• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 549 0

when grown men (in some versions of the story it’s an uncle, in others the curé) pulled him by his curls. In another incident, when he was nine years old, he broke his nose in a fall while playing in the gardens beside the Champs-Elysées. Ten years later his favorite playmates in the gardens were two sisters, Marie and Nelly Benardaky, daughters of the former master of ceremonies of the Russian court. His attachment to Marie (who later married Prince Michel Radziwill) may have been the real-life basis for his fictional first love, Gilberte Swann. Modern readers of the last pages of Swann’s Way, in which the young narrator falls in love with Gilberte, are often confused about how old these children could be, with their adult-seeming flirtations but also with their silly games of tag and the constant surveillance of them by their nannies. In fact they are teenagers, sixteen or seventeen, in a period before adolescence was invented, at a time when people passed directly from childhood to adulthood, when a boy would be wearing short pants one day and taking a mistress the next.

The presence of these real-life girls in Proust’s adolescence and his obvious affection for a few of them call for a clarification. Certainly it would be a mistake to see all of Proust’s women as disguised men, even though some of the tomboys in Remembrance of Things Past who kick sand at sunbathers on the beach at Balbec or leap over their lounge chairs sound suspiciously unlike the meek, middle-class girls of the day. There has been a lot of discussion about the so-called Albertine strategy—i.e., Proust’s disguising an actual affair, say, with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, as a fictional one with Albertine, a young woman of good family who seems casually lusty and—considering the mores of the time—bizarrely unsupervised.

Proust’s gender bending becomes more difficult to decipher when the reader realizes that some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette (despite her lesbian affairs) or the duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma (a composite of Sarah Bernhardt and Réjane, two of the big stars of the day, both of whom Proust came to know). Just as clearly, other female characters are unquestionably boys in drag (such as all those delivery “girls” and milk “girls” with whom the Narrator has casual sex). What are we to make of a passage such as this one:

Of a laundry girl, on a Sunday, there was not the slightest prospect. As for the baker’s girl, as ill luck would have it she had rung the bell when Françoise was not about, had left her loaves in their basket on the landing, and had made off. The greengrocer’s girl would not call until much later. Once, I had to order a cheese at the dairy, and among the various young female employees had noticed a startling towhead, tall in stature though little more than a child, who seemed to be day-dreaming, amid the other errand-girls, in a distinctly haughty attitude . . .

Sometimes one of these boys-in-drag, such as Albertine, presented as the great love of the Narrator’s life, has a “lesbian” affair: The Narrator is depicted as insanely jealous, even to the point of retrospectively, after her death, trying to figure out the identities of Albertine’s lesbian partners. Are we to imagine that since Albertine is based on a real-life man, Agostinelli, who was primarily heterosexual, then his/her affairs with women are actually his (Agostinelli’s) heterosexual affairs with heterosexual women? Many heterosexual men, it seems, at that time did not feel particularly alarmed when their wives had passing affairs with other women; on the contrary, the husbands more often than not were titillated. Can the putatively heterosexual Narrator’s overpowering jealousy about Albertine’s lesbian affairs actually be a reflection of the homosexual Proust’s fury when his bisexual lovers drifted back to women?

In 1881 Marcel had his first asthma crisis as he came back from strolling in the Bois de Boulogne. As he later wrote, “A child who from birth has always breathed without