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dramatic twists of the plot dictated the insights revealed to the Narrator. He’d also learned how to introduce a character through hearsay—the (false) rumors, for example, that Charlus is a hypervirile womanizer who despises homosexuals and is Odette’s lover, misinformation that the reader picks up long before being introduced to Charlus himself. During the course of the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past the Narrator is puzzled by Charlus’s extreme friendliness that alternates with bouts of insufferable—and inexplicable—rudeness. Then, halfway through Remembrance of Things Past, the Narrator observes Charlus cruising a tailor, Jupien, who is entirely receptive to his advances. This insight into Charlus’s sexuality also explains his unnatural attachment to a cruel and ungrateful, if talented, violinist, Morel. Charlus’s masochism becomes even clearer during the air raids of World War I, when the Narrator seeks shelter in a building that turns out to be a male brothel owned by the same Jupien. There the Narrator observes Charlus being chained and beaten by hired hustlers. This sexual humiliation alternates with his moments of overweening pride and arrogance in society—until, at the end of the whole cycle, a feeble, snowy-haired Charlus, accompanied by an ever faithful Jupien, salutes and bows to every passerby, afraid he might be snubbing someone important whose identity he can no longer recall.

As the trajectory of this single character demonstrates, Proust had learned a method of presentation that falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James. Dickens assigns his characters one or two memorable traits, sometimes highly comic, which they display each time they make an appearance; James, by contrast, is so quick to add nuances to every portrait that he ends up effacing them with excessive shading. Proust invented a way of showing a character such as Charlus in Dickensian bold relief at any given moment—Charlus as the enraged queen or, later, Charlus as the shattered King Lear. Yet, by building up a slow composite of images through time, Proust achieves the same complexity that James had aimed at, though far more memorably. It’s like the old dispute among painters as to the primacy of line or of shading. Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth, but (especially in his late novels) nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another. Proust succeeded in rendering characters with the same startling simplicity as Dickens but generated a lifelike subtlety and motion by giving us successive “takes” over hundreds of pages. In that way his style is like the magic lantern the Narrator watches at bedtime when he’s a boy. The heat of the lamp causes a band of images to turn and to project the illusion of motion on the wall. In the same way Proust’s slide show of portraits of the same character induces the illusion of duration, of development—and of psychological truth.

Proust had a lively eye for self-satire and could delegate his own peevishness to Charlus, his jealous rages to Swann, his snobbishness to the duchesse de Guermantes—and not merely the general outlines of these feelings but even highly specific incidents portrayed in his novel.

In the years 1909–11 Proust rewrote and expanded the first volume of his novel. He now came up with a way of constantly adding details and observations to his manuscript. Indeed, his way of rewriting was to add. First he would expand as he dictated to his stenographers. Then he would have his manuscript set in type (Proust used typesetters the way other people use typists, or word processors). Finally he would begin to crowd the margins with more and more new passages, all designed to enrich his design and to establish links among the various characters and scenes. These additions would sometimes become so copious that Proust would have to paste in new pages. The cost of resetting the type would run very high—which Proust gladly paid. In fact, if any writer