The evidence strongly indicates that Proust had sexual relationships with men, and that masturbation was also an important part of his sexual life. It would be misleading to say that he merely masturbated and never had sex with men.
The complication is that the evidence varies considerably in quality.
- Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan-born composer, was probably Proust’s most important early male love. Their relationship in the 1890s was intensely romantic and affectionate. There is good documentary evidence for the relationship, although the precise extent of their sexual activity is harder to establish.
- Lucien Daudet, the writer and son of Alphonse Daudet, was another young man with whom Proust had a close romantic relationship. In 1897, journalist Jean Lorrain insinuated publicly that Proust and Daudet were lovers; Proust responded by challenging Lorrain to a duel.
- Alfred Agostinelli, Proust’s chauffeur and later secretary, is especially interesting. Proust’s surviving letters after Agostinelli left him are extraordinarily passionate. Biographers generally regard the relationship as at least partly sexual, though again the surviving evidence doesn’t give us a neat record of exactly what happened.
- There were also young men who worked for Proust, including secretaries and employees, with whom biographers have found evidence of sexual or erotic involvement. William Carter’s Proust in Love discusses these relationships specifically. Yale describes the book as drawing on correspondence, testimony, and Proust’s own observations.
The particularly well-documented brothel episode
On 11 January 1918, Proust was among the men identified by police during a raid on a male brothel in Paris operated by Albert Le Cuziat. This isn’t merely biographical speculation: there was an actual police raid and Proust was identified as one of the clients.
But what he actually did there is much less certain.
The famous account, repeated by biographers including George Painter and William Carter, says that Proust sometimes paid a young man to masturbate in front of him while Proust masturbated himself. Another account has him watching men being subjected to sadomasochistic activities from a concealed position. The Guardian’s review of Carter’s biography describes this version of the evidence.
So there is a real distinction between:
“Proust went to a male brothel” — very well documented.
“Proust masturbated there while watching men” — supported by testimony and biographical research.
“Proust regularly had penetrative sex with male prostitutes” — not established by comparable evidence.
In fact, some of the strongest accounts suggest that masturbation and voyeurism may have been his preferred activities at the brothel, rather than intercourse.
And Proust himself wrote about it
This gets especially interesting because there are surviving letters and writings that make his interest in male sexuality quite explicit, even though he was extremely careful about what he said directly about himself.
For example, in a discussion of homosexuality Proust wrote about young men who love other boys and said that, generally, such lovers “masturbate one another.” The passage survives through the documentary record cited by Proust scholars. [oai_citation:7‡Library of Congress Tile
He also wrote a 1908 letter to Abel Hermant in which he discussed homosexuality in remarkably sympathetic terms. [oai_citation:8‡Library of Congress Tile
And there are surviving letters concerning young men whose sexuality and “morality” were clearly subjects of concern to Proust. One 1916 letter, now held by the University of Illinois, is particularly suggestive, although the identity and precise nature of the relationship remain uncertain.
So what is the best historical conclusion?
I’d put it this way:
Proust was homosexual, fell in love with men, and had sexual experiences with men. He also masturbated, including in connection with encounters at the male brothel. But we can’t reconstruct his sex life with the precision we can for some modern figures.
The interesting thing is that the documentary evidence is actually stronger for male lovers and sexual encounters than the old stereotype of Proust as a completely celibate, masturbating aesthete would suggest. At the same time, some of the most lurid stories about his sex life—particularly the famous stories involving rats and elaborate fetishistic scenes—have been questioned by modern scholars as potentially embellished or based on unreliable secondhand testimony.
If we separate what Proust himself documented, what contemporaries reported, and what later biographers inferred, the picture becomes considerably clearer.
1. Reynaldo Hahn: probably a sexual relationship, but not provable in the modern evidentiary sense
Proust met the composer Reynaldo Hahn in 1894, when Proust was 23 and Hahn 19. Their relationship was unquestionably intimate and romantic. Proust called him things like mon petit Reynaldo, and the two exchanged affectionate letters for years. Some of Hahn’s letters to Proust survive. Proust even instructed Hahn to destroy one letter—hardly surprising given the danger of homosexual correspondence at the time.
