Two young men stand on the threshold of an all-male brothel, unable to bring themselves to enter. Unable to decide, perhaps, if they can trust each other's complicity enough to risk the adventure together. "Quoi! Apres tout on s'en fiche?" says one of the young men, over and over, apparently addressing some aspect of their situation at the threshold. The "quoi" itself is given an exclamation point rather than a question mark; it seems unable to be clearly interrogative, seems more of a simple sound-expressive of the need for there not to be silence, perhaps the need to perpetuate the possibility of entering. And then there is the half-interrogative sentence: "Apres tout on s'en fiche?" After all, what does it matter? What does it matter whether or not we go in? What does it matter what happens if we do go in? What does it matter if you are not as good a friend as I think you are? What do I know about what matters to you or to me? What does it matter that I can't quite say I want to have sex with a man? This scene from Le Temps retrouve seems somehow paradigmatic of the difficulty of queer sexual expression in Proust. The narrator of the Recherche apparently understands as much, and launches into an intriguing analysis of what is going on here: