PROUST'S SOCIETY
695
Conceding that Charlus is a bit insane, would not
his
inter–
locutor try to silence him, especially as she knows that poor
Madame de Saint-Euverte is overhearing all? And would
Madame de Saint-Euverte really fawn on the Baron after the
humiliation of hearing herself described as a cesspool?
In the second place, I think it questionable
if
people
in
society in Proust's day thought and talked quite so obsessively
about their social position. The members of the Guenilantes
family hold forth with amazing pedantry about their own gene–
alogy. At Marcel's first dinner at the Duchesse de Guermantes'
the company (though I admit to the Duchesse's disgust) turns
happily from gossip to settle down for the major part of the eve–
ning to the serious business of pedigree. It is pedigree, too, at
its
heaviest: "Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch
of the Ducs de
131
Rochefoucauld, my grandmother came from
the Ducs de Doudeauville," but Marcel, like
his
creator, is en–
tranced and cannot even respond to the questions of the Turkish
ambassadress for fear of missing any of the genealogies. To him,
a great name keeps in the full light of day the men and women
who bear it; one follows the course of their families, through
diaries and correspondence, back to the Middle Ages to recap–
ture a past in which "impenetrable night" would cloak the
origins of middle-class folk. But his aesthetic pleasure is even
greater than his historical:
The Prince d'Agrigente himself, as soon as I heard that his
mother had been a Damas, a granddaughter of the Duke of
Modena, was delivered, as from an unstable chemical alloy, from
the face and speech that prevented one from recognizing him, and
went to form with Damas and Modena, which themselves were
only titles, a combination infinitely more seductive. Each name
displaced by the attractions of another, with which I had
never suspected it of having any affinity, left the 'unalterable
posi–
tion which it had occupied in my brain, where familiarity had
dulled it, and speeding to join the Mortemarts, the Stuarts or the