The important qualification is that we don’t have a surviving letter saying, in effect, “we had sex last night.” Scholars have therefore sometimes been cautious about stating exactly what their physical relationship involved. One contemporary scholarly assessment calls the evidence for Hahn as a lover a “strong presumption,” rather than definitive proof.
So:
Romantic/erotic relationship: virtually certain.
Sexual intercourse: plausible, but not demonstrable from surviving documentation.
2. Lucien Daudet: the evidence gets even more interesting
Proust met Lucien Daudet around 1894 and became intensely attached to him. Their relationship lasted roughly two years. Jean Lorrain publicly insinuated in 1897 that there was something sexual between them; Proust responded by challenging Lorrain to a duel.
And we have Proust’s actual letters to Daudet.
The really interesting thing is that Daudet later suppressed material from those letters before publishing them. The original manuscripts show that he removed references to homosexuality and references to himself.
For example, in one unpublished passage Proust uses “m.g.”, shorthand for mauvais genre (“bad form/bad type”), in a context explicitly referring to suspected homosexuality.
So there’s an important historical point here: some of the published correspondence actually understates the homosexual content of the relationship because Daudet edited it out.
William Carter’s scholarly biography treats the relationship between Proust, Daudet and Hahn as a genuine love triangle, with Daudet’s involvement provoking Hahn’s jealousy.
Again, however, the exact sexual acts aren’t documented.
3. Alfred Agostinelli: probably one of Proust’s most physically intense relationships
Agostinelli was initially Proust’s chauffeur and later secretary. Proust became extraordinarily attached to him.
The evidence here is less “Proust had sex with X on Tuesday” and more the enormous emotional intensity of the relationship. After Agostinelli’s death in 1914, Proust incorporated aspects of the relationship into the Albertine material in À la recherche du temps perdu.
There is a strong scholarly consensus that Proust’s relationship with Agostinelli was erotic, although—as with Hahn and Daudet—the surviving documentation doesn’t give us a reliable catalogue of sexual acts. A contemporary review of Proust scholarship describes Agostinelli and Henri Rochat as relationships with lower-class young men that became particularly important in Proust’s later life.
4. Henri Rochat: here Proust himself gives us a fascinating clue
This is one of the most revealing pieces of evidence.
Rochat was a young Swiss man whom Proust employed and eventually had living with him. In a letter to Lucien Daudet, Proust describes Rochat’s departure and then says that he had imposed “almost absolute chastity” on himself for a long time—and that, after Rochat left, he broke that chastity.
The letter is extraordinary because it appears to describe Proust’s sexual behavior in his own words.
Even more intriguingly, the auction documentation for the original manuscript argues that the episode probably refers to Proust’s visit to Albert Le Cuziat’s male brothel.
And Proust had previously described his relationship with Rochat to Daudet as an “incroyable ‘liaison chaste’”—an “incredible, absolutely chaste liaison.”
That doesn’t mean Rochat and Proust never had sex. It means Proust himself was capable of distinguishing between an emotionally/romantically intimate relationship and what he called sexual “chastity.”
5. The 1918 male brothel is the strongest concrete evidence
This is where the evidence changes character.
In January 1918, Proust was caught up in a police raid on the male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat, at the Hôtel Marigny in Paris. His presence there is not a rumor: he was actually identified by police.
And there are accounts of what he did there.
The evidence collected by Proust biographers describes Proust as sometimes watching men and masturbating, rather than necessarily having intercourse with them. There are also accounts involving voyeurism and sadomasochistic activities. But the more elaborate stories have to be treated cautiously because some come through secondhand testimony and were embellished in later retellings.
So if your original question is specifically:
“Did Proust actually have sex with men, or was he basically a masturbator/voyeur?”
