My Years With Proust - Day 672

   Presently I was taken up to Room 43, but it was so unpleasantly stuffy and my curiosity was so great that, having drunk my cassis, I started to go downstairs again, then, changing my mind, turned round and went up past the door of Room 43 to the top of the building.  Suddenly from a room situated by itself at the end of the corridor, I thought I heard stifled groans.  I walked rapidly towards the sounds and put my ear to the door.  "I beseech you, mercy, have pity, untie me, don't beat me so hard," said a voice.  "I kiss your feet, I abase myself, I promise not to offend again.  Have pity on me." "No, you filthy brute," replied another voice, "and if yo yell and drag yourself about on your knees like that, you'll be tied to the bed, no mercy for you," and I heard the noise of the crack of a whip, which I guessed to be reinforced with nails, for it was followed by cries of pain.  At this moment I noticed that there was a small oval window opening from the room on to the corridor and that the curtain had not been drawn across it; stealthily in the darkness I crept as far as this window and there in the room, chained to a bed like Prometheus to his rock, receiving the blows that Maurice rained upon him with a whip which was in fact studded with nails, I saw, with blood already flowing form him and covered with bruises which proved that the chastisement was not taking place for the first time - I saw before me M. de Charlus.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 843

After Marcel left M. de Charlus he ends up in a dingy hotel where he goes to rest, eat and drink something, before heading home during the darkness, made worse by a light-out because of the war.  And just when the story of M. de Charlus can't seem to get stranger, well, it gets stranger.  You can see why editors, and many readers, didn't really no what to make of Remembrance of Things Past, and also why so many people think the age of the modern novel starts with Proust's masterpiece.  Of course, as I've opined, my theory is that most people's entire experience with the novel is Swann's Way, so they may have never made it to this, at the time, disturbing scene 3100 pages in.  Now, the question is why is Proust dog-piling on the Baron once again, or, for that matter, dog-piling on homosexuals again?  Now, of course, the symbolism works well because M. de Charlus has been punishing himself for some time, but one wonders if Proust is using the Baron's punishment here as a metaphor for his own self-loathing (if, in fact, he had any; again, I'll go read a detailed biography of Proust before the next stage of my project).