In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [53]
which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. Before I had made my first Communion, right-minded ladies had had the stupefying experience of meeting an elegant Jewess while paying a social call. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a “change of criterion.” The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its coloured lozenges. Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself, went down, and various obscure nationalists rose to take its place. The most brilliant salon in Paris was that of an ultra-Catholic Austrian prince. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany, the pattern of the kaleidoscope would have taken a turn in the other direction. The Jews having shown, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots, would have kept their position, and no one would any longer have cared to go, or even to admit that he had ever gone any longer to the Austrian prince’s. None of this alters the fact, however, that whenever society is momentarily stationary, the people who live in it imagine that no further change will occur, just as, in spite of having witnessed the birth of the telephone, they decline to believe in the aeroplane. Meanwhile the philosophers of journalism are at work castigating the preceding epoch, and not only the kind of pleasures in which it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity. The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been “great changes.” At the time when I went to Mme Swann’s the Dreyfus storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were extremely powerful—none more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife, Lady Israels, was Swann’s aunt. She herself had no intimate connections as distinguished as those of her nephew, who, since he did not care for her, had never much cultivated her society, although he was presumed to be her heir. But she was the only one of Swann’s relations who had any idea of his social position, the others having always remained in the state of ignorance, in that respect, which had long been our own. When one of the members of a family emigrates into high society—which to him appears a feat without parallel until after the lapse of a decade he observes that it has been performed in other ways and for different reasons by more than one young man whom he knew as a boy—he draws round about himself a zone of shadow, a terra incognita, which is clearly visible in its minutest details to all those who inhabit it but is darkest night, pure nothingness, to those who do not penetrate it but touch its fringe without the least suspicion of its existence in their midst. There being no news agency to furnish Swann’s cousins with intelligence of the people with whom he consorted, it was (before his appalling marriage, of course) with a smile of condescension that they would tell one another over family dinner-tables that they had spent a “virtuous” Sunday in going to see “cousin Charles,” whom (regarding him as a poor relation who was inclined to envy their prosperity) they used wittily to name, playing upon the title of Balzac’s novel, “Le Cousin Bête.” Lady Israels, however, knew exactly who the people were who lavished upon Swann a friendship of which she was frankly jealous. Her husband’s family, which was roughly the equivalent of the Rothschilds, had for several generations managed the affairs of the Orléans princes. Lady Israels, being immensely rich, exercised a wide influence, and had employed it so as to ensure that no one whom she knew should be “at home” to Odette. One alone had disobeyed her, in secret,