How the French Invented Love

by Marilyn Yalom

  Another important aspect of Proustian love is its relation to the great theme of time, which girds the entire oeuvre. Swann is aware that what he feels for Odette during the period of his greatest love is not what he will feel in the future. As much as he tries to disentangle himself from the pain of loving Odette, he clings to her because he knows that when he is released from suffering, he will be another person.

  When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them—then, no doubt, the actions of Odette’s daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest. . . . But the truth was that in the depths of his morbid condition he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact amount to the death of all he now was.

  At some level of consciousness, all lovers know this. If you cease to care for the person you love, you will give up a vital piece of your identity. You will become someone else. You will look back on your past love with tenderness or anger or some other combination of feelings, but you will not be able to recapture the same emotions you once felt. You may even begin to miss the pain you were once capable of feeling. Love, Proust tells us, is a mysterious intoxication, all-powerful yet fleeting, and sometimes expended on the wrong person. So Swann tells himself when his love has finally worn itself out: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me and who wasn’t even my type!” Epiphanies like this remain with Proust’s readers long after they have put his books back on the shelf.

  We learn from Within a Budding Grove that Swann married Odette after he had ceased to love her. The reason for his marriage to his former mistress lay in the birth of their daughter, Gilberte. It was Swann’s dearest hope that someday he would be able to present both his wife and his daughter to his old friend, the Princess des Laumes (who became in time the Duchesse de Guermantes), but she steadfastly refused to meet them because of Odette’s past as a demi-mondaine—a kept woman. Not only did Swann’s female friends refuse to receive Odette, but they also declined invitations to his conjugal residence. That meant that he went alone to many social engagements, including dinner with the narrator’s family, and that even when some of his male friends dined at his home, they came without their wives. Such were the prejudices within the tight caste system that once prevailed in France.

  Ever since Marcel had first seen Swann’s daughter, Gilberte, at Combray, he nurtured a secret love for her, but fearing that the daughter of such a sophisticated father would find him crude and ignorant, he was filled with both “desire and despair” at the thought of getting to know her more intimately. Part of Gilberte’s attraction was the proximity she enjoyed to her father’s friend, the writer Bergotte, whose books Marcel had come to admire above all others. Like Swann, Marcel endowed his love object with the supplemental value acquired from an aesthetic association. Gilberte took on the prestige of Bergotte’s literary works, just as Odette had assumed some of the glory of Botticelli’s frescoes. Even before he knew Gilberte face-to-face, the young Marcel projected onto her all the desirable qualities he imagined she would have, like a patina acquired through time that makes a bronze statue even more beautiful.

  Later, in Paris, Marcel met Gilberte in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, where children of their class would habitually play. (A delightful one still exists today at the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées.) There they would chat side by side on a bench, or play hide-and-seek with other friends, or even engage in some physical wrestling. One memorable bout released in the teenage Marcel an unexpected pleasure.

  We wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted . . . I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse.

  Yes, Marcel has an ejaculation, though the experience is worded so preciously one has to read it twice to make sure.

  Such exertions on the part of an asthmatic boy—Marcel is afflicted by the same malady as his creator, Proust—contribute to the severe illness he contracts outdoors on a very cold day. With a fever of 104 and congestion of the lungs, he is bedridden for a long time and forced to undergo a “milk diet” that eventually cures him. But before he is up and about, he receives a letter from Gilberte that adds to his recovery. Not only does she express concern for his well-being, but she invites him to one of her teas, given on Mondays and Wednesdays. Marcel, who has not yet been invited to her home, is ecstatic.

  As soon as I had finished reading the letter . . . I loved it so much already that every few minutes I had to re-read it and kiss it.

  Love is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.

  For almost a year, Marcel enjoys a loving friendship with Gilberte. They meet regularly at her Paris home in the company of other friends, or at meals with her parents and distinguished guests—for example, Bergotte, who turns out to have a snail-like nose and generally unfavorable appearance, in contrast to his magnificent literary style. They take walks in the Bois de Boulogne and the Jardin des Plantes. Marcel has only one desire, that Gilberte should love him and that his present happiness should continue forever. Of course, in Proust’s world, such happiness is always doomed.

  Suddenly, out of the blue, Gilberte becomes surly. She betrays signs of impatience when Marcel arrives uninvited at her home. On one occasion, when she had planned to go to a dancing lesson, her mother makes her stay at home to entertain Marcel. Gilberte obviously resents Marcel’s presence and they end up quarreling. What might have been a minor tiff gets blown up into an extended separation, largely due to Marcel’s overstocked imagination. Days and weeks go by during which he writes impassioned letters that are never sent. If he stops by the Swanns’, it is only when he knows Gilberte will not be there. When she finally requests his presence, through her mother, he refuses the invitation out of pride and the expectation that another will be forthcoming. Determined to break off with Gilberte, yet hopeful of reconciliation, Marcel suffers the pangs of puppy love, which are not so different from those of his mentor, Charles Swann. He moves from desire to despair and ultimately to indifference in a trajectory that recapitulates Swann’s love for Odette, with the added painful knowledge that he himself was responsible for the breakup. “It was a slow and painful suicide of that self which loved Gilberte.” By dint of telling himself over and over again that he and Gilberte had had a major misunderstanding, he comes to believe that life has irretrievably changed for them, “like certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids.” Eventually he arrives at a state of indifference to Gilberte and is ready to fall in love again, this time with even more devastating consequences.

