“At the beginning of this scene, before my unsealed eyes, a revolution had taken place in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had been touched by a magic wand. Until then, not understanding, I had not seen. The vice (so-called for convenience), the vice of each individual, accompanies him after the manner of those genii who are invisible to those who ignore their presence. Goodness, deceit, a good name, social relations do not allow themselves to be discovered, they exist hidden. Ulysses himself did not at first recognise Athene. But gods are immediately perceptible to gods, the like to the like, so M. de Charlus was to Julien. Until now, in the presence of M. de Charlus, I was like an absent-minded man in company with a pregnant woman, whose heavy figure he had not remarked and of whom, in spite of her smiling reiteration 'Yes, I am a bit tired just now,' he persists in asking indiscreetly, 'What is the matter with you then?' But, let some one say to him, 'She is pregnant,' he immediately is conscious of her abdomen and hereafter sees nothing but that. Enlightenment opens the eyes; an error dissipated gives an added sense.
“Those persons who do not like to believe themselves examples of this law in others—towards the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance whom they did not suspect even until there appears on the smooth surface of a character, apparently in every respect like others, traced in an ink until then invisible, a word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only to recall, in order to satisfy themselves, how at first the surrounding world appeared naked, devoid of those ornamentations which it offers to the more sophisticated, and also, of the many times in their lives that they had been on the point of making a break. For instance, nothing upon the characterless face of some man could make them suppose that he was the brother, the fiancé or the lover of some woman of whom they are on the point of making an uncomplimentary remark, as, for example, to compare her to a camel. At that moment, fortunately, however, some word whispered to him by a neighbour freezes the fatal term on his lips. Then immediately appears, like a Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, these words, 'This is the fiancé, or the brother, or the lover of the woman, therefore it would be impossible to call her a camel before him,' and, this new notion alone causes the retreat or advance of the fraction of those notions, heretofore completed, that he had had concerning the rest of the family.
“The real reason that M. de Charlus was different from other men was because another being had been engrafted upon him, like the horse upon the centaur, that his being was incorporated with that of the Baron. I had not hitherto perceived. The abstract had not become materialised, the being, finally understood had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transmutation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but retrospectively the heights and depths of his relations with me, everything, in fact, which had until then appeared incoherent, became intelligible, disclosed itself, like a phrase which, without meaning so long as the letters composing it are scattered becomes, if the characters be placed in their proper order, a thought impossible to forget.
“Moreover I now understood why, a short time ago, when I saw M. de Charlus coming out from Mme. de Villeparisis' I thought he looked like a woman. It was because he was one! He belonged to that race of beings whose ideal is virile because their temperament is feminine, and who are, in appearance only, like other men. The silhouette cast in the facet of their eyes, through which they see everything in the universe, is not that of a nymph but of a beautiful young man. One of a race upon whom rests a curse, who is forced to live in an atmosphere of falsehood and perjury because he knows that his desire, that which gives to all creatures the greatest satisfaction in life, must be unavowed, being considered punishable and shameful, who must even deny God himself, since when even as a Christian he appears as an accused at the bar of the tribunal he must before Christ and in his name defend himself as if from a calumny from that which is his very life; son without a mother, forced to lie to her all her life, even to the moment when he is closing her eyes, friend without friendships, in spite of all those who are attracted by his charm, fully recognised, and whose hearts would lead them to be kind—for can those relations, which bloom only by favour of a lie, be called friendship, when the first burst of confidence he might be tempted to express, would cause him to be rejected with disgust? Should he, by chance, have to do with an impartial mind, that is to say a sympathetic one, even then diverted from him by a psychology of convention, would permit to flow from the confessed vice even the affection which is the most foreign to him—as certain judges extenuate and excuse more easily assassination amongst inverts and treason amongst Jews from reasons drawn from original sin and fatality of race.
