PROUST ' S SOCIETY
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of pedigree, the case is altered, pedigree alone counts. He says
of the Duc de Luynes: "I ask you;-M. Alberti, who does not
emerge from the mire until Louis XIII. What can it matter
to us that favoritism at court allowed them to pick up duke–
doms to which they have no right?" Small wonder that Madame
Verdurin could not fathom the standards by which he selected
her guests for Morel's recital.
Only by conceding the arbitrariness of those on top and
by intuitively sensing the bonds of congeniality that hold them
together can the observer hope to appreciate the different grada–
tions in position. He must also be prepared for the bad memory
of society and its habit of judging its own history by the same
erroneous standards of its most misguided student. Take, in
Du Cote de Chez Guermantes,
the contrasted positions of
Madame Leroi and the Marquise de Villeparisis. Madame
Leroi, the daughter of "rich timber people," has learned to
copy exactly the colors of the Guermantes and the Courvoisiers
and has penetrated so far into the inner citadel that only a
knowledgeable minority is even aware of her existence. Madame
de Villeparisis, on the other hand, though a member of the
Guermantes family and once treated "like a daughter" by
Queen Marie Amelie, has fallen from the first rank because of
the irregularity of her life. Her parties seem smart enough to
the uninitiated, because her family still attend them, as do many
famous artists and men of letters, and because the talk is good.
Madame de Villeparisis knows how to make her lions roar,
while Madame Leroi, in the tradition of the truly fashionable,
seats them at the card table. But it nevertheless remains the
sad law of the social world that Madame de Villeparisis would
gladly leave her lions to roar alone for the opportunity of
sitting at the least of those card tables. Only after the death of
both women will their fortunes be reversed. Posterity will judge
Madame de Villeparisis a great social leader, because of the
glittering names strewn through the pages of her memoirs,
memoirs that Madame Leroi would never have stooped to
