the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have never coincided with my love for them. True love it must have been, since I subordinated everything else in the world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded rather as endowed with the property of arousing that love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.
It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its representatives exist. But in Proust himself the charm undoubtedly is a subtler thing than that. It has something of the appeal of a dead religion for him. While it was still a power in the world one would have found him in opposition, as the Prince de Guermantes found himself in opposition to the army authorities when at last, and at such pain to himself, he began to suspect their conduct of the Dreyfus case. But aristocracy as a power in France is dead; it is only the ritual, the historic associations, the complete existence of a little world within a world, that remain.
Nor, as a fact, is this interest in cliques by any means confined to the aristocracy. Of at least equal importance are the Verdurins, who, in spite of their riches, are at the very opposite pole of civilisation. And yet with all their vulgarity, with all their intellectual snobbery, with all their lack of taste and breeding, with all their affectation of being a _petit clan_, is it not clear that, up to a certain point at any rate, intelligence is on their side of the ledger? Again, there is that glance at life in barracks, through the mediation of Saint-Loup, which, while small, is as good a summary of the military world as one knows. There are some unforgettable pages on the Jews. There is even that little world of the hotel servants that has plainly interested Proust almost as much as any of the larger worlds he has spent so much care in describing. And, especially in the early books, there are those descriptions of the world of the young man’s parents and grandparents, so typical of the _honnête bourgeoisie_, so profoundly drawn in their uprightness and their rather limited social ideas, so secure and anxious for security, so loving to their boy and yet so anxious not to “spoil” him. Never, with the exceptions of Saint-Simon and Tolstoy, has any author succeeded so well in giving the atmosphere of a particular house or a particular party; never has any one analysed so closely the behaviour of people in small homogeneous masses.