The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [14]
Robert de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, whose uncles are the Duc de Guermantes and the Baron de Charlus, and whose father, the Comte de Marsantes, was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, is a pivotal figure in the Search’s social drama as a character who challenges conventions. His interest in socialism and in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) reflects prominent currents of thought of the period but is quite at odds with his privileged upbringing and social status. When the Duc de Guermantes hears of his nephew’s dreyfusard sympathies, his concern is redoubled by the thought that this radical point of view will lead to Saint-Loup being blackballed for election to the Jockey Club, belle époque Paris’s most exclusive gentlemen’s club. The Duc’s response is revealing: ‘I do claim to move with the times; but damn it all, when one goes by the name of Marquis de Saint-Loup one isn’t a Dreyfusard’ (G, 268; 926). Proust here underlines the absurdity of the partisanal divisions by which French society was riven during the Dreyfus Affair.
Given the prolonged nature of the Affair it was common for individuals to change sides as events unfolded. Proclaiming one’s allegiance to one or other camp was a means of gaining access to certain salons or social circles that would otherwise remain closed. Such turns of the social kaleidoscope (this is a preferred image of Proust’s for the realignments and reconfigurations of the people and places of the social world) are traced in the Search, scrutinized for what they reveal about the laws – and the vicissitudes – of human behaviour.
The Narrator’s grandfather’s treatment of Bloch in ‘Combray’ (SW, 107–8; 80–1) illustrates the anti-Semitism that was not uncommon in French society before the time of the Affair and was fomented by anti-dreyfusard agitators as it developed. Édouard Drumont had published the best-selling anti-Semitic tract La France juive [Jewish France] in 1886, which blamed the country’s ills on the Jews; he formed the French Anti-Semitic League in 1889, which had its own newspaper La Libre Parole. Religious and racial tensions, however, were not the only ones that rendered unsteady the social edifice of the Third Republic. Perhaps more complex were the rifts between the different social castes.
Saint-Loup in his military role is used by Proust further to illustrate the manifold social morphology of the period. The Narrator’s friend descends from a line of ancient nobility traceable back centuries. As a non-commissioned officer Saint-Loup answers to Captain – the Prince – de Borodino. One might fairly expect these men, a marquis and a prince, to share some common ground. Proust, however, lays bare the fine distinctions between Saint-Loup’s ancien régime nobility and Borodino’s more recent Napoleonic title. Saint-Loup’s attitude towards the lower classes is one of ‘patronising affability’: he is casually cordial with them, condescendingly believing that this might flatter them. The individuals Saint-Loup treats in this way, by contrast, are addressed by Borodino ‘with a majestic affability, in which a reserve full of grandeur tempered the smiling good-fellowship that came naturally to him, in a tone marked at once by a genuine kindliness and a stiffness deliberately assumed’ (G, 144, trans. mod.; 845–6). Borodino prefers the company of common men, knowing that the middle class ‘was the great reservoir from which the first Emperor had chosen his marshals and his nobles’ (G, 144–5; 846), yet he keeps them at a greater distance than does Saint-Loup, on whom Borodino looks down ‘from the height of his Imperial grandeur’ (G, 143; 845), taking the scion of old nobility for an inferior who merely thinks himself superior. Snobbishness is found at all levels of society and, as Proust shows, it can take many unexpected forms.
The Search, however, is far from exclusively devoted to high society. Balbec, the thriving (fictional) seaside resort of which so many in reality blossomed on the Normandy coast at