Proust's Overcoat - Lorenza Foschini [13]
The photo was dated 1883. Twelve at the time, Proust had been attending the Lycée Condorcet for a year, along with his friend from elementary school, Jacques Bizet, son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Though the two boys were bound in deep friendship, these feelings would soon intensify for Proust, erupting into infatuation. Proust’s mother was alerted to the situation and was sufficiently worried to forbid her son from going out with his friend. Who could have informed her of what was going on between the two boys? Who set off the alarm in her?
In the correspondence between Bizet and Proust, published long afterward, several letters help illuminate this development and how it played out within the Proust family. Five years after the photo was taken, looking back at their earlier bond, a now seventeen-year-old Proust, still smitten, wrote teasingly to Bizet in June 1888 about what or who might have tipped off his mother when they were twelve:
Maybe it was your appearance, or more likely she heard my brother talking about you, coming into the room when he could have been saying something malicious about you to Baignères, because you and I often did misbehave together, but it was especially because of me and my excessive affection for you. Maybe my brother . . .
Robert was the principal suspect for having exposed their deepening connection. It is quite possible that Robert may have spoken out about his older brother’s behavior in good faith, and not out of spite. So unlike Marcel, Robert was athletic, passionate about math, a reluctant reader, an exemplary son.
Certainly the Proust family was beginning to understand Marcel’s inclinations, but as was true in all bourgeois households at the time, no one spoke of it. What one knew, one never discussed. All the same, one knew.
In The Captive, Proust wrote:
In certain untruthful families, a brother who has come to call without any apparent reason and makes some casual inquiry on the doorstep as he leaves, appearing scarcely to listen to the response, indicates to his brother that this inquiry was the sole object of his visit, for the brother is quite familiar with that air of detachment, those words uttered as though in parentheses and at the last moment, having himself had frequent recourse to use them himself. Similarly, there are pathological families, kindred spirits, fraternal temperaments, initiated into that mute language which enables the members of a family to understand each other without speaking.
These words remind me of what Jean Chalon, writer and, for decades, literary critic for Le Figaro, told me when I met him in Paris. “In the summer of 1982 I met a very old man, a M. de Chantenesse. His father had been a doctor, a friend of Dr. Adrien Proust’s; their families lived near one another on boulevard Malesherbes. Dr. Chantenesse and Dr. Proust used to love chatting together and going for strolls around the neighborhood. One day, Dr. Chantenesse returned to his home in a very emotional state and told his wife:
“ ‘Oh, poor Proust, if only you knew. It’s terrible.’
“ ‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.
“ ‘Not in front of the children, I’ll tell you after our meal,’ replied the physician.
“After the meal was over, the children left the table but young Chantenesse glued his ear to the dining-room door. He overheard his parents saying things about Marcel that he understood only later. His father never stopped repeating: ‘Poor Adrien Proust, luckily he’s got Robert.’
“It would seem that Marcel’s family could not come to terms with his homosexuality,” Chalon explained to me, “since they considered his