Charming Young Man, page 21
A morning in late summer, quiet at the farmhouse except for the drone of the bees. Léon is standing at the front window, drinking a chamomile tea brewed from garden clippings.
The upstairs bed is laid with fresh linens, scented with lavender from Félix’s garden, so fresh that Léon has just found a praying mantis walking across a pillow. He carries it out the back door.
The house is ready. No amount of wandering its rooms will make it more or less so. And yet! That’s what Léon keeps doing. Making sure.
The evening Félix brought him back from Paris, they’d parted ways, Léon going to live with his mother. He got the front bedroom, now that Charlotte had settled in with André. But then there had been that terrible winter, when Léon’s mother had died, followed by Félix’s father, and Félix was overwhelmed with the farm.
It had happened slowly at first, and then all at once. Léon lives here now.
There are still four hours until their guests arrive—and that’s if everything goes well, if the train and ferry are on time. Léon prepares lunch for Félix’s mother; her soft, old teeth hurt so much these days that she is eating mostly porridge in her upstairs bedroom. She hasn’t been up yet today, but Léon knows that is because she is marshaling her strength to make an appearance that evening.
Léon sits on the foot of her bed while she eats, watches out the window as Félix swings his scythe against the tall yellow stalks of wheat. They sold half the land and kept only a small field, enough to bring their grain to the miller so Léon can bake all year, but even farming this reduced plot is shirt-drenching, backbreaking work. Léon canceled all his teaching appointments for harvest week, but Félix insisted that he put them all back. “We need the money,” he said. “And your students need to know you’re always there. It’s good business.”
And so Léon is bathed and neatly dressed, standing in the front room with a tea, while Félix labors outside under his wide straw hat, skin pinking beneath the August sun.
Léon’s first student of the day is just arriving, on foot, her music folder tight in her grasp. Louise. She’s one he inherited from his mother, before that winter day when she collapsed on the front walk, never to get back up. Louise is charming and talkative, probably a little in love with Félix. She never practices and she never improves. Léon adores her. “Hello, Louise!” he calls out, waving.
“Léon, hi!” she says, running up the last steps to the house and taking her place at the piano, chatting about bluebirds and school lessons and church and is Félix around today?
Léon taps the music. “Chopin, Louise, Chopin.”
After a tinkling and discordant hour, Léon’s next student arrives, and then the next. He is glad to have the distraction, so he doesn’t just sit and anticipate the evening’s guests.
By the time his teaching afternoon is over, the sun is orange and halfway down the sky.
Félix comes in, fetches a tin jug, then fills it again and again from the pump out back, quenching his thirst. He grooms and feeds Clémentine in front of the barn, then comes to join Léon inside. “Students done for the day?” he asks, picking bits of hay from his thick hair.
“Yes,” Léon says beside the kitchen sink. “And I think I just have time to—”
In two strides, Félix is next to him, embracing him. The sweat from his torso is already seeping through Léon’s shirt. “I was going to wear this . . .” Léon gives up resisting. Instead he lets his lips meet Félix’s, presses his body against his, clenches his open hands against Félix’s shoulders, wet with sweat.
Léon pulls back, loses his fingers in Félix’s damp hair. “Now you bathe.”
Félix wiggles like a wet dog, spraying Léon even more. “Join me?”
Léon laughs. “I think I’ll have to.”
Two hours later, around a long table out back of the farmhouse, cicadas are throbbing. Félix’s mother dozes at the head, in the comfy armchair they brought out expressly for her. Félix, his usual quiet and patient presence, is sitting at the other end, asking endless short questions to Albert, who gives endless long answers. Léon and John Sargent are in the middle, facing each other across the table.
“I’m sorry about Albert,” Sargent says. “Once he’s started, he keeps going. He even talks in his sleep.”
“He’s delightful,” Léon says. “I’m glad to finally meet him.”
