My Years With Proust - Day 447

Ski having shown some determination to pursue the subject, M. de Charlus, his eyes starting out of his head, raised his voice and with a meaningful glance at Albertine - who is fact could not hear what we were saying, being engaged in conversation with Mme Cottara and Princess Sherbatoff - and the hint of a double meaning of someone who wishes to teach ill-bred people a lesson, said: "I think it's high time we began to talk of subjects that might interest this young lady." But I realised that, for him, the young lady was not Albertine but Morel, and he confirmed, later on, the accuracy of my interpretation by the expressions he employed when he begged that there might be no more such conversations in front of Morel. "You know," he said to me, speaking of the violinist, "he's not at all what you might suppose, he's a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved." One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet "serious" of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1088

Proust reveals more of the Baron's complicated relationship with his young lover Morel, and, for that matter, with his own sexuality.  M. de Charlus refers to Morel as "a very decent boy who has always been very serious and well-behaved."  As I'm reading it the use of the word "boy" is less jarring than the words "decent" and "well-behaved."  We've been discussing the Baron's attempt, either consciously or unconsciously, to isolate himself from his own actions and desires, to praise its expressions (or at least its perceived expressions) in the arts, while also treating it almost as an inert thing separate from his own experience.  To be fair, he was living in a very different age where being "outed" had tremendous implications, but, also, he was, in his way, being more open to his closest friends.  Proust also adds this observation: "One sensed from these words that M. de Charlus regarded sexual inversion as a danger as menacing to young men as prostitution is to women, and that if he employed the epithet "serious" of Morel it was in the sense that it has when applied to a young shop-girl."  Now, is this part of the same conscious or unconscious effort to distance himself from his own desire, or does he truly love Morel and feels some societally-engineered shame for his actions?