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more beautiful and lasting (“eternal”) metaphors than Proust. In discussing the writer in Time Regained, Proust, echoing Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences, tells us, “He can describe a scene by describing one after another the innumerable objects which at a given moment were present at a particular place, but truth will be obtained by him only when he takes two different objects, states the connection between them. . . . Truth—and life too—can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other within a metaphor, liberated from the contingencies of time.” Proust’s own prose is replete with such liberating metaphors, as when he compares the sleeping Albertine to a pomegranate, bland and featureless on the outside but guarding all her bejeweled, treacherous thoughts within, or as when he likens the diners at Belleville to solar systems and the waiters to fleeting comets, or as when Swann, painfully in love, hears the first stirrings of the “little theme,” the anthem of his love for Odette, as the disguised arrival of a goddess.

In the spring of 1921, Proust, weak and more and more subject to dizzy spells, made one of his last outings in order to see a Vermeer painting, The View of Delft, in an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. He used the same occasion when he came to write about the death of the character Bergotte, the novelist, who loses consciousness after looking at the little patch of yellow in the celebrated canvas. Indeed, on the night before he died Proust dictated a last sentence, “There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer’s craft.” Proust could sense that his own death would not be long in coming, and he wrote Francis Jammes, “In your prayers to Saint Joseph ask him to give me a death that will be more gentle than my life has been.”

In May 1921 Sodom and Gomorrah went on sale, and Proust was almost disappointed by the lack of scandal. Perhaps his olympian style, with its coolness and philosophical compulsion to find general truths even in the most exotic (and trashy) particulars, tranquilized his readers’ moralistic responses. To be sure, almost no one who did not know him thought that Proust himself was homosexual. The Narrator is one of the few unambiguous heterosexuals in the book; almost all the other characters turn out to be gay. After Proust’s death several essays congratulated him on his “courage” in braving such disgusting corners of experience, as though Proust were a moral Jean-Henri Fabre—the pioneering entomologist—and his homosexual characters were insects.

One of his few acquaintances who was not happy with the ugly picture Proust drew of homosexuals was Gide, who in 1911 had already published anonymously his ground-breaking defense of homosexuality, Corydon, which he would reissue under his own name in 1924. Gide came twice in May 1921 to Proust’s bedside to discuss “uranism.” According to Gide’s journal, “he said he had never loved women except spiritually and had never known love except with men.” When, during the second visit, Gide reproached him for his negative picture of homosexuality, Proust said that he had transposed to the female characters all his homosexual memories that were tender and charming and so had been left with nothing but grotesque details for his homosexual characters. Perhaps he was only trying to appease and charm the indignant Gide, for elsewhere Proust defended his grotesque vision of “inverts” by arguing that whereas homosexuality may have been treated as natural in pagan times, in the Christian era it had been so persecuted that the only gays who’d survived had been invalids impossible to cure.

The comte de Montesquiou, who had good reason to hate Proust for his portrait under the guise of the baron de Charlus, let his former protégé off lightly, pretending to recognize in Charlus only features of Balzac’s character Vautrin and the contemporary homosexual the baron de Doasan. Privately, however, Montesquiou wrote a friend that he’d gone to bed sick from the