“Finally, lovers (at least according to the first theory advanced which one will see modified by the continuation and which would have angered them above everything had not this contradiction been wiped out from before their eyes by the same illusion that made them see and live) to whom the possibility of this love (the hope of which gives them the force to bear so many risks, so much solitude) is nearly closed since they are naturally attracted to a man who does not resemble in any way a woman, a man who is not an invert and who therefore cannot love them; consequently their desire would remain forever unappeased if money did not deliver to them real men or if the imagination did not cause them to take for real men the inverts to whom they are prostituted. Whose only honour is precarious; whose only liberty provisory, up to the discovery of the crime; whose only situation is unstable like the poet, who, fêted at night in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London is chased from his lodgings in the morning and can find no place to lay his head. Turning the treadmill like Sampson and saying like him, 'The two sexes will die each on his own side.' Excluded even (except during the days of great misfortune when the greatest number rallies around the victim like the Jews around Dreyfus—from the sympathy—sometimes of society) excluded even from their kind who see with disgust, reflected as in a mirror which no longer flatters, all those blemishes which they have not been willing to see in themselves and which make them understand that that which they call their love (and to which, playing upon the word, they have annexed everything that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism can add to love) comes not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen, but from an incurable malady. Like the Jews again (save a few who only care to consort with their own race and have always on the lips ritualistic words and consecrated pleasantries); they fly from each other, seeking those who are most unlike them, who will have nothing to do with them, pardoning their rebuffs, intoxicating themselves with their condescensions; but also reassembled with their kind by the very ostracism which strikes them, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, and finally taking on (as a result of a persecution similar to that of Israel) the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often frightful, finding (in spite of all the mockeries that those more homogeneous, better assimilated to the other race, in appearance less of an invert heap upon him who is apparently more of one) finding even a kind of expansion in frequenting with their kind, even an aid from their existence so that while denying that they belong to that race (whose very name is the greatest of injuries) those who have succeeded in hiding the truth, that they also are of that despised race, unmask those others, less to injure them, not detesting them, than to excuse themselves, as a physician seeks the appendicitis inversion in history, they find pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of them and that the same thing was said of Jesus by the Israelites, without remembering that then when homo-sexuality was normal there was no abnormality, as there were no anti-Christians before Christ, also that opprobrium alone makes it crime, since it has been only allowed to exist as crime because it is refractory to all predication, all example, to all punishment by virtue of special innate disposition which repulses men more (although it may accompany high moral qualities) than certain vices which contradict high moral qualities, such as theft, cruelty, bad faith, better understood, therefore more easily excused by men in general.
“Forming a free-masonry, much more extended, more efficacious and less suspected than that of the lodges, because it rests upon an identity of tastes, of needs, of habits, of dangers, of apprenticeships, of knowledge, of traffic and of language. Whose members avoid one another and yet immediately recognise each other by natural or conventional signs, involuntary or studied, which disclose to the mendicant one of his kind in the lord whose carriage door he opens, to the father in the fiancé of his daughter, to him who had wished to be cured, to confess, in the physician, the priest or the lawyer whom he had gone to consult; all obliged to protect their secret, but, at the same time, sharing the secret of the others, which was not suspected by the others and which makes the most improbable romances of adventure seem true to them, for, in their romantic life, anachronically, the ambassador is the friend of the criminal, the prince who, with a certain freedom of manner, (which an aristocratic education gives and which would be impossible with a little trembling bourgeois) leaves the house of the duchess to seek the Apache. Rejected part of the human collectivity but all the same an important part, suspected where it does not exist, vaunting itself, insolently with impunity where it is not divined; counting its adherents everywhere, amongst the people, in the army, in the temple, in the prison, upon the throne; finally living, at least a great number of them, in a caressing and dangerous intimacy with men of the other race, provoking them, enticing them to speak of this vice as if it were not theirs, a game which is made easy by the blindness or the falseness of the others, a game which may be prolonged for years—until the day of Scandal, when these conquerors are devoured. Until this time obliged to hide their true life, to turn away their regards from where they would wish to fix them, to fix them upon that from which they would naturally turn away—to change the meaning of many adjectives in their vocabulary, a social constraint merely, slight compared to that interior constraint which their vice, or that which is improperly called so, imposes upon them, less with regard to others than to themselves and in a manner which makes it seem not to be a vice—to themselves. But certain ones, more practical, more hurried, who have not time to bargain and to renounce the simplification of life and the gain of time that might result from cooperation, have made two societies, of which the second is exclusively composed of beings like themselves.”
M. Proust's work is the first definite reply in the affirmative to the question whether fiction can subsist without the seductive power due to a certain illusory essence of thought. Whether in this respect he will have many, if any, successful followers is to be seen. But his own volumes stand as an astonishing example of an organic and living fiction obtained solely by the effort to portray truth.
Because of the unique qualities of his novels and the fact that they are developed on a definite psychological plan, more than the usual interest in a favourite writer is attached to the personality of M. Proust. During his lifetime inaccessible both because of aristocratic taste and of partial invalidism, his figure is likely to become more familiar to the reading world—even to those who never read his books—than the figures of great authors who walked with the crowd and kept the common touch.
Neither Proust the man nor Proust the author can be considered apart from his invalidism. It shows all through his writings, although what the malady was which rendered him, if not a de facto invalid, certainly a potential invalid, is not known. Some of his friends accused asthma, others a disease of the heart, while still others attributed it to “nerves.” In reality his conduct and his writings were consistent with neuropathy and his heredity. And if the hero of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is to be identified with himself, as is popularly supposed, he was from early childhood delicate, sensitive, precocious, and asthmatic, that is profoundly neuropathic.
He was fastidious in his tastes; he liked the best styles, the most elegant ladies, aristocratic salons, and fashionable gatherings. He was noted for the generosity of his tips. His life reminds one of the hero of Huysman's famous novel. In his early days, M. Proust was a great swell, and there is no doubt that many of his descriptions of incidents and persons are elaborations of notes that he made after attending a reception given by the Duchesse de Rohan, or other notables of the Faubourg St. Germain, in whose houses he was an habitué.