“Me too,” Sargent says. “I’m so glad this happened. When Claude Monet wrote inviting me to Giverny, and I discovered the nearest train station was ‘Vernon,’ I thought—it couldn’t be! The place where that young pianist was from?”
Léon lifts his glass in a toast. “And now I’m back. And Giverny is right over the hillside.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Sargent says. “Assassinations are perfectly survivable. Well, the social kind are.”
“Maybe . . .” Léon says, “maybe it’s even all for the best.” He goes pensive. He’d never willingly go through something like that again. But he does love his life now. Being him for his sake, writing music for music’s sake.
“How’s . . .” Sargent glances at Félix’s mother. “How’s the reaction, to . . . What am I trying to ask . . .”
Léon knows precisely what Sargent is trying to ask. He watches the slow rhythm of Félix’s mother’s chest to make sure she is asleep. She can’t hear much even when she’s awake, anyway. “I moved in to help Félix manage his farm. We’re partners in that. I’m sure people are talking. If we were strangers here, I think we’d have run into trouble by now. But we know everyone in Vernon, for better or for worse. Most people could take or leave me, to be honest, but they all adore Félix. It’s a small town, and if people in a small town like you enough, they’re perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to anything. Everyone here has something that needs a blind eye turned to it.”
Sargent laughs. “Albert and I require blind eyes from everyone we meet. Three or four of them at least.”
“How long do we have you?” Léon asks.
“We’re hoping to stay a week or two here, until we outstay our welcome. If it’s all right by you, I do want to spend the days with Claude, painting his flowers. Maybe while I’m out you can teach Albert how to farm or at least bake.” Sargent breaks out laughing, crying before he manages to rein it in. He wipes his eyes. “Farming might be out of the question, but he does clean dishes and pump water. That’s about all I can promise. Then we continue down to Provence and into Italy. A bit of a grand tour, really. We think we’re unique and then we go and do what everyone else does.”
“It sounds lovely. Maybe Félix and I will manage something like that one day.”
“You could come with us, if you like.”
“Farming and teaching keep us here, I’m afraid.” Léon yawns. “You wouldn’t believe what time we wake up.”
“Albert and I will keep out of your way so you can . . . go pick eggs? What do farmers do at four in the morning?”
“From the sound of it, I’m worried you think eggs grow on trees.”
“That’s just my French getting in the way. Léon, how is composing going?”
“I make my stabs at it,” Léon says. “Some moments might actually be good. But I’ll never be France’s Mozart, not like they’d all once hoped.”
Sargent pushes food around his plate. “Things didn’t work out too well for that Mozart fellow, you know.”
“Yes, I think about that sometimes,” Léon says.
A voice rings out gaily from around front of the house. “Don’t get up. We’re coming right around back. Everyone get yourselves in order. We have dessert!”
Albert breaks off midstory. “Let me guess. That must be the Charlotte we heard about.”
“And her family,” Félix says. “Her husband’s name is André. The child’s name is Pascale.” He stands up and cups his hands around his mouth. “Yes, come around back!”
Félix’s mother startles awake. Léon, who is nearest, puts his hand on her arm. “Sorry, Maman. Are you ready for bed?”
She nods.
Léon offers her his arm and guides her into the house. As has happened a few times in his life, a moment has so much in it that it locks into his memory. Like he’s had it painted. He knows he’ll be returning to this in his mind until whenever he dies. Happiness isn’t in the future; it is now, in this brief moment: fireflies over a freshly shorn field, plates empty of dinner, three men pushed back from the table, enjoying their conversation, his sister arriving with a box tied up in string, the hem of her simple dress wet from the evening dew, her husband with their wailing child on his hip, the setting sun lighting up the windowpanes of Félix’s house, of their house, inside it a piano with a bitten-down pencil and a half-filled sheet of music.
Author’s Note
This book came to me along an unexpected path. In the summer of ’07, my then-boyfriend and I had planned to live together while he worked a temporary gig in Denver. I sublet my New York City apartment for three months, packed my PlayStation 2 into my Samsonite, and we headed out on our big adventure.