  At this point of the novel, the reader will have read about 700 pages, with about 2,500 more to follow. I repeat: Proust is not for everyone. You have to be willing to wade through pages of analysis, with the narrator commenting on everyone’s experiences, including his own, in an attempt to derive general laws that pertain to the social world. Proust’s commentaries, when formulated like a maxim, are always worth reflecting on. For example: “Man is a being who cannot get outside of himself, who knows others only within himself, and, if he says the opposite, lies.” This bitter assessment of human relations, which Proust enacts through a cast of memorable characters, will find supporters throughout the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, will make solipsism a fundamental tenet of his existentialist philosophy. In h
is play No Exit, hell consists of “the others” who refuse to confirm one’s picture of oneself. But isn’t love supposed to break down the barriers between self and other and, ideally, form a unit capable of mutual empathy and reciprocal pleasure? Proust is willing to concede only “intermittencies of the heart,” temporary happiness followed inevitably by suffering and despair.

  Proust’s homosexual characters are no more successful than his heterosexuals in warding off jealousy and suffering. In fact, because they are obliged to hide their sexual orientation from public view, they have the added burden of maintaining love relations under a cloak of secrecy, removed from the eyes of society and the criminal justice system. At the beginning of the volume titled Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe), Proust offers an impassioned defense of homosexuals, whose liberty lasts “only until the discovery of their crime.” Proust is thinking specifically of Oscar Wilde, “the poet one day fêted in every drawing-room and applauded in every theater in London, and the next day driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head.”

  From this point on, Proust gives vent to his fascination with numerous forms of homosexual behavior. Like Gide, he drew upon his personal experience, but unlike Gide, he never came publicly out of the closet. As he is reputed to have said in a conversation with Gide: “You can tell everything, provided you don’t say ‘I.’ ”3

  Proust made no moral distinction between heterosexual and homosexual love; his frequent application of the word “vice” to homosexual behavior seems to have been a concession to prevailing attitudes.4 Yet Proust’s depiction of gay men is hardly flattering, especially in contrast to Gide’s proselytizing efforts. Cities of the Plain introduces a wide variety of homosexual types, from men who love only men and women who love only women to bisexual men and women who switch between sexes with the apparent ease of changing clothes. By the end of Cities of the Plain, there’s scarcely a character who hasn’t incurred the suspicion of being gay or bisexual.

  Consider Albertine, whom Marcel meets at the fictional beach resort of Balbec, modeled on the Norman coastal town of Cabourg. Appearing first in the volume titled Within a Budding Grove, Albertine is part of a group of sportive girls who enchant the nonathletic narrator with their vitality and charm. He falls in love with all of them, before singling out Albertine. By the end of the summer, he and Albertine have become friends and lovers, inaugurating a relationship they will continue sporadically in Paris. Yet by the time they return to Balbec the following season, Marcel begins to have suspicions that Albertine may also engage in lesbian activities. He is alerted to this possibility when he and his older companion, Doctor Cottard, see her dancing with a female friend, Andrée. Cottard points out that the two women’s breasts are pressed against each other and adds, in his most professional manner: “It is not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement through their breasts.” This peremptory remark further inflames Marcel’s suspicions.

  On another occasion, Marcel sees Andrée “lay her head lovingly on Albertine’s shoulder and kiss her on the neck, half shutting her eyes.” Convinced that Albertine and Andrée are lovers, the wounded Marcel concocts an elaborate story destined to hurt Albertine—he tells her that he is really in love with Andrée. At the same time he prods Albertine to reveal her lesbian proclivities. Albertine is completely taken in by Marcel’s story; she is indeed hurt, tearful, and prepared to break off with him for good, but she swears that his suspicions about her relations with other women are not grounded in reality. “Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” In 1921, when Cities of the Plain was published, out-of-the-closet lesbians were famously part of the Parisian avant-garde scene, as we shall see in the following chapter.

