310 MARCEL PROUST
nor was Antoine, when Proust objected to his recommendation
of firmness in shaking hands: "but people would take me for an
invertl" It is very likely that Proust's relations with all these
noble young friends-not only those we have already met, but
those, Albufera, Radziwill and Guiche, who are about to arrive-
were entirely platonic. They may not have been willingly so; and
his ill-success with Antoine and Fenelon may well have been due
to his friends' realisation of the true nature of his frustrations. It
is probable, too, with two possible exceptions, that all these
young men were themselves normal. Marriage and. the pursuit
of women, it is true, are by no means incompatible with sexual
inversion: Wilde and Gide were husbands and fathers, and
Proust himself was to portray the woman-chasers and the
married men of Sodom. But some weight must be given to the
fact that a majority of Proust's friends-Gabriel de La Roche-
foucauld, Antoine Bibesco, Lauris, Albufera, Radziwill and
Guiche-were engaged in love-affairs with women during the
first period of his friendship with them, and later married. Two,
however, did not marry. It mayor may not be significant that
Emmanuel Bibesco was called the Dancing Girl, that there is no
trace in the little we know of him of any affairs with women, and
that he ultimately committed suicide: on the other hand, it is
clear that Proust's feeling for him never went beyond liking.
F eneion, too, remained single: it seems not unlikely that it was
to him that Paul Morand so scathingly referred when he alleged
that 'the enchanting young man with fair hair and blue eyes, the
darling of the ladies in 1900, who served as the model for Saint-
Loup, was to end fairly and squarely in heterodoxy, or, as we
called it in our jargon of those days, bi-metallism'. Fenelon
perhaps suggested the descent into Sodom of Saint-Loup, as he
suggested his redemption through death in battle. Did Proust,
with his expert intuition in these matters, divine the truth even
at this early period? Did their friendship end because Fenelon
felt himself on the point of giving way, or because Proust himself
made advances for which F eneion was not yet prepared? How-
ever this may be, the swift Fenelon vanished into the East; his
keen blue eyes and flying coat-tails were seen by his friends only
in brief, yearly glimpses, on his summer leaves, and by Proust
still more seldom. He half-forgot Bertrand instantly, and half-
remembered him for ever.