We broke up on day three. I remember us crying into our breakfasts at some chain restaurant whose name was a pun on eggs. The Eggcellent Griddle Company maybe, or Eggspecially Breakfast. “I don’t have anywhere to go live,” I said. “I sublet my apartment, remember?”
“Oh crap,” he said. “That’s right.”
While he was at work I piled my boxer briefs and PlayStation games into my suitcase and headed to the airport without a plane ticket.
“Where can you send me today for under two hundred dollars?” I asked at the airline counter. “Preferably under one hundred dollars.”
“Oh!” the agent said from behind her computer screen. “Is this round-trip or one-way?”
“One-way.”
She listed off cities, glancing at me nervously between each one. Saint Louis, Tampa, Minneapolis, Seattle.
Seattle. My best friend from college lived there. Things were looking up. We’d eat lots of donuts and watch ’90s rom-coms. “How much does that cost?” I asked.
I texted my friend from the tarmac. “Um, how do I get to your house from the airport? Oh, and can I stay with you for a while?”
Once I was in Seattle, I started to feel better. My friend and I spent a weekend eating those donuts and watching Jennifer Aniston movies and going for long walks. On Monday morning I escorted my friend to work, hugged her goodbye, and wandered downtown in the rain.
I soon passed the Seattle art museum and went in. To fill my day and to keep my mind off the breakup, I decided to spend five minutes with each piece of art. With a pause for lunch, that would bring me to five p.m., when I could go find my friend outside her office and throw myself into her arms and ask where we were getting our takeout from and which movie we were watching next.
It was calming, spending time with little pieces of art that I would otherwise have walked right by. A Hopi comb, a folded revolutionary flag, little black-and-whites by Jasper Johns. As the afternoon was waning, I made it to the fourth floor, where I found, tucked near the men’s room, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
It wouldn’t have caught my attention normally, but I dutifully spent my five minutes there. Once I stopped and looked, something in this young man’s eyes pulled me. A sadness, a defiance, something ambitious and clear-seeing. I felt like I could see him, and—even though we were separated by over a hundred years—I felt seen by him. The audio guide told me his story as I dodged people coming and going from the men’s room.
“Léon Delafosse.” John Singer Sargent, 1895
[Warning to those who like to read the author’s note early: spoilers follow!]
I learned that Léon Delafosse was born into poverty in rural France, where he showed a natural talent for the piano. He made it to Paris in the 1880s, where he was one of the youngest ever to enter the Paris Conservatory. At the age of thirteen, he won first prize in piano. In an era without mechanical means to listen to music, belle époque salons hired live performers for parties, and the young genius with the angelic face became highly sought after in society. Léon embraced the opportunity to meet patrons who could give him the financial freedom to write his own compositions. Marcel Proust, the same Proust who would go on to write one of the most influential novels of all time, Remembrance of Things Past, was at the time a young writer of society pieces. He latched on to Léon and used him as his calling card to even higher society, where he introduced the young man to the Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac, who became Léon’s patron.
Montesquiou was France’s equivalent of Oscar Wilde, a larger-than-life writer and dandy. He was said to have had one of his own tears encased in a gold ring and an imported tortoise that had been encrusted with rubies wandering his home during parties. He brought Léon into higher and higher society, where he met John Singer Sargent (who painted the portrait I was seeing on that rainy day in Seattle), and eventually even the Queen of England.
This is where the historical record gets slender. We know that Léon and the count had a falling out. After their relationship soured, Montesquiou poisoned the connections he had made for the young musician. Once heralded as France’s next great composer-pianist, Léon never lived up to that grand potential and largely disappeared from history—though Proust did wind up writing unkind portraits of him and Montesquiou in his Remembrance of Things Past, immortalizing them as the social-climbing violinist Morel and the odious Baron de Charlus.
