PROUST'S SOCIETY
691
questions. Why, for example, does Marcel only fall in love with
Albertine when Doctor Cottard points out to him that, while
dancing with another girl, she is rubbing her breasts against
those of her partner? And why does Marcel's mother, who is
otherwise represented as a woman of the strictest Victorian
morality, tolerate the presence of Albertine in her apartment at
night? Why is almost every male character in the book, other
than the narrator, an actual or reputed homosexual? A perspica–
cious reader, who knew nothing of Proust's personal life, would
probably recognize in the author (as the author recognizes in
Charlus) the tendency of the homosexual to attribute his tastes
to others. But what of the other two misrepresentations? Would
the same perspicacious reader become aware that the author was
half
Jewish and a man who had spent much of his life assidu–
ously cultivating a titled, anti-semitic aristocracy? It seems less
likely.
What difference does it make? Not much, surely, in an ap–
preciation of the work as a whole. But it seems to me that there
are certain exaggerations in Proust's picture of the social world
that stem directly from his confusion of his snobbishness with
his love of history and art, and that an analysis of these exag–
gerations may be of assistance to the reader who, like myself,
has speculated about them.
I note at the outset that the characters of
A la Recherche
du
Temps Perdu
are constantly referring to Saint-Simon.
Marcel's grandfather is as familiar with everything concerning
the bourgeoisie of Combray as was Saint-Simon's Prince de
Conti with the family tree of the court. Swann, in the torments
of his jealousy, emigrates to "those few and distant parts of
himself which had remained almost foreign to
his
love and to
his pain," by reading about court life in Saint-Simon. In
his
first
appearance in the novel he refers to Saint-Simon's volume · on
the mission to Spain. The relationship of Leonie and her maid,
Fran~oise,
is described as a counterpart
to
the relationship be–
tween king and courtiers at Versailles, and the perfect manners,
