituality that hides the lack of content, in the surviving of manias and taboos and habits and superstitions that do not succeed anymore to rise to a vision of world.

As much the delicate Marcel is man of his age as the haughty Robert instead was born late as regard to the age that would fit him. Hence the sentimentalism, the incongruence, the sense of a quasi-annoyance that ends rising from his writings and images and even from the few finds of daily life as a pot of Gallé, an oriental-fashioned fauteuil, the exposition devoted to him sparingly shows. That's the generation Proust de Montesquiou set in his fiction as symbol. The mass society will take upon itself the burial of the one and the other.