I removed the headphones. The painting took on new dimensions to me. Léon’s fingers were elegant, and vivid against the nondescript, dark background. A pianist would need those fingers. For navigating his relationships with Proust and Montesquiou, Léon might also have needed that face. I began to spin out his story in my mind, trying to fill in the gaps in the historical record, wondered what his life would have been like and what he might have gone through.
The question would come to haunt me: What had happened to Léon Delafosse?
I began writing this book that summer, getting much of my initial knowledge from the Seattle public library. My research took me to Paris, where Léon and Marcel’s letters are in the National Library. (Proust is so beloved in France that most anything related to him is archived away.) The process of reading Léon’s letters was all very French: I showed my credentials, then was seated in a somber, wood-paneled room, where I turned in an orange card to get a green one, which I then gave to a white-gloved attendant who came to my table with a velvet poof and a folio of letters. I put on my own protective gloves and leafed through.
The letters stretched my college French to the limit, and Léon’s penmanship was nearly indecipherable, but holding the paper he’d used and the words he’d written in my hands was still thrilling. On one of the envelopes he’d addressed to Proust, he’d been sloppy sticking the stamp to the corner, and it hung over the edge. I slipped off my white glove and ran my fingertip along the underside of the stamp, where Léon, the real Léon, had licked it 117 years earlier.
I wrote a version of this book that year, a version that never satisfied me enough to send out. Finally, a decade later, I chucked that draft entirely and started over, and Charming Young Man is the result.
This book takes as its base what is known about the lives of Léon Delafosse, Marcel Proust, and Robert de Montesquiou, but it is not a historical record. I’ve taken plenty of liberties; what we know of Léon’s life is too scant not to. I decided to place Léon in Vernon for his childhood, and I invented Félix and Charlotte entirely (we do know from the record that Léon’s mother was a piano teacher). To tell the young-adult story I wanted, and because in my fictional tale I’ve postulated a romantic side to Léon’s relationship with Robert, I also condensed age gaps, so the central figures would all be in or near their teenage years, which also meant altering the years that certain events occurred. The letters and reviews in this novel are written by me.
For those who lived outside of sexual and gender norms in 1890s Paris, it was a time both of great opening up and of great constraint. Those with social capital could flout convention, like the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt performing as a man and Robert de Montesquiou embracing his dandy side. But there were many articles bemoaning the decadence and corruption of this time, that by embracing “immorality,” those who broke norms were risking their eternal souls and perhaps even bringing about the destruction of civilization itself.
Men with social standing, like Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou, could be uncloseted and free in a drawing room, only to hide that side of them once they put their coats on and went back into the street, entering into marriages of convenience or weathering criticism and judgment or worse. Marcel never married, but in 1897 he fought a duel with a man who publicly questioned the propriety of his relationship with Lucien Daudet (who figures in this novel briefly, as Proust’s friend at the Saussine salon; Proust is also widely acknowledged to have eventually entered into a romantic relationship with Reynaldo Hahn). Robert never married, and some historians believe that he never had sex with anyone either. The most common explanation is that he felt too much shame around homosexuality to act on it. It’s hard to underestimate the effects internalized shame would have had on people who might have lived happier and more open lives had they been born in a different time. I wonder, however, if he might simply have been asexual, and that shame had less to do with it than historians assume. It’s too late to ask Robert, so I try here to keep his characterization open to both interpretations.
Robert did have a lifelong union with his secretary, Gabriel Yturri, a man many assume to have also been his romantic partner. Yturri was known to be kind and gentle, a humanizing force to a count who could be capricious and cruel. They wound up buried next to each other in the Gonards cemetery in 1921, though the impropriety of two men lying in rest together meant that the grave is unmarked and officially anonymous. Above the grave, Montesquiou requested a certain statue be placed. He’d fallen in love with it at the Château de Vitry-sur-Seine and had it moved there to watch over them. It’s known as the angel of silence. He stands guard over the anonymous grave of two men in love, a finger over his lips.
