Admittedly, every man of M. de Charlus's kind is an extraordinary creature since, if he does not make concessions to the possibilities of life, he seeks out essentially the love of a man of the other race, that is to say a man who is a lover of women (and incapable consequently of loving him); contrary to what I had imagined in the courtyard, where I had seen Jupien hovering round M. de Charlus like the orchid making overtures to the bumble-bee, these exceptional creatures with whom we commiserate are a vast crowd, as we shall see in the course of this book, for a reason which will be disclosed only at the end of it, and commiserate with themselves for being too many rather than too few.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 654
Proust is once again throwing out a hint for the later unfolding of the novel, and thus I figured I should include it here. As the students know from Linden's The Accidental Mind, about 4-6% of the population fall are consistently homosexual, although a much higher percentage (1 in 4 men and around 1 in 7 women) have had at least one homosexual experience leading to orgasm.
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