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her “the flying louse” (“ugly as a louse” is a common French expression). She was also intensely jealous, and Agostinelli, though he seemed to love her, cheated on her constantly with other women. Oddly enough, it never occurred to her to be jealous of Proust, nor did the demonically possessive Proust seem to be jealous of her. At that time homosexual relations, especially between the classes, were viewed benignly as a form of patronage—or weren’t focused upon at all, except when a scandal erupted; and such scandals were never characteristic of France. Oscar Wilde had his trial in London in 1895 and was convicted; in 1900 the Belgian gay writer Georges Eekhoud was tried for his novel Escal-Vigor and was acquitted; in 1902 Friedrich Alfred Krupp committed suicide following a scandal about his homosexuality; in 1903 Sir Hector Archibald Macdonald shot himself; and in 1907 it seemed everyone in Germany was accusing everyone else of “uranism” (even the chancellor of Germany, for instance, brought a successful libel suit against someone for accusing him of homosexuality; Count Kuno von Moltke brought a similar suit against the journalist Maximilian Harden, and lost; and the following year Prince Eulenburg was arrested for a second time and tried repeatedly until the collapse of his health brought an end to all legal proceedings). In France no such scandals ever arose, in large part because the laws dating back to 1791 (and ratified by the penal code of 1810) had already decriminalized sodomy—laws briefly reinstated only under the Vichy regime during World War II.

Even more important, a “patronage” sort of homosexuality in which an older, richer gay man helped along in his career a younger, poorer, usually heterosexual man was virtually an institution in Latin countries until the 1950s, when growing prosperity and unsupervised heterosexual dating at an earlier age did away with the foundations of such a practice. But in Proust’s day this sort of quasi-sexual patronage, far from seeming exploitive, was actually considered to be charitable and generous. Proust’s sexual tastes changed over time from an attraction to gay artistic peers (such as Reynaldo Hahn and Lucien Daudet) to working-class heterosexuals such as Agostinelli and, subsequently, Henri Rochat, a waiter at the Ritz—a change that, of course, would make him intensely unhappy.

Agostinelli, besides being linked to the ugly, jealous Anna, had a sister who was the mistress of the baron Duquesne, a brother who was a chauffeur, a half-brother who worked as a hotel waiter, and a demanding father. Alfred apparently sent money to all of them, which he earned by gouging Monsieur Proust (at one point Proust sold some Royal Dutch stocks worth twenty thousand dollars in today’s money and wired it all to Agostinelli). In a letter to his banker Proust wearily remarked, “When one loves not members of society but people more or less poor, these sufferings over love usually double one’s considerable financial problems.” He thought that it was a shame he couldn’t fall in love with a member of his own class, since it would have cost him a great deal less money.

Proust was certainly in love, to the point that once he and his entourage had arrived in Cabourg in 1913 for the whole summer, after a few days he suddenly decided that he had to return to Paris instantly in order to be near some mysterious woman. The “woman,” in fact, was Agostinelli himself, who had to drive Proust back to the capital, a sudden whim that gave Proust a few precious days alone with his beloved and removed the young man from the presence of a new woman he’d just met at Cabourg and whom he had begun to court. In Remembrance of Things Past the Narrator, worried that Albertine is about to take up with Vinteuil’s lesbian daughter and her friend, invents an amorous pretext for dashing back from Balbec to Paris with Albertine. Proust knew perfectly well that he was only irritating Agostinelli, but his jealousy was stronger than his wisdom. He cut his beard, hoping to please his beloved, but to no avail. As he’d told friends