The upstairs bed is laid with fresh linens, scented with lavender from Félix’s garden, so fresh that Léon has just found a praying mantis walking across a pillow. He carries it out the back door.
The house is ready. No amount of wandering its rooms will make it more or less so. And yet! That’s what Léon keeps doing. Making sure.
The evening Félix brought him back from Paris, they’d parted ways, Léon going to live with his mother. He got the front bedroom, now that Charlotte had settled in with André. But then there had been that terrible winter, when Léon’s mother had died, followed by Félix’s father, and Félix was overwhelmed with the farm.
It had happened slowly at first, and then all at once. Léon lives here now.
There are still four hours until their guests arrive—and that’s if everything goes well, if the train and ferry are on time. Léon prepares lunch for Félix’s mother; her soft, old teeth hurt so much these days that she is eating mostly porridge in her upstairs bedroom. She hasn’t been up yet today, but Léon knows that is because she is marshaling her strength to make an appearance that evening.
Léon sits on the foot of her bed while she eats, watches out the window as Félix swings his scythe against the tall yellow stalks of wheat. They sold half the land and kept only a small field, enough to bring their grain to the miller so Léon can bake all year, but even farming this reduced plot is shirt-drenching, backbreaking work. Léon canceled all his teaching appointments for harvest week, but Félix insisted that he put them all back. “We need the money,” he said. “And your students need to know you’re always there. It’s good business.”
And so Léon is bathed and neatly dressed, standing in the front room with a tea, while Félix labors outside under his wide straw hat, skin pinking beneath the August sun.
Léon’s first student of the day is just arriving, on foot, her music folder tight in her grasp. Louise. She’s one he inherited from his mother, before that winter day when she collapsed on the front walk, never to get back up. Louise is charming and talkative, probably a little in love with Félix. She never practices and she never improves. Léon adores her. “Hello, Louise!” he calls out, waving.
“Léon, hi!” she says, running up the last steps to the house and taking her place at the piano, chatting about bluebirds and school lessons and church and is Félix around today?
Léon taps the music. “Chopin, Louise, Chopin.”
After a tinkling and discordant hour, Léon’s next student arrives, and then the next. He is glad to have the distraction, so he doesn’t just sit and anticipate the evening’s guests.
By the time his teaching afternoon is over, the sun is orange and halfway down the sky.
Félix comes in, fetches a tin jug, then fills it again and again from the pump out back, quenching his thirst. He grooms and feeds Clémentine in front of the barn, then comes to join Léon inside. “Students done for the day?” he asks, picking bits of hay from his thick hair.
“Yes,” Léon says beside the kitchen sink. “And I think I just have time to—”
In two strides, Félix is next to him, embracing him. The sweat from his torso is already seeping through Léon’s shirt. “I was going to wear this . . .” Léon gives up resisting. Instead he lets his lips meet Félix’s, presses his body against his, clenches his open hands against Félix’s shoulders, wet with sweat.
Léon pulls back, loses his fingers in Félix’s damp hair. “Now you bathe.”
Félix wiggles like a wet dog, spraying Léon even more. “Join me?”
Léon laughs. “I think I’ll have to.”
Two hours later, around a long table out back of the farmhouse, cicadas are throbbing. Félix’s mother dozes at the head, in the comfy armchair they brought out expressly for her. Félix, his usual quiet and patient presence, is sitting at the other end, asking endless short questions to Albert, who gives endless long answers. Léon and John Sargent are in the middle, facing each other across the table.
“I’m sorry about Albert,” Sargent says. “Once he’s started, he keeps going. He even talks in his sleep.”
“He’s delightful,” Léon says. “I’m glad to finally meet him.”
“Me too,” Sargent says. “I’m so glad this happened. When Claude Monet wrote inviting me to Giverny, and I discovered the nearest train station was ‘Vernon,’ I thought—it couldn’t be! The place where that young pianist was from?”