The historically defensible answer is:
We know he was sexually attracted to men. We know he had intense erotic relationships with men. We know he visited a male brothel. We have firsthand documentary evidence that he experienced periods of sexual abstinence and then deliberately broke them. We have testimony that masturbation and voyeurism were part of his encounters with men. But we do not have equally strong documentary evidence establishing that he regularly engaged in penetrative sex with men.
That’s an important distinction.
One particularly revealing letter
There’s also a 1916 letter concerning a young man named Antoine Bermond. Proust tells the recipient to employ Bermond and asks that the letter be destroyed or returned. He discusses the young man’s “morality,” makes references to two homosexual men, and is unusually concerned that the correspondence be kept secret. The University of Illinois, which holds the letter, describes these features as evidence suggesting a potentially homosexual relationship, while explicitly acknowledging that we don’t know exactly who Proust’s unnamed correspondent was.
This is typical of Proust’s surviving correspondence: he often writes around the sexual subject rather than naming it.
And this is why
Sodome et Gomorrhe matters
Proust’s fiction is not autobiography, but it’s difficult to read Sodome et Gomorrhe without recognizing that he was drawing on intimate knowledge of male homosexual culture.
He knew about:
- male cruising,
- clandestine homosexual encounters,
- prostitutes,
- voyeurism,
- masturbation,
- the need for coded language,
- fear of discovery,
- homosexual blackmail,
- and the difference between romantic attachment and anonymous sexual encounters.
The fascinating thing is that his fiction is often more explicit about homosexual behavior than his private correspondence is about his own behavior.
And Proust wasn’t simply writing about some abstract category called “homosexuality.” He had firsthand experience of the social world he describes.
| Claim | Evidence |
| Proust was sexually attracted to men | Extremely strong |
| He fell in love with men | Extremely strong |
| Hahn was a lover | Very strong, though exact sexual nature uncertain |
| Daudet was a lover | Very strong |
| Agostinelli was an erotic attachment | Very strong |
| Proust had sexual encounters with men | Strong |
| Proust masturbated with/while watching men | Strong |
| Proust visited a male brothel | Documented |
| Proust regularly had penetrative sex with men | Not established |
| The more extreme brothel stories are all true | Uncertain |
One especially useful primary-source trail is Proust’s correspondence with Lucien Daudet, because the surviving originals reveal that the material published shortly after Proust’s death was deliberately sanitized. Sotheby’s and Christie’s descriptions of the manuscripts are unusually informative on this point.
The key point is that one of Proust’s own letters appears to describe a deliberate sexual abstinence followed by an immediate sexual encounter, and the letter was deliberately suppressed when it was originally published.
1. Proust’s “almost absolute chastity” letter
The most revealing document is an autograph letter to Lucien Daudet, now known from the original manuscript.
Proust writes:
“la chastété presque absolue à laquelle je m’étais condamné depuis si long temps…”
Literally:
“the almost absolute chastity to which I had condemned myself for such a long time…”
He then says that, after his companion had left, he broke that chastity an hour later:
“j’ai eu l’infamie de la rompre une heure après que j’ai été seul.”
That is: “I had the infamy of breaking it an hour after I was alone.”
This is unusually valuable because this isn’t a biographer interpreting Proust’s behavior; it is Proust describing his own behavior in a letter.
There are two important qualifications:
- The letter is undated, and scholars have debated whether it belongs to 1918 or 1919.
- The sexual act itself isn’t named.
However, the manuscript’s provenance and the surrounding circumstances make the connection to Albert Le Cuziat’s male brothel very strong. The Christie’s scholarly description explicitly says that the sexual “lapse” almost certainly occurred at the Hôtel Marigny brothel.
So this gives us something considerably stronger than “Proust was probably gay.”
Proust himself tells Daudet that he had maintained near-total sexual abstinence and then deliberately broke it shortly after being alone.
2. The really revealing phrase: “liaison chaste”
There’s another letter to Daudet from around November 1918 in which Proust refers to an “incroyable ‘liaison chaste’, absolument chaste”—an “incredible ‘chaste liaison,’ absolutely chaste.”
