Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [17]
Again and again Proust would suffer from his reputation as a socialite, a mondain. It was certainly true that most of his friends as a young adult (and there were dozens of them) were rich or titled or talented or all three, and that very few belonged to the social milieu into which he had been born. And it was certainly true he gave the impression of being snobbish. Jean Cocteau wrote, “Proust doesn’t hesitate to judge society people and accuse them of stupidity. He finds them stupid but superior, which is the very definition of snobbism.” But, as Proust’s writings demonstrate, when he was young and naive a noble name was for him a piece of living, breathing, walking, talking history, a modern incarnation of a medieval legend. The first time the Narrator sees the duchesse de Guermantes, for instance, she is kneeling in the local Combray church in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad, reserved for members of her family: “My disappointment was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of Madame de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a stained-glass window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had it occurred to me that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Madame Sazerat. . . .” Later, when he is no longer so fascinated by her, he comes to enjoy her way of conversing, by turns earthy and refined, witty and ceremonial—a true reliquary of authentic French. And the Narrator is never able to rid himself entirely of his poetic, heraldic appreciation of the lady: “I knew quite well that to a number of intelligent people she was merely a lady like any other, the name duchesse de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there are no longer any duchies or principalities; but I had adopted a different point of view in my manner of enjoying people and places. This lady in furs braving the bad weather seemed to me to carry with her all the castles of the territories of which she was duchess, princess, viscountess, as the figures carved over a portal hold in their hands the cathedral they have built or the city they have defended.”
Certainly Proust may have started out as a snob, but he ended up as the most penetrating critic of snobbism who ever lived. He showed how empty are its victories, how evanescent its conquests. More particularly, he demonstrated the vanity and cruelty and insecurity and affectedness—and snobbishness!—of even the most sought-after members of society. Many of the originals for his characters recognized how damning his portraits were. The comtesse de Chévigné, one of the models for the duchesse de Guermantes, was so furious when she skimmed The Guermantes Way that she broke off twenty-five years’ worth of friendship and burned Proust’s many letters; to destroy a writer’s writing is surely the most wounding revenge.
The society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, for whom Proust posed in 1892, has left us an equally unforgettable verbal portrait of someone who as a youngster would frighten his playmates by seizing them by the hand and announcing his need to possess them with all the force of a tyrant: “Already he pretended to attribute sublime virtues to one friend or another, although in his deepest heart he judged people at their true value. A Proust can only be someone isolated—is that the price genius must pay? We feel we must keep