Léon lifts his glass in a toast. “And now I’m back. And Giverny is right over the hillside.”
“See, what did I tell you?” Sargent says. “Assassinations are perfectly survivable. Well, the social kind are.”
“Maybe . . .” Léon says, “maybe it’s even all for the best.” He goes pensive. He’d never willingly go through something like that again. But he does love his life now. Being him for his sake, writing music for music’s sake.
“How’s . . .” Sargent glances at Félix’s mother. “How’s the reaction, to . . . What am I trying to ask . . .”
Léon knows precisely what Sargent is trying to ask. He watches the slow rhythm of Félix’s mother’s chest to make sure she is asleep. She can’t hear much even when she’s awake, anyway. “I moved in to help Félix manage his farm. We’re partners in that. I’m sure people are talking. If we were strangers here, I think we’d have run into trouble by now. But we know everyone in Vernon, for better or for worse. Most people could take or leave me, to be honest, but they all adore Félix. It’s a small town, and if people in a small town like you enough, they’re perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to anything. Everyone here has something that needs a blind eye turned to it.”
Sargent laughs. “Albert and I require blind eyes from everyone we meet. Three or four of them at least.”
“How long do we have you?” Léon asks.
“We’re hoping to stay a week or two here, until we outstay our welcome. If it’s all right by you, I do want to spend the days with Claude, painting his flowers. Maybe while I’m out you can teach Albert how to farm or at least bake.” Sargent breaks out laughing, crying before he manages to rein it in. He wipes his eyes. “Farming might be out of the question, but he does clean dishes and pump water. That’s about all I can promise. Then we continue down to Provence and into Italy. A bit of a grand tour, really. We think we’re unique and then we go and do what everyone else does.”
“It sounds lovely. Maybe Félix and I will manage something like that one day.”
“You could come with us, if you like.”
“Farming and teaching keep us here, I’m afraid.” Léon yawns. “You wouldn’t believe what time we wake up.”
“Albert and I will keep out of your way so you can . . . go pick eggs? What do farmers do at four in the morning?”
“From the sound of it, I’m worried you think eggs grow on trees.”
“That’s just my French getting in the way. Léon, how is composing going?”
“I make my stabs at it,” Léon says. “Some moments might actually be good. But I’ll never be France’s Mozart, not like they’d all once hoped.”
Sargent pushes food around his plate. “Things didn’t work out too well for that Mozart fellow, you know.”
“Yes, I think about that sometimes,” Léon says.
A voice rings out gaily from around front of the house. “Don’t get up. We’re coming right around back. Everyone get yourselves in order. We have dessert!”
Albert breaks off midstory. “Let me guess. That must be the Charlotte we heard about.”
“And her family,” Félix says. “Her husband’s name is André. The child’s name is Pascale.” He stands up and cups his hands around his mouth. “Yes, come around back!”
Félix’s mother startles awake. Léon, who is nearest, puts his hand on her arm. “Sorry, Maman. Are you ready for bed?”
She nods.
Léon offers her his arm and guides her into the house. As has happened a few times in his life, a moment has so much in it that it locks into his memory. Like he’s had it painted. He knows he’ll be returning to this in his mind until whenever he dies. Happiness isn’t in the future; it is now, in this brief moment: fireflies over a freshly shorn field, plates empty of dinner, three men pushed back from the table, enjoying their conversation, his sister arriving with a box tied up in string, the hem of her simple dress wet from the evening dew, her husband with their wailing child on his hip, the setting sun lighting up the windowpanes of Félix’s house, of their house, inside it a piano with a bitten-down pencil and a half-filled sheet of music.
Author’s Note
This book came to me along an unexpected path. In the summer of ’07, my then-boyfriend and I had planned to live together while he worked a temporary gig in Denver. I sublet my New York City apartment for three months, packed my PlayStation 2 into my Samsonite, and we headed out on our big adventure.