The likely subject is Henri Rochat, the young Swiss man who was living with Proust.
This is fascinating because Proust is essentially making a distinction between:
a passionate relationship with a man and sexual activity.
He can describe the former as a liaison while insisting that it was “absolutely chaste.”
That makes it dangerous to look at his relationships with Hahn, Daudet, Agostinelli, etc. and simply assume that an intense emotional relationship necessarily involved intercourse.
3. The Hahn correspondence
With Reynaldo Hahn, we have an enormous body of correspondence, and the intimacy is unmistakable.
Proust calls him things like:
“mon petit Reynaldo”
“My little Reynaldo.”
He also repeatedly asks Hahn to be discreet about their correspondence. In one surviving letter he ends with an instruction to burn the letter.
And there is a fascinating archive containing the correspondence itself, rather than merely biographers’ descriptions of it. The digital Hahn collection makes the letters available chronologically.
But here’s the important limitation:
The letters don’t give us a reliable description of sexual intercourse.
They establish profound intimacy, erotic attachment and secrecy. They don’t establish exactly what they did physically.
So I’d now be more cautious than my previous answer about saying that we can prove Hahn and Proust had sex.
4. The Daudet letters are particularly revealing because they were censored
This is perhaps the most extraordinary documentary point.
Daudet himself suppressed passages from Proust’s letters when they were published.
In one original letter, Proust discusses an amorous relationship of Daudet’s and uses the abbreviation “M.G.”, which the manuscript’s scholarly description explains as mauvais genre—a coded suggestion of homosexuality. Daudet removed material referring to himself and suppressed various names and passages.
So when historians used the published correspondence for decades, they weren’t necessarily seeing everything Proust had written.
The original manuscripts reveal a substantially more homosexual subtext.
5. And the brothel evidence is not merely anecdotal
There is a police record concerning the inspection of Le Cuziat’s establishment on the night of 11–12 January 1918. Proust was found there. Le Cuziat was subsequently prosecuted. The police documentation has been studied by historians.
That matters because it removes one common problem with historical accounts of Proust’s sex life:
we aren’t relying entirely on gossip.
There really was a male brothel; Proust really was there; police really recorded his presence.
What remains uncertain is what Proust did while he was there.
6. So did he actually have intercourse with men?
Here’s where I think the evidence requires intellectual honesty.
There are three levels:
Certain:
- Proust desired men.
- He fell in love with men.
- He had erotic relationships with men.
- He frequented a male brothel.
- He personally described breaking a prolonged period of “almost absolute chastity.”
- He practiced or participated in masturbation/voyeuristic sexual activity.
Very probable:
- He had sexual contact with men beyond masturbation.
- At least some of his male relationships involved physical intimacy.
Not securely demonstrated:
- That Proust regularly practiced anal intercourse with men.
- That Hahn, Daudet, Agostinelli, or Rochat can each be definitively classified as sexual partners in the modern sense.
And this is actually quite interesting: the documentary evidence may tell us more about Proust’s sexual psychology than about his sexual mechanics.
He was clearly capable of intense desire for men, but he also seems to have had a complicated relationship with masturbation, voyeurism, abstinence, fantasy and anonymous sexual encounters.
7. One correction to the popular image of Proust
There’s a tendency to divide the possibilities into:
A. Proust was having sex with men, or
B. Proust was a repressed homosexual who only masturbated.
The evidence doesn’t really support that binary.
A better picture is:
Proust had romantic relationships with men + sexual encounters with men + masturbation + voyeurism + periods of deliberate abstinence.
What we can’t do is reconstruct the frequency or exact physical nature of those encounters.
And given how carefully Proust and his friends concealed homosexual material—Daudet literally removed passages from the published letters—that absence of explicit documentation isn’t necessarily evidence that the acts never happened.
____________________________
Proust’s masturbation habit
1. At 16, Proust explicitly described masturbation
In a letter to his grandfather from 1888, when Proust was sixteen, he explained why he needed money to visit a brothel. He said that his father had given him money to see a woman because he was trying to stop what he called his “bad habit of masturbating.” He then said that when he got there he was too sexually excited to have intercourse.
