particularly the homosexual identity, is the author's preoccupation. For the reason that the issue is treated continually and with seriousness, it must also be inferred that Proust felt it somehow fundamental to and problematic in human existence. Proust connects the aesthetic sensibility directly to ambiguous sexuality in The Captive, remarking on the nexus of homosexuality and refined aesthetic sensibility: "It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, shameful, execrated, that is the only true form, the only form that corresponds in one and the same person to an intensification of the intellectual qualities. One is dismayed at the relationship that can exist between these and a person's bodily attributes when one thinks of the tiny dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of the sense, that explains why the world of poets and musicians, so firmly barred against the Duc de Guermantes [a Jew], opens its portals to M. de Charlus" (Proust, The Captive 205). Although the element of inverted sexuality is decisive for the narrative frame and details, and although Proust's narrator declares his intent to "study them ["Sodomites"] with greater thoroughness in the course of the following pages" (Cities 654), to call Remembrance of Things Past exclusively the psychological equivalent of Proust's "coming-out" would be an overstatement. For one thing, Proust's first-person narrator putatively prefers women lovers, particularly as the series draws to a close. Additionally, it is really all experience of fellow men and women that Proust/Marcel eventually takes as his province; in Time Regained, Proust/Marcel declares the whole of his social and emotional environment as his subject, settling on "the idea that even the people who were once most dear to the writer have in the long run done no more than pose for him like models for a painter" (Proust, Time Regained 941). The result is an epic in the form of a hi...