We broke up on day three. I remember us crying into our breakfasts at some chain restaurant whose name was a pun on eggs. The Eggcellent Griddle Company maybe, or Eggspecially Breakfast. “I don’t have anywhere to go live,” I said. “I sublet my apartment, remember?”
“Oh crap,” he said. “That’s right.”
While he was at work I piled my boxer briefs and PlayStation games into my suitcase and headed to the airport without a plane ticket.
“Where can you send me today for under two hundred dollars?” I asked at the airline counter. “Preferably under one hundred dollars.”
“Oh!” the agent said from behind her computer screen. “Is this round-trip or one-way?”
“One-way.”
She listed off cities, glancing at me nervously between each one. Saint Louis, Tampa, Minneapolis, Seattle.
Seattle. My best friend from college lived there. Things were looking up. We’d eat lots of donuts and watch ’90s rom-coms. “How much does that cost?” I asked.
I texted my friend from the tarmac. “Um, how do I get to your house from the airport? Oh, and can I stay with you for a while?”
Once I was in Seattle, I started to feel better. My friend and I spent a weekend eating those donuts and watching Jennifer Aniston movies and going for long walks. On Monday morning I escorted my friend to work, hugged her goodbye, and wandered downtown in the rain.
I soon passed the Seattle art museum and went in. To fill my day and to keep my mind off the breakup, I decided to spend five minutes with each piece of art. With a pause for lunch, that would bring me to five p.m., when I could go find my friend outside her office and throw myself into her arms and ask where we were getting our takeout from and which movie we were watching next.
It was calming, spending time with little pieces of art that I would otherwise have walked right by. A Hopi comb, a folded revolutionary flag, little black-and-whites by Jasper Johns. As the afternoon was waning, I made it to the fourth floor, where I found, tucked near the men’s room, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
It wouldn’t have caught my attention normally, but I dutifully spent my five minutes there. Once I stopped and looked, something in this young man’s eyes pulled me. A sadness, a defiance, something ambitious and clear-seeing. I felt like I could see him, and—even though we were separated by over a hundred years—I felt seen by him. The audio guide told me his story as I dodged people coming and going from the men’s room.
“Léon Delafosse.” John Singer Sargent, 1895
[Warning to those who like to read the author’s note early: spoilers follow!]
I learned that Léon Delafosse was born into poverty in rural France, where he showed a natural talent for the piano. He made it to Paris in the 1880s, where he was one of the youngest ever to enter the Paris Conservatory. At the age of thirteen, he won first prize in piano. In an era without mechanical means to listen to music, belle époque salons hired live performers for parties, and the young genius with the angelic face became highly sought after in society. Léon embraced the opportunity to meet patrons who could give him the financial freedom to write his own compositions. Marcel Proust, the same Proust who would go on to write one of the most influential novels of all time, Remembrance of Things Past, was at the time a young writer of society pieces. He latched on to Léon and used him as his calling card to even higher society, where he introduced the young man to the Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac, who became Léon’s patron.
Montesquiou was France’s equivalent of Oscar Wilde, a larger-than-life writer and dandy. He was said to have had one of his own tears encased in a gold ring and an imported tortoise that had been encrusted with rubies wandering his home during parties. He brought Léon into higher and higher society, where he met John Singer Sargent (who painted the portrait I was seeing on that rainy day in Seattle), and eventually even the Queen of England.
This is where the historical record gets slender. We know that Léon and the count had a falling out. After their relationship soured, Montesquiou poisoned the connections he had made for the young musician. Once heralded as France’s next great composer-pianist, Léon never lived up to that grand potential and largely disappeared from history—though Proust did wind up writing unkind portraits of him and Montesquiou in his Remembrance of Things Past, immortalizing them as the social-climbing violinist Morel and the odious Baron de Charlus.