So we have unusually direct evidence that:
- Proust masturbated regularly as a teenager.
- His parents knew about it.
- His father actually tried to use a visit to a brothel as a supposed remedy.
- The attempted heterosexual encounter did not result in intercourse.
That last point is interesting in light of your original question: at least at 16, the documentary evidence actually gives us masturbation rather than successful heterosexual sex.
2. Proust later wrote explicitly about men masturbating one another
There’s an even more interesting passage from Proust’s early writing/correspondence, quoted by Jean-Yves Tadié in his biography.
Proust describes young men who love other young men:
“they love them because of their flesh, who covet them with their eyes…”
and then says that, generally, when love overwhelms them,
“they masturbate one another.”
The passage is discussing homosexual young men in the third person, so we shouldn’t automatically interpret it as a confession. But it demonstrates that mutual masturbation was something Proust explicitly understood and wrote about as a form of homosexual sexual behavior. [oai_citation:1‡Library of Congress Tile
And there is additional evidence that Proust actually made suggestions concerning mutual masturbation in letters to male friends. A German scholarly account of the correspondence describes his early letters as including “suggestions for masturbating together.”
That makes the distinction between “Proust had homosexual relationships” and “Proust had homosexual sex” rather less abstract.
3. But Proust also conceived of homosexuality as potentially celibate
This is an important counterweight.
In a 1908 letter to Abel Hermant, Proust wrote that homosexuality retained something of its original character of friendship and its virtues. [oai_citation:3‡Library of Congress Tile
And elsewhere he explicitly entertained the possibility that a homosexual person could remain celibate.
This seems to have been more than an intellectual position. Proust appears to have regarded sexuality as something that could be separated from romantic attachment.
That helps explain something which otherwise seems contradictory: he could describe an intense relationship with a man as “chaste” without necessarily meaning that there was no erotic dimension to it.
4. His fiction is even more explicit
In In Search of Lost Time, masturbation is not incidental. Elisabeth Ladenson’s chapter on sexuality in Marcel Proust in Context notes that the narrator masturbates as a boy and argues that Proustian sexuality is, broadly speaking, “largely masturbatory.” An early version of the opening even described the protagonist’s exploration of himself in search of an unknown pleasure.
And Proust’s treatment of Albertine is particularly relevant.
The narrator’s relationship with Albertine is fictionalized and gender-transposed from Proust’s own experience, but the sexual boundary in the novel repeatedly involves mutual masturbation rather than intercourse. The scholarly discussion explicitly connects this to Proust’s description of homosexual young men masturbating one another. [oai_citation:5‡Library of Congress Tile
In other words, Proust repeatedly returns to a model of sexuality in which:
desire → looking → touching → masturbation
rather than necessarily:
desire → intercourse.
5. This fits remarkably well with the brothel testimony
The later accounts of Proust at Le Cuziat’s male brothel describe essentially the same pattern.
According to testimony recorded by biographers, Proust would have a young man masturbate in front of him while Proust himself masturbated. One account says Proust remained in bed with the sheet pulled up while observing the young man.
That testimony is considerably less secure than the 1888 letter—we have to distinguish eyewitness testimony, hearsay and later biographical reconstruction—but it is striking that it corresponds so closely to a sexual pattern that appears in Proust’s writing.
6. So what does the whole record suggest?
I’d revise my answer to your original question slightly:
Proust was not simply a man who “only masturbated.” There is evidence of sexual contact and sexual propositions involving men.
But masturbation appears to have been unusually central to his sexuality, and there is much better documentary evidence for it than for intercourse.
| Evidence | What it tells us |
| 1888 letter to grandfather | Proust himself says he masturbated |
| Early letters | Interest in/possibly proposals for mutual masturbation with men |
| Discussion of homosexual young men | Proust explicitly describes mutual masturbation between men |
| Hahn/Daudet correspondence | Powerful evidence of male romantic/erotic relationships |
| Rochat correspondence | Proust describes a supposedly “chaste†liaison |
| 1918 brothel | Proust was actually present at a male brothel |
| Brothel testimony | Masturbation/voyeurism are specifically reported |
| Direct evidence of male-male intercourse |
So if someone said:
“Proust was homosexual, but there is no evidence he actually had sex with men.”
