My Year With Proust - Day 320

The feud of the Capulets and the Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles of every sort which have been surmounted, the special eliminations to which nature has had to surject the chances, already far from common, which bring about love, before a retired tailor, who was intending to set off soberly from his office, can stand quivering in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty; this Romeo and this Juliet may believe with good reason that their love is not a momentary whim but a true predestination, determined by the harmonies of their temperaments, and not only by their own personal temperaments but by those of their ancestor, by their most distant strains of heredity, so much so that the fellow-creatures who is conjoined with them has belonged to them from before their birth, has attracted them by a force comparable to that which governs the worlds on which we spent our former lives.  M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see whether the bumble-bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long been waiting to receive, and had no chance of receiving save by an accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle.  But it was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same order and no less marvelous.  As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 651

And Proust returns to one of his favorite topics: love.  There are times when his analysis of M. de Charlus seems, well, a tad clunky, or at least very much a product of his age.  That cuts both ways, obviously.  Who else was showing this level of understanding of homosexuality when Proust was writing?  He doesn't describe the relationship between M. de Charlus and Jupien as perversity, rather he describes it as a love story, even if a seemingly inexplicable one: a "retired tailor, who was intending to set off soberly from his office, can stand quivering in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty."  Still, the two men, like everyone in love, felt the same thing and asked the same question, even down to wondering if their love was somehow predestined.  Proust concludes, "As soon as I considered the encounter from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty."