This more-ish book is best, if inadequately, described as a biography of Samuel-Jean Pozzi, the French gynaecologist. Pozzi is well known as the subject of an 1881 painting, though not to the novelist Julian Barnes, despite his deep love and knowledge of 19th-century France, until he visited an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s portraits four years ago. He was immediately intrigued by Dr Pozzi at Home, which depicts Pozzi, bearded and contemplative, in a scarlet dressing gown or coat with his right hand placed against his chest. At a time when Britain was preparing to vote on European membership, Barnes was delighted to discover that this Frenchman of Italian extraction was not only the most powerful surgeon of his time, as well as a senator, village mayor, campaigner, atheist, Dreyfusard, and Don Juan. He was also an Anglophile who in 1874 co-translated Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and in 1876 attended a British Medical Association conference in Edinburgh, where he embraced the principles of Listerism.
For this son of foreign-language teachers, best known for novels about English attitudes to France, Pozzi became an exemplar of anti-chauvinist sentiment. He now assumes the starring role in a generally star-studded account of Anglo-French relations during la belle époque, when the two cultures collaborated on some things (the figure of “the dandy”) and butted heads on others (the French could never stop bashing the figure of the “Englishwoman”). Barnes takes as his starting point a visit that Pozzi and a couple of friends paid to London in 1885, to shop and to sample “aestheticism”, a sojourn that featured appearances from Henry James and Whistler before being cut short – for Pozzi at least – by the needs of one of his clients, Alexandre Dumas’s wife.
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