My Years With Proust - Day 424

M. de Charlus was only a Guermantes when all was said.  But it had sufficed that nature should have upset the balance of his nervous system enough to make him prefer, to the woman his brother the Duke would have chosen, one of Virgil's shepherds or Plato's disciples, and at once qualities unknown to the Duc de Guermantes and often combined with this lack of equilibrium had made M. de Charlus an exquisite pianist, an amateur painter who was not devoid of taste, and an eloquent talker.  Who would ever have detected that the rapid, nervous, charming style with which M. de Charlus played the Schumannesque passage of Faure's sonata had its equivalent - one dare not say its cause - in elements entirely physical, in the Barton's nervous weaknesses? We shall explain later on what we mean by nervous weaknesses, and why it is that a Greek of the time of Socrates, a Roman of the time of Augustus, might be what we know them to have been and yet remain absolutely normal, not men-women such as we see around us to-day.  Just as he had real artistic aptitudes which had never come to fruition, so M. de Charlus, far more than the Duke, had loved their mother and loved his own wife, and indeed, years afterwards, if anyone spoke of them to him, would shed tears, but superficial tears, like the perspiration of an over-stout man, whose forehead will glisten with sweat at the slightest exertion.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 985-986

Proust returns to one of his favorite themes from Cities of the Plain: the sexual orientation of M. de Charlus.  He associates M. de Charlus's artistic desires and talents with the fact taht "nature should have upset the balance of his nervous system," which relates both to the old belief in the fragile artistic temperament as well as stereotypes about sexuality.  Proust throws in this foreshadowing: "We shall explain later on what we mean by nervous weaknesses, and why it is that a Greek of the time of Socrates, a Roman of the time of Augustus, might be what we know them to have been and yet remain absolutely normal, not men-women such as we see around us to-day."  It will be interesting to see how he spins the romanticizing of homosexuality of the ancient world with the deprecation of it in Proust's own age.

Oh, and here's a link to Gabriel Faure's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, which Proust references.  Well, he simply mentions a sonata, but I love this one so I'm assuming this was his intent.