Some Best People

Revealing the Identity Between Marcel Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain and Main Street

FRANK MOORE COLBY

MARCEL PROUST, I believe, is an acknowledged expert in the social values of "best society" in France, and now that his books are appearing here in English I hope some one in authority will compare his best people with our own. Meanwhile I will attempt it, but before doing so I feel that I ought to lay my cards on the table, for Proust is right in saying that it takes a chic person to catch a chic person, and no one ought ever to write on this subject without confessing his relation to chic-ness. The habit of our critics when they write of social snobbery, social nuances, and the mondanities, of concealing some black and vitiating quality of private circumstance, such as the fact that the critic himself is a brakeman on the Long Island Railroad, or a professor of English at Yale, accounts in part for the terrible confusion of all such discussion in this country.

Cooks are far better indicators of social distinction than American critics because at least you know where the cooks stand themselves; whereas owing to the shamefacedness of our writers in this respect the usual book or essay on best society in this country is an equation full of unknown quantities.

Social self-definition is of course extremely difficult in this country, even with the best will in the world, but in my own class of society there is never a spirit of frankness. In my social set a callous middle-aged person will seem as embarrassed, when you question him on this subject, as a dog when you try to look him in the eye. This arises, I think, from an inner sense of being socially nondescript. In my social stratum educational advantage, travel, professional, literary, or artistic experience or attainment seem to have left no trace whatever on the unhewn granite of our social formation. If I scratch the most distinguished of my acquaintances, I find the hired men on my uncle's farm.

The Status of the Author

NONDESCRIPT, therefore, is about as near as I can come to exact social self-definition—nondescript, rather bad form, and with acquaintances only among the equally shapeless. By way of a negative confirmation of this self-rating, I may say that I have repeatedly tried to lose caste, just to see if I really had any, and in no case have my acquaintances noticed any difference afterwards. As Mrs. Edith Wharton, the poet Markham, and the late Professor Barrett Wendell might have put it, centuries of social inexperience have slanted back my brow. Hence all material serving as the basis of my social comparisons has been toilsomely gathered from society fiction and essays, newspapers, and the tales of social climbers and exiles. Nothing is here set down from the point of view of personal advantage. Personally I am a dowdy man.

As to the authenticity of Proust's best people, I have, to be sure, only hearsay to go upon and the intrinsic evidence of his novels, but it seems to me established. The central character who runs all through the series, identified with Proust himself by his commentators, is by his own showing on the fringe of best society in the first volume, well advanced in it in the third, and from there on square in the middle of it down to the close of the eighth volume, which is the last that I have read. By direct assertion and by a thousand inferences we are assured that these are not only truly chic people, but absolutely the only chic people of France, judged by an expert standard. For just as there are poets' poets, so there are the subtly or reconditely inner chic imponderable save to persons already endowed with a certain degree of chic-ness. Generally speaking this best society is not only unknown but invisible, having no more in common with brilliant society as known to press and public than it has with a colored Baptist congregation.

The Inner Invisible Chic

IN their crude confounding of such things as titles, wealth, honors, achievement, and reputation with the true criteria of social distinction, socially ambitious persons welter all their lives outside real society never knowing where it is and struggle for strange irrelevant social prizes, like plumbers competing for degrees in the order of Free Masons. Editors, presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors, conspicuous American visitors and like riff-raff would not be likely to know or to be known by the really fashionable. For one of the characteristics of the right kind of people is not even to be heard of by the wrong kind of people, chic-ness like the grace of God in Calvinistic circles, being undemonstrable by outer sign. The most exquisite man in all Paris, friend of the Prince of Wales, and intimate of the fourteen only really aristocratic families of France, was, according to Proust, regarded by his own relatives as quite unfashionable.

Now the hero of the Proust novels is from first to last a Levite in good standing, close to the family of the high priest, in this temple of chic-ness, and he details all matters of ritual and personnel with a minuteness that has added greatly to the animosity of commentators. If Proust does not really know from experience the who's who and what's what of these peculiar people, then he is the most incautious liar of his time. So far as I have heard no one has accused him of this false pretension, which would be about like saying that a seven-volume report of the Smithsonian Institution on the habits of the Ki-po Indians was invented by a man who had never met a Ki-po. I have heard Proust called a snob, but never an outsider, and vindictive as many are from their inability to comprehend him, they would certainly have called him both if they could have done so.

Proust's best people from the FaubourgSaint-Germain do not offer the contrast I had expected to the best people of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or for that matter of Patterson, Indianapolis, or Kansas City. Even certain atrocious groups over whom Mr. Sinclair Lewis is despairing for the future of this country are in many ways not unlike this flower of the French noblesse. In fact the deeper you get into the right set in the Faubourg Saint-Germain the pleasanter you feel toward home and after a dinner with the inmost best, prolonged by Proust through two hundred pages, all cynicism in respect to the first families of Hoboken has utterly vanished.

I would not go so far as to say that the best people in the Faubourg Saint-Germain are in allrespects like those blighted better families hemmed in by Mrs. Wharton and others between the south side of Washington Square and Fortieth Street in the New York of better days. They are a gayer folk than the gentry of old Washington Square. Life among them especially as regards the easy barnyard simplicity of the sex relation, is more like that of our negro quarter. But in respect to the provincialism of these two great worlds there is not the slightest difference. Theirs is a universe of small proprieties, bounded by a few streets, in which the rich aristocratic background seems to have no more to do with the matter than the Palisades as seen from the porch of a grocer's mansion in the Bronx.

Though they have all been buttressed in their present place for generations they have all the anxieties and complacencies of the newly arrived. The Due de Guermantes talks about his family, which is the best and oldest on the Continent, as an American millionaire might talk if he had just bought it. Repartee at dinner parties in the Faubourg Saint-Germain is administered with clubs. Civilization seems not to have tempered the raw-edge of personalities at dinner parties or lightened the pressure of pleasantry. Wit to be sure never had any point in American best society owing to the general fear of mental strain, but wit in the Faubourg Saint-Germain has only great flat surfaces that resound on the cheeks they slap, as when the Due de Charlus, the wittiest and most elegant of its denizens, tells a countess of his acquaintance that she smells like a cesspool. As a rule they take these sallies pleasantly. I may add in this instance that the countess, far from taking offence, immediately asked him to a dinner party.

Two Well-Bred People

PROUST'S novels tend to confirm the theory based on what Henry James called the "American scene" that in the chaos of contemporary life the well-bred person is a freak of nature, and that you are no more likely to find a group of th em anywhere than a group of geniuses. A well-bred married couple should be regarded in the same light as the Siamese twins. The prodigy never occurred in Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain. There are only two well-bred people in the whole eight volumes, and one was a Jew and the other the hero's grandmother, who was not in the best society. Competition is too keen at every point of contemporary life for good breeding to survive in any social aggregate. Best society is not a state of peace, but of neighborhood club law and constant border warfare. But for this, probably, the life would be too tame for contemporary taste, and if dukes and duchesses did not claw one another, uniting now and then to crush the skull of some intruder with a repartee, they would miss the lusty pleasures of the outside commercial conflict. From the trampling and shouts of polite society you perceive that it is homogeneous with the surrounding industrial civilization. There is no tact in Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain, but only tactics, as in the rough world everywhere.