Free The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust by Joachim Neugroschel

of unsatisfied or abandoned mistresses. Thus, certain young women who are just beginning
     to ascend and certain old women who are now sliding back enjoy talking about the social
     standing that others have or, even better, do not have. In fact, while those women
     derive more pleasure from talking about the standing that others do not have, their
     talking about the standing that others do have nourishes them more effectively, providing
     their famished imaginations with more substantial fare. I have known people to thrill,
     more with delight than envy, at the very thought of a duchess’s family connections.
     In the provinces, it seems, there are female shopkeepers whose brains, like narrow
     cages, confine desires for social standing that are as ferocious as savage beasts.
     The mailman brings them
Le Gaulois
. The society page is devoured in the twinkling of an eye. The fidgety provincial
     women are sated. And for an hour their eyes glow with peace of mind, their pupils
     dilating with enjoyment and admiration.
THREE: A GAINST A F EMALE S NOB
    If you were not part of high society and were told that Élianthe, young, beautiful,
     rich, loved as she is by friends and suitors, had suddenly broken with them all and
     was endlessly courting old, ugly, stupid men whom she barely knew, begging for their
     favors and patiently swallowing their snubs, toiling like a slave to please them,
     losing her mind over them, regaining it over them, becoming their friend through her
     attentiveness, their support in case they are poor, their mistress in case they are
     sensual—if you were told all that, you would wonder: Just what crime hasÉlianthe committed, and who are those formidable magistrates whose indulgence she
     must buy at any price, to whom she sacrifices her friendships, her loves, her freedom
     of thought, the dignity of her life, her fortune, her time, her most private female
     aversions? Yet Élianthe has committed no crime. The judges whom she obstinately tries
     to corrupt barely give her a second thought, and they would let her pure and cheerful
     life keep flowing tranquilly. But a terrible curse lies upon her: she is a snob.
FOUR: T O A F EMALE S NOB
    Your soul is certainly, as Tolstoy says, a dark forest. But its trees are of a particular
     species; they are family trees. People call you vain? But the universe is not empty
     for you; it is filled with coats of arms. It is quite a dazzling and symbolic conception
     of the world. Yet do you not also have your chimeras in the shape and color of the
     ones we see painted on blazons? Are you not educated?
Le Tout-Paris
, the
Almanach de Gotha, La Société et le High-Life
have taught you the
Bouillet
. In reading the chronicles of the battles won by ancestors, you have found the names
     of the descendants whom you invite to dinner, and this mnemonic technique has taught
     you the entire history of France. This lends a certain grandeur to your ambitious
     dream, to which you have sacrificed your freedom, your hours of pleasure or reflection,
     your duties, your friendships, and even love. For the faces of your new friends are
     linked in your imagination to a long series of ancestral portraits. The family trees
     that you cultivate so meticulously, whose fruit you pick so joyously every year, are
     deeply rooted in the most ancient French soil. Your dream interlocks the present and
     the past. The soul of the crusades enlivens some trivial contemporary figures for
     you, and if you read your guest book so fervently, does not each name allow you to
     feel an ancient and splendid France awakening, quavering, and almost singing, like
     a corpse arisen from a slab decorated with armorial bearings?
Oranthe
    You did not go to bed last night and you still have not washed this morning?
    Why proclaim it, Oranthe?
    Brilliantly gifted as you are, do you not believe that this sufficiently distinguishes
     you from the rest of the world, so that you need not cut such a wretched