I’d say that’s too strong.
If someone said:
“Proust had a very active sex life with men involving regular intercourse.”
I’d also say the evidence doesn’t justify that confidence.
The safest reconstruction is that Proust’s homosexual sexuality included romantic attachment, voyeurism, masturbation and mutual masturbation, and probably other sexual contact, while the documentary evidence for intercourse itself remains comparatively thin.
And there’s one further rabbit hole that’s reallyinteresting: Proust’s father appears to have known about his son’s masturbation extremely early, and Proust’s first documented visit to a brothel was actually arranged by his father as an attempted “cure.” The story gets stranger when you look at what Proust wrote about that experience and how it connects to his later attitudes toward sex.
___________________________
Why are there so few surviving gay love letters from the 19th and early 20th centuries?
So: were few written, or were most destroyed?
Probably both—but destruction, non-preservation, and misidentification are likely much more important than a simple lack of writing.
There’s an additional statistical trap here: we can only observe the letters that survived. If 90% of letters were destroyed, the remaining 10% can make the original culture look much less emotionally and romantically expressive than it actually was.
And there’s an especially cruel historical irony: heterosexual love letters could become cherished family heirlooms—“Grandfather’s letters to Grandma”—whereas same-sex love letters could be treated as embarrassing, scandalous, or dangerous evidence and thrown away.
So when you encounter a historical same-sex relationship with only fragments of correspondence, the absence of letters shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as an absence of love—or even as evidence that the relationship was less emotionally intense. The archive itself has been shaped by the dangers those people lived under.
___________________________
Proust’s duels
Proust’s dueling was about social honor, and in the most famous case that honor was inseparable from the question of homosexuality and masculinity.
How many duels did Proust actually have?
The number is a little misleading because biographers distinguish between actual encounters, proposed duels, and incidents that nearly became duels.
- 1897: Jean Lorrain — the one unquestionably famous actual duel. Proust and Lorrain met with pistols in the Bois de Meudon on February 6, 1897. They exchanged shots and neither was injured.
- Proust had at least five or six other occasions involving the “terrain” or serious preparations for a duel, depending on what one counts. One scholarly account says he went “at least six times onto the field.”
- Other episodes involved people such as Paul Hervieu, Henri de Vogüé, the marquis de Medici, and Jean de Pierrefeu, but several were threats or negotiations that never became a completed pistol/sword encounter.
- There was already a near-duel at Mont-Dore in 1896, before the Lorrain encounter.
So I would not say “Proust fought six duels.” A safer formulation is: he fought one famous actual duel, and had a remarkable number of other potential or aborted duels.
And the Lorrain duel is very revealing
This is the important part of your question.
Jean Lorrain was a journalist and novelist who had attacked Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les Jours. In February 1897 he published another attack that contained a fairly transparent insinuation that Proust and Lucien Daudet were lovers. Lucien was indeed someone with whom Proust had a romantic relationship.
Proust immediately demanded satisfaction.
And here’s the paradox: Lorrain himself was homosexual, and his contemporaries knew it. So this wasn’t simply “a straight man defending himself against a homosexual accusation.” It was two men living within a culture in which homosexuality could be tolerated privately while being extremely dangerous as a public label.
That distinction is crucial.
Proust could have relationships with men. What he desperately did not want was for someone to publicly define him as a homosexual, particularly in a way that associated him with the contemporary stereotype of the effeminate, weak, unmanly “invert.”
There is quite good evidence for this. One study of masculinity and sexuality in fin-de-siècle France notes that Proust later explicitly invoked his willingness to duel when someone characterized him as “feminine.” He essentially argued: ask my seconds whether I have the softness of an effeminate man.
