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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. . . . And not just me, there’s also my family for whom I must not appear for any reason to be a salaïste, especially since I’m not one.”

Despite such indiscretions, Bibesco paradoxically prided himself on his ability to keep a secret; in fact, being clandestine was a cornerstone of his friendships. He went so far as to propose to Marcel a pact in which the two friends would be obliged to repeat to each other all the good—and especially all the evil—they heard about each other through the rumor mill. This pact was accompanied by many code words—tombeau (“tomb”), for instance, meant that an inviolable secret was about to be pronounced. It may all sound rather juvenile, but Proust was thrilled at last to be part of a secret society of distinguished, handsome young heterosexuals, even if membership meant he must conceal his own sexual identity. Perhaps this fear of rejection, were the truth to be known, made Proust unduly dismissive of the prevailing French cult of friendship, for already in 1901 he was writing Bibesco, with whom it seems clear Proust was at least partially in love, “All that is to make too much of a fuss over friendship, a thing without reality. Renan says that we should flee intimate friendships. Emerson says that we must regularly trade in our friends for new ones. Of course people as great as they were have said the opposite. But I’m rather worn out by insincerity and by friendships, which almost come to the same thing.” The “insincerity” Proust was complaining about was his own. Later, in the final volume of his great novel, Proust would write: “The artist who renounces one hour of work for an hour of chatting with a friend knows that he has sacrificed a reality for something that doesn’t exist. . . .”

And yet while he was in the first flush of his friendship with Antoine de Bibesco he did everything to lure him to his sickbed—strangely enough, he even promised to discuss salaïsme with this incorrigible heterosexual: “I’ve reflected rather deeply about salaïsme and I’ll communicate my thoughts to you during one of our next metaphysical interviews. Naturally enough my thoughts about it are extremely negative. But it does remain a philosophical point of curiosity about certain people. Dreyfusard, anti-Dreyfusard, salaïste, anti-salaïste are virtually the only interesting things to know about an idiot”—that is, we’re always curious to know about the politics and sexuality of even an otherwise dull person.

Ironically, the handsome young Fénelon, the third of Proust’s new friends, was also secretly homosexual, or rather bisexual (bimettalisme was the little group’s code word for this tendency), a fact that Proust did not discover till years later. Proust was so infatuated with Fénelon that he called him “His Blue Eyes,” after the name of a popular play of the day. During a trip to Holland the two men had a temporary falling out. As Proust wrote Hahn, “My affection for his blue eyes is undergoing an unhappy crisis just now, since when he said something unpleasant to me I started socking him with both fists.” It was Fénelon who once gallantly aided a shivering Proust by walking agilely over the backs of the booths in a crowded restaurant