Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [15]
Proust was also meeting gifted French homosexuals of his own age. In fact, in 1892 he had his photo taken with Robert de Flers, the future marquis de Flers and the author of successful comedies and libretti for operettas, and Lucien Daudet, the son of the (then) celebrated writer Alphonse Daudet (Letters from My Windmill and Sapho). The young Lucien would later become the unofficial gentleman-in-waiting to the ex-empress Eugénie, who had outlived her husband, Napoleon III, and her son, the prince imperial, killed in Africa. The Spanish-born empress had at first been exiled to England after her husband lost the French throne in 1871, but later she was permitted to live in Biarritz, the French Atlantic coastal resort close to the Spanish border, and there she held a mournful shadow court until her death in the 1920s. Her most faithful attendant was the ardent Lucien, who wrote several books about her.
If Madame Proust had had any doubts about her son’s homosexuality, they were quickly banished when she saw the photo of Proust, carefully groomed and seated, a flower in his buttonhole, flanked on one side by the standing Flers, with his flowing bohemian silk cravat, and on the other by the affected Lucien, a hand resting on Marcel’s shoulder, the other hand suspended in the air as though he had just plucked an invisible harp string. All three young men have wispy mustaches and tightly buttoned jackets. Lucien is gazing down at Marcel with devoted rapture. Edmond de Goncourt described Lucien as “a handsome young man, curled, well-dressed, pomaded, painted and powdered” with “a tiny vest-pocket voice.” Even Lucien’s father, Alphonse, thought he was a bit too chic. The quarrel between Proust and his parents reported in Jean Santeuil which ended with the young hero breaking a Venetian vase was in reality prompted by Madame Proust’s horror at the photo, which she forbade her son to circulate. Apparently Madame Proust also objected to Lucien’s powdered face and the garish color of his tie, since Marcel dashed off a letter: “I don’t think there’s any harm in being photographed with Robert de Flers and if Lucien Daudet is wearing a tie a little too bright or a complexion a bit too pale, that’s a problem that disappears in the photograph which doesn’t render colors.” In a second letter, written at midnight on November 4, 1896, and slipped under his mother’s door, Proust accedes to her demands and writes: “The best would be if I’m the one to take all the proofs, I’ll give one to each of them and I’ll hand over the rest to you: in that way they won’t be in circulation (since you find in all this something I fail to understand).”
At the same time that Proust was eager to make love to other young men, he was equally determined to avoid the label “homosexual.” Years later he would tell André Gide that one could write about homosexuality even at great length, so long as one did not ascribe it to oneself. This bit of literary advice is coherent with Proust’s general closetedness—a secretiveness that was all the more absurd since everyone near him knew he was gay.
IV
PROUST WAS BEGINNING to rise in society, which slightly dismayed (and secretly thrilled) his staid parents, who were shocked to discover around their dining table