LOUIS AUCHINCLO$$
Bourbons, traced with them branches of the most graceful design
and an everchanging
£0101'.
.
Relating a title..to the :past
.is
simply .projecting snobbish–
neSs back into history. Proust was as impressed by a dead duke
as by a live one. His characters have streams of consciousness
that ceaselessly gurgle over the damp pebbles of rank. The young
Madame de Cambremer has married her husband in order to
b¢..
abk
to
refer to her mother-in-Iaw's brother by the family
abbreviation: "Man oncle de Ch'nouville." Madame de Ville–
parisis speaks with affected amusement but basic veneration of
the convent where her great-aunts were abbesses, which excluded
the daughters of the King of France because they were des–
cended from the Medici. Her nephew, the Prince de Guermantes,
niakes 'a scene at every dinner party when he
is
not given the
seat to' which· he would have been entitled under Louis
XIV.
And Charlus, of course, excels them all, speaking of his relatives
who are described in Saint-Simon's memoirs as if they were con–
temporaries: "We took precedence over all foreign princes. The
Due de Bourgogne, having come to us with ushers with raised
wands, we obtained the King's authority to have them lowered."
Yet in contrast to the CQurvoisiers, a related but rival clan, the
Guermantes have a reputation of modernity and liberalness! The
latter, whom we meet only fleetingly, are the family who are
supposed to be the
real
conservatives in questions of precedence
and pedigree.
I
am aware that there were, and still are, persons
as :
dbs<:ssed with these questions as Charlus himself, but to
postulate a whole Society of them seems to approach the field
of caricature.
. And, .finally, Proust's picture of the society of the Fau–
bourg St. Germain is too lush, too rich. No matter how pains–
takingly he underlines the dullness, the selfishness, and- the
fatv.ity of the Guermantes set, they remain to the end still
invested with much of the glamor in which
his
imagination
has clothed them. The beauty of their women, the romance
of
