Cover, The Man in the Red Coat by 2019

Author:2019
Language: eng
Format: epub

When Whistler was painting Montesquiou, the artist warned the Count about the danger of living so worldly an existence: “If you continue to go about in society, your fate will be to meet the Prince of Wales.” There is no evidence of Montesquiou meeting the Prince, though they swam in the same waters; and the Count’s cousin, Countess Greffulhe, stayed with the Prince at Sandringham. As for Wilde: during his tour of America, and despite republican convic-tions, he liked to let drop allusions to “my friend the Prince of Wales.”

Wilde and Montesquiou went to America and came back with money. Prince Edmond de Polignac, by nature more indolent, stayed in France and let money come to him, in the form of Winnaretta Singer. It’s strange that the term “gold digger” is reserved exclusively for women who attach themselves to men for upward financial mobility. The biggest gold diggers of the Belle Epoque were English and French male aristocrats who married American heir-

esses to renew their bloodline, revive their sense of entitlement, and bolster their bank balance.

Samuel Pozzi’s attitude to America was not based on either social superiority, paranoia or cupidity. It was inquisitive, open-minded and professional. As he had written in his Treatise, “Chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance.” In 1893, he was invited to the World’s Fair in Chicago as part of the official French delegation.

He sailed on the liner La Touraine to New York, where he met his American editor, then took the “Michigan Central” Pullman train—twenty hours of it—to Chicago. There, alongside his official duties, he had the chance to see four of the city’s hospitals. He was amazed by the efficiency of the American system, and by its private funding; also by the higher social status of the nurses, and their higher pay (three or four times that of their French equivalents).

On his return, he immediately began raising private money for the Lourcine-Pascal, and founded a Comité des Dames to provide support and entertainments for the patients.

His second visit to North America came in 1904, when he was invited to “represent French surgery” at a two-venue congress, in St. Louis and then Montreal, spread over May and June. By now, Pozzi’s fame and social weight were considerable. Though booked to sail on the liner La Savoie, he was scooped up at the last minute by Gordon Bennett Jr., an American socialite, newspaper owner and sportsman. They had first met when Pozzi stitched Bennett up after he had fallen off the running-board of a car. Now they crossed the Atlantic on Bennett’s 2,000-ton steam yacht, whose luxuries included a Turkish bath and two milking cows.

In the States and Canada, Pozzi was feasted and fêted; now fifty-eight, with his charm and excellent English, he was the perfect face of French surgery. Despite the attractions of the St. Louis World’s Fair, his main discovery on the American leg of his trip was that the pioneering centre of American surgery was not in one of the great cities,

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