Made from the Stuff of Saints: Chateaubriand's Rene and Custine's Search for a Homosexual Identity

Putting homosexuality back into its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored, within which it has only been allowed an encrypted and ciphered status, or out of which it has been abstracted, is a literary criticism in the fullest sense.

--James Creech

Reviewing Anka Muhlstein's Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine, Robert Darnton, the eminent American historian of the French Revolution, has recently commented that the existence in Paris in the 1830s of "a homosexual ménage established at the pinnacle of high society was an extraordinary phenomenon." ¹ Given its contexts and development, it was indeed. Darnton's estimate of the marquis's achievement exudes wonderment at every turn: for not only was Custine's salon a milestone in the history of homosexuality, but it was also "an extraordinary phenomenon" in view of Parisian high society in the early nineteenth century. That two men living domestically as if married--Custine and his lover, the Englishman Edward Saint-Barbe (or Edouard de Sainte-Barbe, as he became known)--should have filled their hotel de ville with the illuminati of the day was genuinely remarkable. As Darnton notes, "They gave dinner parties, concerts, poetry readings, and receptions, where aristocrats rubbed shoulders with the most famous figures of the Romantic era: Chopin, Berlioz, Balzac, Musset, Lamartine, Hugo, Stendhal, Heine, Sand, Gautier" (16). Darnton remains amazed at the achievement, enacted long before Oscar Wilde convened his secret nocturnal soirées with the Cleveland Street boys and Gide and Proust disguised their proclivities in the sexually transformed Paris of the 1890s, where homosexuality had been medicalized and was increasingly criminalized. Rather bemused, the detective in Darnton asks, "How did they do it?" Darnton is quick to follow with the riposte that Muhlstein, a nonprofessional historian, attributes their success to two factors: "Custine's wealth and his aristocratic indifference to social conventions" (16). We agree that both were essential. Personal wealth and aristocratic confidence fit the facts of the public Custine; they do not, however, explain the psychological private figure and his curious development in the world of his youth and adolescence from 1790 forward, when his sexual identity was formed. ² Nineteenth-century France and Italy were permeated with wealthy homosexual aristocrats unprepared to flout social convention in this way and incapable of establishing any type of "ménage . . . at the pinnacle of high society." In this essay we attempt first to identify and then to explain some crucial elements in the psychological Custine.

This aim leads to wider concerns. To put "homosexuality back into its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored," in James Creech's words, is an important and exciting task. ³ Yet where the censorship has been most effective, there are almost no obvious texts at all. ⁴ Jean-Paul Aron and Roger Kempf suggest that in nineteenth-century France there were three sorts of homosexual discourse: "a common discourse, scarcely spoken; a scientific discourse which is systematized only during the Second Empire; and a literary discourse which is applied to sapphism but more or less freezes over on the subject of male homosexuality." ⁵ It was illegal to engage in homosexual acts that bore the character of a "public outrage to decency," and harsh penalties were enforced. ⁶ The desire to deny the reality of same-sex physical and genital relations, however, meant that legal proceedings were avoided where possible, especially if they were likely to attract particular attention. On 19 July 1822, for instance, the unfortunate Percy Jocelyn, bishop of Clogher (1764-1843), was caught having sex with a soldier in a London pub. ⁷ The bishop was released on bail and swiftly left the country to avoid trial. One week later...