Proust’s Dr God
The Man in the Red Coat
The drifting, anecdotal paragraphs of The Man in the Red Coat will not seem unfamiliar to readers of Levels of Life (2013) – Julian Barnes’s last foray into narrative non-fiction.
In that book, sections on the ballooning mania of the photographer Nadar and the unlikely couple formed briefly by the gruff English balloonist Fred Burnaby and the actress Sarah Bernhardt are followed by a third section. There, Barnes, with a sudden sharpening of focus, describes his own desolation following the death of his wife.
The new book is best described as notes towards a biography of the French society doctor Samuel-jean Pozzi. From Bergerac, of Italian Protestant extraction, Pozzi made his career in Belle Époque Paris. He wrote what was for years the standard textbook on gynaecology, introduced many foreign techniques and procedures into French hospitals and ran one himself, the Broca, alongside a private practice in the Faubourg St Honoré. He was a notable collector, Dreyfusard, atheist, internationalist and general moderniser. He was painted by Sargent – indeed, it was the dashing, full-length portrait of the handsome doctor in a red dressing gown that sparked off Barnes’s pursuit. He was a friend of Henry James, Robert de Montesquieu, the Polignacs and the Goncourt brothers. He was revered by Proust, who made his entrée into society in the Pozzi drawing room in Place Vendôme. Proust’s brother, Robert, himself a distinguished physician, was Pozzi’s student. Pozzi had also been the lover of, among many others, it seems, Sarah Bernhardt, who addressed him in their lifelong correspondence as ‘ Mon Docteur Dieu’.
But the two books do not resemble each other merely in virtue of their style, or their overlapping casts. Grief also plays a subtle but decisive role in The Man in the Red Coat.
First there is Pozzi’s own grief. Like many who launch themselves on society, he seems to have turned his own household into a blast zone. Although it brought him considerable wealth, status and a dependable social façade, his marriage to the devoutly Catholic Thérèse Loth-cazalis foundered from the first and remained largely hollow. She was known as ‘Pozzi’s mute’ and, in 1909, after 30 years of uneasy cohabitation, they separated. His three children, particularly his daughter, Catherine, seem as a result to have felt a lifelong resentment.
Then there is the strange, Flaubertian cruelty of his death. In the last months of the First World War, in the midst of his war work, he was shot by Maurice Machu, a clerk from Boulogne, on whom he had performed largely cosmetic surgery for varicose veins on the scrotum, and who believed he had