OOH LA LA! THE SEDUCER PARIS DUBBED DOCTOR LOVE

The Man In The Red Coat Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape €22 ★★★★★

Aprince, a count and a doctor walk into a department store... The set-up of Julian Barnes’s The Man In The Red Coat reads like the Irishman, Englishman and Scotsman joke recast with exquisites and dandies. These three men are Barnes’s starting point for a grand tour of late-19th-century Paris in the company of its greatest hedonists and heroes.

The prince was Edmond de Polignac, an aristocrat down to his last chateau, ‘a discreet but known homosexual’, married to an American sewing-machine heiress.

The count was Robert de Montesquiou who claimed descendance from D’Artagnan, Dumas’ literary musketeer.

The doctor was Dr Samuel Jean Pozzi, above, a brilliant surgeon, gynaecologist and expert in sexual dysfunction who went by the nicknames ‘Docteur Dieu’ and ‘Doctor Love’.

The prince and the count moved in the same circles. Doctor Pozzi had treated the count for what the patient called ‘my dead-leaf vitality’. Pozzi may have been the commoner on their lads’ shopping and gallery-hopping trip to London in June 1885, but in Barnes’s telling, it is Pozzi who captivates.

Barnes’s canvas is La Belle Epoque, an age of dressing up, debauchery and shameless self-puffery. Barnes calls Pozzi ‘a sane man in a demented age’ and a ‘surgical innovator’. He was a pioneer of Listerism, which advocated hand-washing, and the use of catgut instead of silver wire to sew up wounds. If all Lister’s stages were followed in a surgery for amputation, the death rate fell from 50 to 15 percent.

This elegant history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a daydream of France’s golden heyday. Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love.