In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [106]
such as level-headedness and moderation, which Mme de Villeparisis chiefly extolled were not especially exalting; but in order to describe moderation in an entirely convincing way, moderation will not suffice, and some of the qualities of authorship which presuppose a quite immoderate exaltation are required. I had remarked at Balbec that the genius of certain great artists was completely unintelligible to Mme de Villeparisis, and that all she could do was to make delicate fun of them and to express her incomprehension in a graceful and witty form. But this wit and grace, in the degree to which they were developed in her, became themselves—on another plane, and even though they were employed to belittle the noblest masterpieces—true artistic qualities. Now the effect of such qualities on any social position is a morbid activity of the kind which doctors call elective, and so disintegrating that the most firmly established can hardly resist it for any length of time. What artists call intelligence seems pure presumption to the fashionable world which, incapable of adopting the angle of vision from which they, the artists, judge things, incapable of understanding the particular attraction to which they yield when they choose an expression or draw a parallel, feel in their company an exhaustion, an irritation, from which antipathy rapidly springs. And yet in her conversation, and the same may be said of the Memoirs which she afterwards published, Mme de Villeparisis showed nothing but a sort of graciousness that was eminently social. Having passed by great works without considering them deeply, sometimes without even noticing them, she had retained from the period in which she had lived, and which indeed she described with great aptness and charm, little but the most trivial things it had had to offer. But a piece of writing, even if it treats exclusively of subjects that are not intellectual, is still a work of the intelligence, and to give a consummate impression of frivolity in a book, or in a talk which is not dissimilar, requires a touch of seriousness which a purely frivolous person would be incapable of. In a certain book of memoirs written by a woman and regarded as a masterpiece, such and such a sentence that people quote as a model of airy grace has always made me suspect that, in order to arrive at such a degree of lightness, the author must once have been imbued with a rather weighty learning, a forbidding culture, and that as a girl she probably appeared to her friends an insufferable bluestocking. And between certain literary qualities and lack of social success the connexion is so inevitable that when we open Mme de Villeparisis’s Memoirs today, on any page an apt epithet, a sequence of metaphors will suffice to enable the reader to reconstruct the deep but icy bow which must have been bestowed on the old Marquise on the staircase of an embassy by a snob such as Mme Leroi, who may perhaps have left a card on her when she went to call on the Guermantes, but never set foot in her house for fear of losing caste among all the doctors’ or solicitors’ wives whom she would find there. A bluestocking Mme de Villeparisis had perhaps been in her earliest youth, and, intoxicated with her learning, had perhaps been unable to resist applying to people in society, less intelligent and less educated than herself, those cutting taunts which the injured party never forgets.
Moreover, talent is not a separate appendage which can be artificially attached to those qualities which make for social success, in order to create from the whole what people in society call a “complete woman.” It is the living product of a certain moral conformation from which as a rule many qualities are lacking and in which there predominates a sensibility of which other manifestations not discernible in a book may make themselves fairly acutely felt in the course of a life: certain curiosities for instance, certain whims, the desire to go to this place or that for one’s own amusement and not with a view to the extension, the maintenance or even the mere