plaire." Like so many sensitive and unpopular schoolboys, he probably made a virtue of necessity; it was the intolerance of others which soon made him intolerable. And as one reads the endless story of his quarrels—there was hardly a friend or relation or even acquaintance, of whom he did not come to speak with venom and contempt—one begins to wonder what secret unhappiness or weakness lay hidden under this protective covering of insolence. "Si vous aviez voulu," he was once told, "tout le monde vous aimerait." "Vous me faites peur!" was his answer, sublime, and yet how pitiful! The truth is that he suffered all his life from the delusion that he was being persecuted.
As soon as he left school, he started to organize the existence that he led for nearly fifty years. From the first he deceived himself with regard to the value of the verse which he wrote with such assiduous accomplishment. It was never really more than a by-product of his activity. It gave him a certain literary status, it enabled him to turn graceful compliments for his friends, and afforded him a pretext for the feeling of self-satisfaction which it was the ruling passion of his life to gratify. But interior decoration was at least as important a method of self-expression. The descriptions in the memoirs of his early furnishing schemes make a document for the history of taste even more curious, and fearful, than Goncourt's Maison d'un Artiste. Pseudo-mediaeval lamps and Japanese objects from the Paris Exhibition jostled Morris wallpapers and rococo confessionals. It is possible that as he grew older his taste became less catholic. The two houses at Versailles in which he passed his later years apparently were charming: one was called Le Pavillon des Muses, and the other Le Palais Rose. When towards the end of his life he found he could no longer participate in the current artistic enthusiasms, he suddenly realized that for him life was over. He had once set the fashions in the aesthetic world, but an insurmountable barrier lay between the apostle of Gustave Moreau and Burne-Jones, and the appreciation of Picasso and of Negro Art. Seeing therefore that life had passed him by, he turned from the contemplation of his past to the possibilities of his future. And we have this Catholic aristocrat and aesthete finding comfort in a theological work translated from the English, Dieu, l'Invisible Roi, by H. G. Wells. It was characteristic of him to like the idea that God is not omnipotent: it placed Montesquiou himself in a less undignified position.
