gruffness of the man with the heart of gold who is determined not to show his emotions, the man who at the moment of parting from a friend who may very possibly be killed has a secret desire to weep, which no one suspects because he conceals it beneath a mounting anger which culminates, at the actual moment of farewell, in a sort of explosion: “Well, now, damn it! Shake hands with me, you old ruffian, and take this purse, it’s no use to me, don’t be an idiot.” The diplomat, the officer, the man who believes that nothing counts except a great task in the service of the nation but who was fond nevertheless of the “poor boy” in his legation or his battalion who has died from a fever or a bullet exhibits the same taste for virility in a form that is less clumsy, and more sophisticated, but at bottom just as odious. He does not want to mourn for the “poor boy,” he knows that soon he and everybody else will forget him, just as a kind-hearted surgeon soon forgets though, for a whole evening after some little girl has died in an epidemic, he feels a grief which he does not express. Should the diplomat be a writer and describe this death, he will not say that he felt grief. No—first from “manly reticence,” secondly from that skilled artistry which arouses emotion by dissembling it. With one of his colleagues he will watch by the side of the dying man. Not for one second will they say that they feel grief. They will talk of the affairs of the legation or the battalion and their remarks may be even more terse than usual: “B. said to me: ‘Don’t forget we have the general’s inspection tomorrow. See to it that your men are well turned out.’ Habitually so gentle, he spoke in a sharper tone than usual. I noticed that he avoided looking at me, I too felt myself to be overwrought.” And the reader understands that this “sharp tone” is simply grief showing itself in men who do not want to appear to feel grief, an attitude which might be ridiculous and nothing more but is in fact also wretched and ugly, because it is the manner of feeling grief of those who think that grief does not matter, that there are more serious things in life than being parted from one’s friends, etc., so that when someone dies they give the same impression of falsehood, of nothingness, as on New Year’s Day the gentleman who hands you a present of marrons glacés and just manages to say with a titter: “With the compliments of the season!”
To conclude the narrative of the officer or the diplomat watching at the deathbed, his head covered because the wounded or sick man has been carried out of doors, the moment comes when all is over. “‘I must go back and get my kit cleaned,’ I thought. But I do not know why, at the moment when the doctor let go the pulse, simultaneously B. and I, without any sign passing between us—the sun was beating vertically down, perhaps we were hot standing beside the bed—removed our caps.” And the reader knows that it was not because of the heat of the sun but from emotion in the presence of the majesty of death that the two virile men, on whose lips the words grief and affection were almost unknown, now bared their heads.
In homosexuals like Saint-Loup the ideal of virility is not the same, but it is just as conventional and just as false. The falsehood consists for them in the fact that they do not want to admit to themselves that physical desire lies at the root of the sentiments to which they ascribe another origin. M. de Charlus had detested effeminacy. Saint-Loup admired the courage of young men, the intoxication of cavalry charges, the intellectual and moral nobility of friendships between man and man, entirely pure friendships, in which each is prepared to sacrifice his life for the other. War, which turns capital cities, where only women remain, into an abomination for homosexuals, is at the same time a story of passionate adventure for homosexuals if they are intelligent enough to concoct dream figures, and not intelligent enough to see through them, to recognise their origin, to pass judgment on themselves. So that while some young men