DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 175Meanwhile the preparation of Les Plaisirs et les Jours was
advancing rapidly. The long dedicatory foreword to Willie Heath
was written in July 1894; Mme Lemaire was busy with her grace-
fully repellent brush-drawings; Anatole France used his personal
influence to find a publisher; and Montesquiou generously
consented to the quotation of his still unpublished verses to Mme
Lemaire ('the goddess and Vigee-Lebrun of flowers'), 'which
display,' wrote the grateful Proust, 'the sententious and subtle
elegance, the vigorous sense of form, that so often in his work
remind one of the seventeenth century'. But Count Robert
refused to allow one of the stories to be dedicated to him, even
with the inducement that France and Heredia would be among
his fellow-dedicatees, and that his hete noire Blanche would be
excluded; and in the end it was decided there should be no
dedications of individual stories at all. The manuscript-although
a few pieces were written and inserted later-was in the hands of
the publisher Calmann Levy by September. And when the year
ended Proust found he no longer dreaded New Year's Day-that
recurrent point in the spiral of time which in the long-past winter
of Marie de Benardaky seemed the beginning of a new life, but
afterwards became a mocking admonition that life could not be
altered by the calendar alone. 'I used to feel,' he wrote to
Montesquiou, 'that however the years change, our character
remains the same; and that the future we dream and desire is
merely the product of the very past from which we would like
it to be so different, and only echoes all the bells of good and evil
we have previously set ringing. But now it is with a keener
consciousness of divine grace and human liberty, with faith in at
least an inner Providence, that I begin the year.' For now the joy
of Reynaldo's friendship reached out into an endless future, and
the possibility of fame from writing seemed within his. grasp.
His new love, however, happy and virtuous as it seemed, had
its darker implications. Whether or not his previous friendships
had been entirely platonic, they had been transitory, and had
never touched his deepest emotions; he had often been in love
with women; he could still regard himself as fundamentally
normal. Now, once and for all, he must admit to himself that he
was a homosexual, one of the exiled, scattered, outlawed inhabi-
tants of Sodom, a race more tragic and despised even than the
Jews. He was a criminal, and Reynaldo was his accomplice; they