Post-War Trends War, as always, checked the flow of fiction on any exotic themes. But Marcel Proust in his invalid’s ivory tower was steadily working on _À La Recherche du Temps Perdu_, which emerged intermittently from 1918 to 1926. (_Swann’s Way_ had appeared in 1913, but it and _The Guermantes Way_ are least pertinent to the present study, variance in the latter being confined to the male liaisons of the Baron Charlus.) One of the major factors in Proust’s long narrative is the lesbianism of its narrator’s mistress, Albertine. This is strongly foreshadowed in _Within a Budding Grove_; its development provides much of the narrative suspense in _The Captive_, and it reaches a climax in _The Sweet Cheat Gone_. Proust weaves the lesbian strand skillfully through his complex but controlled pattern. A sadistic episode between Mlle Vintueil and a friend figures briefly in the Combray-childhood section of Marcel’s history (which in the completed cycle precedes _Swann’s Way_), but this ties into the later pattern when Marcel learns that Albertine had, during adolescence, been associated with this pair of women.[13] Then comes Marcel’s obsession with the group of bold and athletic girls at the seaside resort of Balbec and his final fixation upon Albertine who was one of them;[14] his temporary separation from her while he is absorbed with the Duchesse de Guermantes and his military cousin, Robert; his later living with Albertine alone in the family town house and attempting to cut her off from all her previous feminine associates save the trusted Andrée,[15] whom he later ironically discovers to have been her lover;[16] and his final awareness that even his first love, Gilberte Swann, was associated with a nameless girl transvestist whom he had imagined to be a boy; and that Gilberte had also known Albertine’s circle.[17]