I removed the headphones. The painting took on new dimensions to me. Léon’s fingers were elegant, and vivid against the nondescript, dark background. A pianist would need those fingers. For navigating his relationships with Proust and Montesquiou, Léon might also have needed that face. I began to spin out his story in my mind, trying to fill in the gaps in the historical record, wondered what his life would have been like and what he might have gone through.
The question would come to haunt me: What had happened to Léon Delafosse?
I began writing this book that summer, getting much of my initial knowledge from the Seattle public library. My research took me to Paris, where Léon and Marcel’s letters are in the National Library. (Proust is so beloved in France that most anything related to him is archived away.) The process of reading Léon’s letters was all very French: I showed my credentials, then was seated in a somber, wood-paneled room, where I turned in an orange card to get a green one, which I then gave to a white-gloved attendant who came to my table with a velvet poof and a folio of letters. I put on my own protective gloves and leafed through.
The letters stretched my college French to the limit, and Léon’s penmanship was nearly indecipherable, but holding the paper he’d used and the words he’d written in my hands was still thrilling. On one of the envelopes he’d addressed to Proust, he’d been sloppy sticking the stamp to the corner, and it hung over the edge. I slipped off my white glove and ran my fingertip along the underside of the stamp, where Léon, the real Léon, had licked it 117 years earlier.
I wrote a version of this book that year, a version that never satisfied me enough to send out. Finally, a decade later, I chucked that draft entirely and started over, and Charming Young Man is the result.
This book takes as its base what is known about the lives of Léon Delafosse, Marcel Proust, and Robert de Montesquiou, but it is not a historical record. I’ve taken plenty of liberties; what we know of Léon’s life is too scant not to. I decided to place Léon in Vernon for his childhood, and I invented Félix and Charlotte entirely (we do know from the record that Léon’s mother was a piano teacher). To tell the young-adult story I wanted, and because in my fictional tale I’ve postulated a romantic side to Léon’s relationship with Robert, I also condensed age gaps, so the central figures would all be in or near their teenage years, which also meant altering the years that certain events occurred. The letters and reviews in this novel are written by me.
For those who lived outside of sexual and gender norms in 1890s Paris, it was a time both of great opening up and of great constraint. Those with social capital could flout convention, like the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt performing as a man and Robert de Montesquiou embracing his dandy side. But there were many articles bemoaning the decadence and corruption of this time, that by embracing “immorality,” those who broke norms were risking their eternal souls and perhaps even bringing about the destruction of civilization itself.
Men with social standing, like Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou, could be uncloseted and free in a drawing room, only to hide that side of them once they put their coats on and went back into the street, entering into marriages of convenience or weathering criticism and judgment or worse. Marcel never married, but in 1897 he fought a duel with a man who publicly questioned the propriety of his relationship with Lucien Daudet (who figures in this novel briefly, as Proust’s friend at the Saussine salon; Proust is also widely acknowledged to have eventually entered into a romantic relationship with Reynaldo Hahn). Robert never married, and some historians believe that he never had sex with anyone either. The most common explanation is that he felt too much shame around homosexuality to act on it. It’s hard to underestimate the effects internalized shame would have had on people who might have lived happier and more open lives had they been born in a different time. I wonder, however, if he might simply have been asexual, and that shame had less to do with it than historians assume. It’s too late to ask Robert, so I try here to keep his characterization open to both interpretations.
Robert did have a lifelong union with his secretary, Gabriel Yturri, a man many assume to have also been his romantic partner. Yturri was known to be kind and gentle, a humanizing force to a count who could be capricious and cruel. They wound up buried next to each other in the Gonards cemetery in 1921, though the impropriety of two men lying in rest together meant that the grave is unmarked and officially anonymous. Above the grave, Montesquiou requested a certain statue be placed. He’d fallen in love with it at the Château de Vitry-sur-Seine and had it moved there to watch over them. It’s known as the angel of silence. He stands guard over the anonymous grave of two men in love, a finger over his lips.
