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.
Simple images are nevertheless attractive in their lack of ambiguity. Before he saw Chardin’s paintings, the sad young man could at least believe that all bourgeois interiors were inferior to palaces, and could therefore make a simple equation between palaces and happiness. Before meeting aristocrats, Proust could at least trust in the existence of an entire class of superior beings, and could equate meeting them with acquiring a fulfilled social life. How much more difficult to factor in sumptuous bourgeois kitchens, boring princes, and drivers with more class than dukes. Simple images provide certainties; for instance, they assure us that financial expenditure is a guarantor of enjoyment.
One sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, but who become convinced that they are—and also convinced of the rare quality of their wholly detached tastes—when they have agreed to pay a hundred francs a day for a room in a hotel which will enable them to enjoy this sight and sound
.
Similarly, there are people who are doubtful whether someone is intelligent, but who rapidly become convinced that they are once they see them fit the dominant image of an intelligent person and learn of their formal education, factual knowledge, and university degree.
Such people would have had no difficulty determining that Proust’s maid was an idiot. She thought that Napoleon and Bonaparte were two different people, and refused to believe Proust for a week when he suggested otherwise. But Proust knew she was brilliant (“I’ve never managed to teach her to spell, and she has never had the patience to read even half a page of my book, but she is full of extraordinary gifts”). This isn’t to propose an equally, if more perversely, snobbish argument that education has no value, and that the importance of European history from Campo Formio to the battle of Waterloo is the result of a sinister academic conspiracy, but rather that an ability to identify emperors and spell aproximately is not in itself enough to establish the existence of something as hard to define as intelligence.
Albertine has never taken an art history course. One summer afternoon in Proust’s novel, she is sitting on a hotel terrace in Balbec talking to Madame de Cambremer, her daughter-in-law, a barrister friend of theirs, and the narrator. Suddenly, out at sea, a group of gulls who have been floating on top of the water take off noisily.
“I love them; I saw them in Amsterdam,” says Albertine. “They smell of the sea, they come and sniff the salt air even through the paving stones.”
“Ah, so you’ve been to Holland. Do you know the Vermeers?” asks Madame de Cambremer. Albertine replies that unfortunately she doesn’t know them, at which point Proust quietly shares with us Albertine’s even more unfortunate belief that these Vermeers are a group of Dutch people, not canvases in the Rijksmuseum.
Luckily, the lacuna in her knowledge of art history goes by undetected, though one can imagine Madame de Cambremer’s horror had she discovered it. Nervous about her own ability to respond correctly to art, the external signs of artistic awareness take on a disproportionate significance for an art snob like Madame de Cambremer. Much as for the social snob, unable to judge others independently, a title or reputation becomes the only guide to eminence, so too for the art snob, information is ferociously clung to as a marker of artistic appreciation—though Albertine would only need to make another, culturally aware trip to Amsterdam in order to discover what she had missed. She might even appreciate Vermeer far more than Madame de Cambremer, for in her naïveté, there would at least be a potential for sincerity absent from de Cambremer’s exaggerated respect for art, which ironically ends up treating canvases far more like a family of Dutch burghers whom one would be privileged to meet.
The moral? That we shouldn’t deny the bread on the sideboard a place in our conception of beauty, that we should shoot the painter rather than the spring and blame memory rather than what is remembered, that we should restrain our expectations when introduced to a Comte de Salignac-Fénelon-de-Clermont-Tonnerre and avoid fixating on spelling mistakes and alternative histories of imperial France when meeting those less elaborately titled.
Q: Would Proust really be someone to consult for advice on romantic problems?
A: Perhaps—in spite of the evidence. He outlined his credentials in a letter to André Gide:
Incapable though I am of obtaining anything for myself, of sparing myself the least ill, I have been endowed (and it’s certainly my only gift) with the power to procure, very often, the happiness of others, to relieve them from pain. I have reconciled not only enemies, but lovers, I’ve cured invalids while being capable only of worsening my own illness, I’ve made idlers work while remaining idle myself.… The qualities (I tell you this quite unaffectedly
because in other respects I have a very poor opinion of myself) which give me these chances of success on behalf of other people are, together with a certain diplomacy, a capacity for self-forgetfulness and an exclusive concentration on my friends’ welfare, qualities which are not often met with in the same person.… I felt while I was writing my book that if Swann had known me and had been able to make use of me, I should have known how to bring Odette round to him
.
Q: Swann and Odette?
A: One shouldn’t necessarily equate the misfortunes of individual fictional characters with the author’s overall prognosis for human contentment. Trapped inside a novel, these unhappy characters would, after all, be the only ones unable to derive the therapeutic benefits of reading it.