THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
69
man's attitude toward his shoes: "My grandfather often used to say
that he judged a man by his shoes. Perhaps he was saying that our
external effect is the only one most people see and judge us by."
This left me thunderstruck. For I could not help but remember the
heartbreaking scene in Marcel Proust's great novel when Swann goes
with
news to see his intimate friends, the Duc and Duchesse de
Guermantes, who love him very much; his news is that he is dying.
Since they are extremely fond of him, his death is hardly a matter
of indifference to them. But these supreme products of an aristocracy
-who would, moreover, consider Mr. Aldridge's gentle folk of the
deep South and Boston as
parvenus
and
arrivistes-can
think of
nothing to say!6 Until after much squirming, the Duke, overwhelmed
with anxiety because his wife is wearing the wrong shoes for the din–
ner they are going to, hustles her away to get the right ones.
The passage is, of course, famous and has been cited many
times. Edmund Wilson, in
Axel's Castle,
summing up Proust's atti–
tude as a whole, says after remarking upon this and two other like
episodes: "In each case, Proust has destroyed, and destroyed with
ferocity, the social hierarchy he has just been expounding. Its values,
he tells us, are an imposture; pretending to honor and distinction, it
accepts all that is vulgar and base; its pride is nothing nobler than
the instinct it shares with the woman who keeps the toilet and the
elevator boy's sister to spit upon the person whom we happen to have
at a disadvantage. And whatever the social world may say to the
contrary, it either ignores or seeks to ignore those few impulses toward
justice and beauty which make men admirable."
No matter what the social world may say! And no matter what
literary critics may say! Mr. Trilling in his essay also refers to this
pasiage; just after he has said that "it does not matter in what sense
the word manners is taken" (but it does matter very much), he
writes that "The Duchesse de Guermantes unable to delay her
departure for the dinner party to receive properly from her friend
Swann the news that he is dying but able to change the black
slippers her husband objects to; Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller;
Priam and Achilles- they exist by reason of their observed man–
ners. So true is this, indeed, so creative is the novelist's awareness of
6 They invented the words. The manners in Proust are never superior to
those of Huck Finn and Jim, or Ishmael and Queequeg, at least in my opinion.
