Adam Begley

Meet Dr Love: the infallibly seductive, pioneering French gynaecologist

Julian Barnes tells how the ‘disgustingly handsome’ Parisian doctor and his aristocratic friends took the capital by storm in the summer of 1885

Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way.

But just to get you started: Pozzi (1846–1918), the man John Singer Sargent painted, gloriously, in sumptuous red, was a Frenchman, a prominent, pioneering doctor in Belle Epoque Paris, and a charming, ubiquitous, infallibly seductive socialite. (‘Disgustingly handsome’ is how the Princess of Monaco described him.) He was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and also her lover; she called him ‘Docteur Dieu’. (His other nickname was ‘L’Amour médecin’, which Barnes translates as Dr Love.)

In the introduction to his ground-breaking two-volume treatise on gynaecology, Pozzi wrote: ‘Chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance.’ In his inaugural lecture as the first professor of gynaecology in all of France he declared that ‘conscience must be the first characteristic of a doctor, especially one who wields a knife’. He had his human failings: he was not a good husband to his rich wife, and also a flop as a father to his unhappy, high-minded, highly strung daughter. And yet — enlightened, amusing, engaged and engaging, this Docteur Dieu is an undiscovered hero.

If that’s not enough to grab you, here’s Barnes’s hook: in June 1885, Pozzi accompanied Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou on a trip to London for what Montesquiou described as some ‘intellectual and decorative shopping’.The trio arrived in town armed with a letter of introduction from Sargent addressed to Henry James. The great novelist steered his French visitors from concert hall to gallery to bookshop (and to Liberty’s and to Bond Street tailors). They met Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Alma-Tadema and Whistler.

Who were Pozzi’s aristocratic pals? Polignac was a musician, a gentle, retiring soul, sweet and consequently somewhat less interesting than the others.

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