So the duel could function as a kind of public performance of masculinity.
Was he trying to hide his homosexuality?
Partly, yes — but “hide” is too simple.
Proust’s position was more like:
I will not allow you to publicly define me by this.
He was extremely secretive about his sexuality. He did not publicly “come out,” and he could simultaneously have relationships with men and vehemently deny or evade the homosexual label. Edmund White’s account emphasizes precisely this contradiction: Proust wanted to engage in homosexual relationships while avoiding the public category “homosexual.”
But the duel wasn’t necessarily intended to convince everyone that Proust was heterosexual. That would have been almost impossible in his social circle. Many people knew or strongly suspected.
Rather, it established:
“You may gossip about me privately, but you cannot publicly insult my honor and masculinity without consequences.”
That’s a very different thing.
And social status mattered enormously
Proust was also intensely concerned with his position in Parisian society.
Remember what Lorrain’s attack actually did. It wasn’t merely:
“Proust sleeps with men.”
It simultaneously suggested that Proust was a pretty, effeminate society boy whose literary success came from salon connections.
That attacked three things at once:
- his masculinity
- his sexual reputation
- his legitimacy as a serious writer
The third point is easy to miss. Lorrain was suggesting that Proust’s literary career was basically a product of fashionable connections and patronage. Proust had enormous ambitions to be taken seriously as a writer.
So demanding a duel allowed him to answer the insult in the language of the society he desperately wanted to belong to: honor, courage, bravery, witnesses, and aristocratic codes of conduct.
His choice of witnesses is significant too. He brought Jean Béraud and the celebrated fencing master Gustave de Borda. The latter was an especially prestigious choice and effectively supplied Proust with a very strong symbolic demonstration of masculine credibility.
There’s another fascinating clue: Proust liked the memory of the duel
This is why I wouldn’t reduce the whole thing to “he was scared of being outed.”
Proust subsequently regarded the duel as one of his great memories and continued to derive a kind of certificate of courage from it. A scholarly study of his dueling habit argues that the episode became an important part of his self-construction.
And this is where things get psychologically interesting.
Proust was physically frail, asthmatic, highly nervous, intensely cerebral, and frequently described by others in terms that could be coded as effeminate. The duel gave him an opportunity to construct the opposite image:
Proust the aesthete → Proust the brave man.
Proust the “invert” → Proust who will risk being shot.
Proust the salon intellectual → Proust who obeys the masculine code of honor.
One scholar has gone so far as to argue that the dueling impulse allowed Proust to affirm a virile side of his identity precisely when his sexuality exposed him to accusations of effeminacy.
I think that’s a much more illuminating interpretation than simply “Proust was defending his reputation.”
And there’s a delicious irony
Proust and Lorrain were, in a sense, fighting over the very thing they had in common.
Both men were homosexual; both were involved in the extraordinarily coded Parisian literary/social world; and both understood perfectly well how dangerous the public perception of “effeminacy” could be.
So the duel wasn’t really:
“I’m not homosexual!”
It was closer to:
“You do not have the right to expose, define, or humiliate me publicly.”
And underneath that:
“I am not the weak, effeminate creature you’re portraying me as.”
That latter point is probably the key to understanding why Proust was so attracted to the idea of dueling even beyond the Lorrain affair. He himself later wrote about having a “mania for duels,” and in The Prisoner he has the narrator acknowledge that he could appear extraordinarily proud and prone to duels despite supposedly lacking ordinary amour-propre.
So if I had to rank the motives, I’d put them roughly:
1. Defending social honor/reputation
2. Defending his masculinity and refusing public humiliation
3. Protecting the privacy of his homosexuality
4. Genuine attraction to the drama, courage, and aristocratic ritual of the duel
And #2 and #3 are really inseparable in his historical context.
The most Proustian thing about it is that he wasn’t simply trying to convince society that he wasn’t homosexual. He was trying to control the meaning of being homosexual without allowing society to make it synonymous with weakness, femininity, or social inferiority.
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