SAINT-LOUPthey were no doubt justifiable in themselves, would never have
occurred to her if he had been safely bedridden. He kept the
servants awake, and they in tum kept her awake; they were nOt
to wait on him at table, but must deposit a tray of food in his
bedroom and go away; they must not light a special fire in the
dining-room when his friends called; and worst of all, the bedside-
table on which he worked must be taken away ('I'd rather do
without chairs!'). Perhaps he was speaking the truth when he
told her that his despair at her unkindness was the sole cause of
his quarrel with Fenelon.
Fenelon and Lauris called one afternoon early in December,
and kept their overcoats on in the unheated dining-room: "I
daren't, Madame would have me dismissed," said Marie, when
asked to light a fire. In this gloomy situation Fenelon was moved
to say 'something extremely disagreeable'; whereupon Marcel
leaped upon him with clenched fists and, when restrained by
Lauris, seized Bertrand's beautiful new hat, stamped upon it, and
tore out the lining. With ludicrous pathos he kept the piece of
lining to show his mother, 'so that you can see I'm not exaggera-
ting; but please don't throw it away, as I want to give it him
back in case it's still of any use to him'. Here is the original of
the incident in which the Narrator desecrates the new top-hat of
the Baron de Charlus.^1 The Baron has insulted him for not
consenting to his veiled overtures: it would be neat and logical
if the offence for which Proust punished Fenelon had been the
exact opposite, namely, an accusation of lack of virility. "Proust
was a Saturnian, and a very difficult friend," Fenelon told Paul
Morand twelve years later.
'Saturnian' was the euphemism in the slang of their group for
'homosexual'; we find Proust using the word on two other
occasions to the Bibesco brothers, but never to anyone else. 'I
have made some rather profound reflections on Saturnism,' he
airily informed Emmanuel Bibesco at about this time, 'which I
shall communicate to you at one of our next metaphysical
discussions. I need hardly add that they are of the utmost severity.
But one clings, all the same, to a philosophical curiosity about
people. Almost the only things worth knowing about a fool are
that he's an anti-Dreyfusard or a Saturnian.' Clearly, Emmanuel
was not supposed to be aware of Proust's own homosexuality;
1 11, 559