The man who hates himself: Baron de Charlus, in Search of Lost Time

About 2/3rds of the way through "in the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower," the second volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Proust introduces probably the strangest character in the whole work, Baron de Charlus - he may have been mentioned or cited earlier, but this is the narrator's first encounter with the Baron. When introduced, he stares at the narrator (M.) repeatedly as M. walks near the Hotel-Grand in Balbec-Plage, and when they're introduced he pointedly and completely ignores M., then steps over to him and privately invites him and his grandmother to join him (and Mme de Villeparsis, his relative) for tea. When M. later joins the tea gathering, Charlus again ignores him, finally offering him his hand in a weird two-finger handshake, and implies that M. had never been invited - and when M. calls him on this, Charlus ignores M. What to make of this? First, Charlus is one of those self-centered noblemen (so-called) who say that rank and class means nothing to them - and the say it so often that obviously it means everything. Second, he has, M. learns from his friend St. Loup, cultivated a reputation as a "lady's man," and on one occasion had a guy severely beaten for making a pass at him (he's supposedly very handsome). Anyone will pick up that his staring at M. and privately inviting him to tea is a come-on, and we lean later in the work that Charlus is homosexual (or bisexual) - so there's clearly an element here of self-hatred (he becomes more open about his sexuality late in the series) - and also a bit of Proust's self-hatred or fear of his own identity, as his narrator, so closely modeled on Proust, resembles P. in everything except sexual orientation. Charlus is such a hateful person, cruel to everyone, because, first of all, he can get away with it since he's rich and title, and second because he hates himself or at least some aspect of himself.