  When Albertine mentions to Marcel that she is about to leave for Trieste with a certain older woman, whom he knows to have been the lover of Mademoiselle Vinteuil, the composer’s daughter (everything is interconnected in Proust’s world!), he has a complete meltdown. Alone in his hotel room, separated from his mother’s room by a thin wall, he falls into a neurotic fit. From this point on, Marcel is determined to sequester Albertine and keep her from meeting Mademoiselle Vinteuil’s friend or any other lesbian. He persuades her to live with him in Paris so as to keep her constantly under his eye and force her to love him, but his neurotic inquisitions and her fluid sexuality result mainly in mutual torment. One twentieth-century literary critic wrote that “the only happy experience of love” in all of Proust occurs when Marcel contemplates Albertine asleep.5 He exaggerates. One can find several other happy love experiences. Still, his observation is emblematic of Proustian love on the whole. The lover, devoured by jealousy, is at rest only when the loved one is asleep, encased in the prison of her motionless body. When awake and capable of following her own desires, she will become, once again, a source of anxiety.

  Anxiety is intrinsic to Proustian love because the lover craves total possession of the loved one. The lover wants the impossible—to possess the beloved in every way, including her absent moments and her past. Ironically, her mystery is both an essential ingredient in love and the source of the lover’s torture: “one loves only what one doesn’t possess.” If mystery disappears, the lover falls out of love. The paradox of Proustian love, so unsatisfying as a general model, can still be helpful to readers who do not share his particular incapacity for happiness. Like the seventeenth-century “Map of the Land of Tenderness,” it indicates potential dangers that loom on the highway of love. Can one avoid falling into the bottomless pit of jealousy? Can one keep indifference at bay after a period of romantic infatuation? It raises the question of how to transform the temporary stage of “falling in love” into the more permanent stage of “standing in love.” Proust’s lovers never make that transition.

  I cannot end without saying a few words about the Baron de Charlus, probably the best-known homosexual character in all of French literature. Charlus comes from a mighty family, is the brother of the Duc de Guermantes and the Prince de Guermantes, and wears his nobility with the scornful pride of his class. He enjoys a close friendship with Swann—the only Jewish member of the exclusive Jockey Club—until the time of the heated Dreyfus Affair, when all of France was divided over whether the French Jewish officer was or was not guilty of treason. Charlus barely speaks to anyone whom he considers beneath him, which is most everyone. And yet, because of his closet homosexuality, he often pursues young men from the working class and puts himself in humiliating situations. Such is his love for the violinist Morel, whose father had been only a servant. Charlus becomes Morel’s patron and lover, and Morel rewards him with contempt and indifference, without refusing his social connections and extravagant gifts. In one hilarious incident, Charlus goes so far as to invent an imaginary insult so he can fight a duel on Morel’s behalf—a duel that never takes place because Morel fears it will tarnish his own reputation.

  The character of Charlus was based largely on Proust’s friend, the poet, critic, and man-about-town Comte Robert de Montesquiou. Two famous portraits, one by Whistler at the Frick in New York, the other by Giovanni Boldini at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, capture the fastidious elegance of this homosexual dandy, who was known to have had a sense of grandeur and mad outbursts similar to those in the novel. There was even a real duel with another poet over a perceived slight to Montesquiou’s manhood. Montesquiou patronized a gifted young pianist named Léon Delafosse, the model for Morel, without incurring the humiliations that Morel heaped upon Charlus. From his large social circle, Proust was able to extract the raw material for his characters, though for the emotion of love, he had only to look inward to remembrances of his enduring attachment to his mother and grandmother, his high school crush on Léon Daudet, his long-term affair with Reynaldo Hahn, his passion for Alfred Agostinelli (the chauffeur and pilot who provided many el
ements for the character of Albertine), and the numerous young men with whom he had fleeting encounters in his later years.

  With the publication of Cities of the Plain, Proust left himself open to attacks for his obsessive portrayals of homosexuals. Gide criticized him for having made “inverts” so unattractive, hardly the model that Gide presented to his readers. (“Invert” was a common term for homosexual at that time.) Colette, on the other hand, wrote Proust a letter of praise in July 1921: “Nobody in the world has written pages like those on the Invert, no one.”

  By grappling with his personal demons on the written page, Proust was able to dramatize those impediments to love that were his own: jealousy, hypersensitivity, and fear of loss, along with bouts of snobbery, cruelty, and indifference. His fictive lovers bear many of these same unfortunate traits. Yet, as readers, we are able to sympathize with them and, through them, discover previously hidden truths about ourselves. How Proust “took his private, thoroughly idiosyncratic world and made us feel at home in it” still astonishes his devotees.6

  As an adult lover, Proust remained at heart the little boy of thirteen who had written in a friend’s album that his idea of unhappiness was to be separated from his mother. Around the age of twenty-one, he wrote in another album that his principal character trait was “the need to be loved” and that his preferred occupation was “to love.” He added that his greatest misfortune would have been “not to have known my mother or my grandmother.” Not everyone is destined to transform the love of one’s mother into the love of a heterosexual partner. And not everyone is destined to produce a masterpiece.