The role of the inverts was to show their abnormality, of the Jews to represent black magic (‘necromancy’), of the artists to manifest another form of supranatural and superhuman contact, of the aristocrats to show that they were not like ordinary (‘bourgeois’) people. Despite their clannishness, it is true, as Proust observed, that ‘save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus,’ all these newcomers shunned intercourse with their own kind.
