How Proust Can Change Your Life

Proust’s narrator experiences a similar trajectory of hope and disappointment. He begins by being drawn to the aura of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, picturing them as belonging to a superior race infused with the poetry of their ancient name, dating back to the earliest, most noble families of France, and a time so distant that not even the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres were yet built. He imagines the Guermantes wrapped in the mystery of the Merovingian age; they make him think of forest hunting scenes in medieval tapestries, and seem to be made of a substance unlike that of other humans, existing like figures in a stained-glass window. He dreams of how exquisite it would be to spend the day with the Duchesse fishing for trout in her sumptuous ducal park, filled with flowers, rivulets, and fountains.

Then he has a chance to meet the Guermantes, and the image shatters. Far from being made of a substance different from that of other humans, the Guermantes are much like anyone else, only with less developed tastes and opinions. The Duc is a coarse, cruel, vulgar man; his wife is keener to be sharp and witty than sincere; and the guests at their table, whom he had previously imagined to be like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle, are interested only in gossiping and exchanging trivialities.

Such disastrous encounters with aristocrats might encourage us to give up on our search for so-called eminent figures, who only turn out to be vulgar drones when we meet them. The snobbish longing to associate with those of superior rank should, it seems, be abandoned in favor of a gracious accommodation to our lot.

Yet there may be a different conclusion to be drawn. Rather than ceasing to discriminate between people altogether, we may simply have to become better at doing so. The image of a refined aristocracy is not false, it is merely dangerously uncomplicated. There are of course superior people at large in the world, but it is optimistic to assume that they could be so conveniently located on the basis of their surname. It is this the snob refuses to believe, trusting instead in the existence of watertight classes whose members unfailingly display certain qualities. Though a few aristocrats can match expectations, a great many more will have the winning qualities of the Duc de Guermantes, for the category of “aristocracy” is simply too crude a net to pick up something as unpredictably allocated as virtue or refinement. There may be someone worthy of the expectations that the narrator has harbored of the Duc de Guermantes, but this person might well appear in the unexpected guise of an electrician, cook, or lawyer.

It is this unexpectedness that Proust eventually recognized. Late in life, when a certain Madame Sert wrote and bluntly asked him whether he was a snob, he replied:

If, amongst the very rare friends who out of habit continue to come and ask for news of me, there still passes now and then, a duke or a prince, they are largely made up for by other friends, one of whom is a valet and the other a driver.… It’s hard to choose between them. Valets are more educated than dukes, and speak a nicer French, but they are more fastidious about etiquette and less simple, more susceptible. At the end of the day, one can’t choose between them. The driver has more class

.

The scenario may have been exaggerated for Madame Sert, but the moral was clear: that qualities like education or an ability to express oneself well did not follow simple paths, and that one could not therefore evaluate people on the basis of conspicuous categories. Just as Chardin had illustrated to the sad young man that beauty did not always lie in obvious places, so too the valet who spoke lovely French served to remind Proust (or perhaps just Madame Sert) that refinement was not conveniently tethered to its image.