Rupert Preston Bell: When Proust met Wilde

“Ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe”

The story goes that Marcel Proust met Oscar Wilde at a salon in Paris and invited him home afterwards, only for Wilde to turn on his heel and walk out the minute he saw Mme Proust’s furniture.

What a great anecdote it is, leaving us wondering what these two great aesthetes would have made of each other if they’d spent more time together. But is it true?

The tale comes from the French biographer Philippe Jullian, who put the meeting at the end of 1891. At this time, Proust was just 20, living with his parents, a young man trying to climb the social ladder, with little published but great aspirations. Wilde, meanwhile, was at the height of his popularity, in France as well as Britain. It was the year he wrote his French play Salome, to great acclaim in France (though it was banned in Britain as the depiction of Biblical characters on stage was forbidden at the time). He was so celebrated that, when he attended the Moulin Rouge earlier that year, the poet Stuart Merrill recalled that “The habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North”. He made friends with Émile Zola and André Gide, and met Victor Hugo at least once.

Here is what Jullian says, based on what he heard many years later from the grandsons of the hostess in whose salon they were introduced.

C'est [Jacques-Emile Blanche] qui, chez Mme Baignères, réunit une fois encore Wilde et Proust. Wilde est très touché de l'enthousiasme que témoigne Proust pour la littérature anglaise, des questions si intelligentes qu'il lui pose sur Ruskin ou George Eliot, et accepte de bonne grâce un dîner chez Marcel, boulevard Haussmann. Le soir de ce dîner, Proust, retenu chez Mme Lemaire, arrive très essoufflé, deux minutes en retard : il demande au domestique : « Est-ce que le monsieur anglais est là ? - Oui, Monsieur, il est arrivé il y a cinq minutes; à peine est-il entré au salon qu'il a demandé la salle de bains et n'en est plus sorti. » - Marcel court au bout du couloir. - « Mr. Wilde, êtes-vous souffrant ? - Ah, vous voilà, cher monsieur Proust, - Wilde paraît majestueusement - non je ne suis pas souffrant le moins du monde. Je pensais avoir le plaisir de dîner en tête à tête avec vous, mais on m'a fait entrer dans le salon. J'ai regardé ce salon et, au fond de ce salon, il y avait vos parents, alors le courage m'a manqué. Adieu, cher monsieur Proust, adieu... » Proust, lui, devait raconteur que Wilde avait fait des remarques désagréables sur le mobilier du salon, disant, tout comme Robert de Montesquiou et le baron de Charlus : « Comme c'est laid chez vous. »

The account is colourful, but unfortunately doesn’t quite add up. It was written much later, and relies on third-hand evidence. Later biographers are inclined to think the story apocryphal, finding that Proust had not read either Ruskin or Eliot by that date, and that he didn’t live at the Haussmann address until 15 years later.

Yet the story has considerable allure, and the reference to them meeting “once again” is itself suggestive; if they frequented the same salons they might have bumped into each other even if this anecdote isn’t true.

And indeed there’s another mention of a possible meeting between Wilde and Proust, in the memoires of the poet Fernand Gregh. He wrote that they both attended the salon of Mme Arman de Caillavet: “je me rappelle un mot spirituel et exact de Mme Arnan qui l'avait reçu à dîner en même temps que Marcel Proust (ils s’entre-regardèrent avec une curiosité complexe)…”

Somehow, this seems more authentic. And the similarities between the lives and writings of the two suggests they would have been intrigued by each other. Proust references Wilde’s writing in later life, although rather disparagingly. And he alludes to Wilde in A la recherche du temps perdu, though not by name. It’s generally accepted that he based the haughty homosexual character Charlus partly on Wilde. And when Proust introduces Charlus, he writes: "He was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness." Fancifully, we might even attribute this to a memory of the supposed meeting.

After his imprisonment and disgrace, Wilde fled back to France, ending up in Paris, where he subsided in poverty, sex and alcohol. There were rumours that Proust paid secret visits to Wilde at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts where he spent the last weeks of his life, but of this there is no evidence.

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