Unpacking His Library: Robert de Montesquiou and the Esthetics of the Book in Fin-de-siecle France

" ... que furent les volumes/Par moi vetus d'etoffe et mis en un ecrin?" -- Robert de Montesquiou, "Priere du Relieur," Prieres de tous (1902) "O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!" --Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" (1931) In the image of its legendary owner, the poet, aesthete, and dandy extraordinaire Robert de Montesquiou, the posthumous sale of his library in April 1923 and April 1924 at the Hotel Drouot became a notorious literary and society happening. As its three-volume sale catalog, prefaced by Maurice Barres and embellished with engravings of Montesquiou's distinctive bat emblem, attests, the collection of 3727 volumes, manuscripts, and bindings belonging to this "bibliophile distingue" (Lievre 369) featured many gems. (2) These included, for example, a five-volume, 1678 edition of La Fontaine's Fables (31, first sale; N.a.f. 15229), which fetched one of the sale's highest prices? What created an even greater stir, however, was the insertion of letters and dedications to Montesquiou in several hundred of the volumes by contemporary authors, and their subsequent sale. Some of these items revealed highly personal, often embarrassing details of authors' lives, as with the 95 letters and other documents describing the final years of Verlaine. (4) Others exposed the attitudes of exaggerated obsequiousness and delirious admiration often bestowed on the count by those in the rarefied salons and cenacles he frequented. A notable bibliophilic, literary, and society event, then, the sale also occasioned public reflection on the possible deeper significance of this library. What, as Pierre Lievre mused in the columns of La Revue Hebdomadaire, did Montesquiou's library show? One set of answers to this question, in fact the one most frequently developed by Montesquiou's contemporaries, leads into the domain of literary relations and literary history. In this view, the many volumes in the library by Marcel Schwob, Remy de Gourmont, Georges Rodenbach, Pierre Louys, Stephane Mallarme, and others in their circle, all bearing laudatory inscriptions from the authors, are revealing indicators of Montesquiou's importance as a poet and esthetic guide for the Symbolists. A related set of answers to the question of the library's documentary significance opens onto literary biography. Focusing exclusively on the numerous dedicaces to Montesquiou, this approach attempts to tease out, as one critic suggested, their layers of "courtoisie ... bienseance ... interet ... toutes sortes de convenances et d'obligations ..." as well as their "moquerie secrete" and their "ironie deguisee" (Lievre 370), in order to probe the complex poses that Montesquiou and many of those in his literary, artistic, and society orbits adopted toward one another. The study of Montesquiou's library may thus hold great value for literary historians and biographers seeking to study his position within a literary network or to clarify the nature of his relations with other writers. (5) However, it is also possible to propose a less traditional "reading" of Montesquiou's library from the combined perspectives of both the history of the book and esthetics. For book historians, especially those interested in one of its crucial components, the history of reading, the catalog of a personal library can be a privileged document. It can serve, as Robert Darnton suggests, as a "profile of a reader," allowing us to "inspect the furnishings" of a reader's mind ("History of Reading," 162)--even if readers rarely read all the books in their libraries, as the many volumes with uncut pages in the Montesquiou catalog attest. Personal libraries such as Montesquiou's, in conjunction with other documents, may also help clarify hot only what, where, and when individuals read, but also how they were affected by their readings (Darnton, "History of Books," 134). In Montesquiou's case, these questions of social practices and mentalites cannot easily be separated from a consideration of his esthetics. …