Wooster and Montesquieu

Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster is a defining character of P.G. Wodehouse's career, and my cat. Now my cat came to me at a somewhat later age through a complicated channel that I will not bore you with here as it is far more amusing to bore you with it in person. I was reading a great deal of Wodehouse when he arrived in my life and his deep concern for food and the most comfortable spot in any comfortable area reminded me of Bertie's own proclivity for creature comforts. Though my Wooster is less capable of quoting MacBeth when in a spot of trouble, he hisses as if he were Lady M. In his little gray suit, and sharp white shirt and boots he is indeed a fine dandy.

Which is why a dear friend yesterday informed me that unpacking her Penguin copy of Huysman's Against the Grain (A Rebours), she was struck by the similarity between the cover image and my cat. What an honor! Upon finding the cover in a quick Google search, I discovered that the portrait is one of my own favorite artists Boldini!

Now the original work represents the Comte de Montesquieu, the aesthete of the aesthetes. He represents much of the art for art sake's movement, his appetite for life, fine things, and beauty in general making him a prominent promoter and benefactor of the aesthetic and decadent movements at the end of the 19th century. A prolific art critic, an occasional poet (a seeming requirement of the times), he was a portrait sitter extraordinaire. Besides Boldini, he sat for Whistler, de Laszlo, Paul Helleu, and though a supporter of Sargent's, peculiarly never sat for him. 

He is one of the models for Proust's character Baron de Charlus in In Search of Lost Time. Some of the moments of greatest arrogance which lead to acts of cruel spitefulness are loosely based on Montesquieu's own behavior. He was quite hurt by Proust's interpretation of him–after all he had introduced Proust to Society–but must have understood the note of truth if he was able to recognize himself.

Montesquieu was friends with Mallarmé, Sarah Berhnhardt, Paul Verlaine, as well as socialites of the period beyond count, where my Wooster is really more a stay-at-home recluse who seems happy with my company alone. The Comte de Montesquieu would no doubt be horrified that I never do my nails or personally know Anna Wintour. Though my Wooster does not get into any of the scrapes from which Jeeves rescued the fictional Wooster, I do feel that I awake to serve him breakfast and am reprimanded if supper is tardy.

As TS Eliot explained better than I can, the naming of cats is a difficult matter and to get it correct is not done. But a name that's suggestive, that allures, is the best of the options to come. So I point laughing to a foolish Etonian, and another finds him in a grander salon-ian. But these human names are false. Seeing him calm and reflective I wish we all had what Montesquieu appears to have in Boldini's portrait, what Wooster would lose without Jeeves, what a cat seems to have with ease:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable.
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.