Proust Moment, April 24, 2003

The Company One Keeps

Marcel's grandmother visits the home of Mme. de Villeparisis, and learns that she knows Swann.

Marcel's grandmother can barely bring herself to visit a woman of a higher social station; "because of our caste theory, she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in spite of several common interests." She is suitably impressed not only with her, but with the tailor and his daughter who live the courtyard, "For in her eyes distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position." When she come home and mentions to the the great-aunt that the madame is friendly with Swann, that shallow woman is horrified: "My dear, he is so common!"

Looking up to people of elevated social position is not unlike the way many people regard celebrity: people want their stars a certain elevated way, or else they wouldn't be stars.

"Now, the effect of that remark about Swann had been, not to raise him in my great-aunt's estimation, but to lower Mme. de Villeparisis. It appeared that the deference which, on my grandmother's authority, we owed to Mme. de Villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard, and that she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of Swann's existence and in allowing members of her family to associate with him. `How should she know Swann? A lady who, you always made out, was related to Marshal Mac-Mahon!' This view of Swann's social atmosphere which prevailed in my family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst class, you might almost say a 'fast' woman, whom, to do him justice, he never attempted to introduce to us, for he continued to come to us alone, though he came more and more seldom; but from whom they thought they could establish, on the assumption that he had found her there, the circle, unknown to them, in which he ordinarily moved."

--"Overture," Swann's Way

The woman is Odette; the circle is a fashionable literary salon lorded over by a horrendous pair of nouveaux-riche snobs, the Verdurins. This is another echo of the coming tragedy that is "Swann in Love," when Charles will fall in love with a beautiful woman with whom he has nothing in common, a woman who will make a fool of him and leave him to mourn that he had wasted the best years of his life in love with a woman "who was not in my style."