so MARCEL PROUSTbeginning of middle age, he thought for a time of marrying one,
but decided to write his novel instead. Almost to the end of his
life he continued, now and then, to fall in love with women; but
somehow his choice always happened to be a respectable married
lady, twenty years older than himself, or a high-class, equally safe
and unattainable cocotte; or if he loved an unmarried woman of
his own age or younger, then she was usually the fiancee or
mistress of a friend. The married ladies or the cocotte, Freudians
would say, were mother-images; and they would rightly add that
a preference for women already bespoken to male friends is a
typical symptom of homosexuality. These were substitutes for his
mother, those were substitutes for his friends. But there was a
rejected part of himself, forever prevented by stronger forces
from coming to power, for which the young girls were also
substitutes for Marie de Benardaky; and when he migrated to the
Cities of the Plain he took with him a prisoner crushed beneath
the weight of Time and Habit, a buried heterosexual boy who
continued to cry unappeased for a little girl lost.