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BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Michael Hayward

Julian Barnes opens The Man in the Red Coat (Random House) with a scene set in June 1885, as three Frenchmen arrive in London. “One was a prince, one was a count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian surname.” The commoner proves to be the eponymous “man in the red coat,” a certain Dr. Samuel Pozzi, who wore his dazzling scarlet housecoat—“full length, from neck to ankle, allowing the sight of some ruched white linen at the wrists and throat”—when posing for a formal portrait in oils, painted by John Singer Sargent in 1861. You might ask why a “society surgeon”—basically: a gynecologist to the French upper classes—merits a lavishly illustrated biography by a Booker-winning Francophile. Well, precisely because Barnes is an unapologetic Francophile, fascinated by French culture and history, who one day wondered just why this “commoner” had posed for a portrait by Sargent, and how he came to be in London in June 1885 on a shopping trip, in the company of a prince and a count. Using Dr. Pozzi and his red coat as a port d’entrée, Barnes takes his readers on a fascinating and gossipy tour of Paris during the Belle Époque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honour.” Along the way we meet the French writer, Colette, and “the divine Sarah” (Bernhardt); we dine with Marcel Proust and rub shoulders with the notorious Comte de Montesquiou (model for the decadent central figure in Á rebours, J.K. Huysmans’s scandalous novel of that era). The Man in the Red Coat is an entertaining work of social history, one which successfully manages to maintain a delicate balance, simultaneously literary and trashy. —Michael Hayward

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