Marcel Proust by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

While Proust was working on his Ruskin translations and essays, he was becoming friendly with three young noblemen of a rank higher than that of any of his previous friends. The first he befriended was the count Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld, a liberal intellectual and a Dreyfusard—one of the models for Proust’s character Robert de Saint-Loup, who has similarly advanced views. Just as Saint-Loup marries Gilberte Swann, who is half-Jewish, so Gabriel eventually married in 1905 Odile de Richelieu, a young heiress half-Jewish and half-ducal. The La Rochefoucaulds were one of the first three families of France, and accordingly Count Gabriel marked the pinnacle of French society—and of Proust’s social climbing. Gabriel was famous for his frivolity, for his womanizing and sophisticated debauchery; one ancestor of his, a courtier at the time of Louis XIV, had been celebrated for his pithy, disillusioned epigrams, the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, and now Count Gabriel was nicknamed “La Rochefoucauld of Maxim’s”—especially appropriate since Maxim’s in the Belle Epoque was known as a restaurant where no respectable woman would ever be seen.

Another handsome young aristocrat Proust became friendly with was the Romanian prince Antoine de Bibesco, who fended off Marcel’s excessive demands on his time with a coolness that amounted to cruelty. Bibesco remembered that at one of his mother’s salons he had first met Proust, whom he later characterized by saying he had eyes of “Japanese lacquer” and a hand that was “dangling and soft.” When he subsequently instructed Marcel on how to shake hands with a virile grip, Proust said, “If I followed your example, people would take me for an invert.” Which is just an indication of how devious the thinking of a homosexual of the period could become—a homosexual affects a limp handshake so that heterosexuals will not think he is a homosexual disguising himself as a hearty hetero—whereas in fact he is exactly what he appears to be: a homosexual with a limp handshake. . . .

Bibesco could be malicious, especially in the tricks he liked to play on his friends and the confidences he liked to betray. As Proust observed of him, he was serious about ideas but sarcastic with men. His nickname for Proust was “the Flatterer.” When Proust confided in Bibesco his “nearly” amorous fascination with yet another young aristocrat, Bertrand de Fénelon, Bibesco instantly repeated the news on every side—which made Proust fear that he, Proust, would be accused of salaïsme, their private word for homosexuality, derived from the name of the notoriously gay Count Sala. Proust seems not to have realized how his reputation as a homosexual had become general knowledge in his circle. “We’d agreed,” Proust wrote Bibesco, “that you would be the only one to whom I’d be open about what even Reynaldo isn’t in on. Involuntarily you’ve informed the others about it. I’ve done everything to cover things up. But if now you’re going to make allusions . . . ! Just think a moment about the effect that would have, about what people would think of me.

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