Friday, July 8, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 196

"My parents might, it is true, have attached some servant other than Francoise to my person, but I should have been no better off.  Francoise was in a sense less of a servant than the others.  In her way of feeling things, of being kind and compassionate, harsh and disdainful, shrewd and narrow-minded, of combining a white skin with red hands, she was still the village girl whose parents had had 'a place of their own' but having come to grief had been obliged to put her into service.  Her presence in our household was the country air, the social life of a farm of fifty years ago transported into our midst by a sort of reversal of the normal order of travel whereby it is the countryside that comes to visit the traveller.  As the glass cases in a local museum are filled with specimens of the curious handiwork which the peasants still carve or embroider in certain parts of the country, so our flat in Paris was decorated with the words of Francoise, inspired by a traditional and local sentiment and governed by extremely ancient laws. And she could trace her way back as though by clues of coloured thread to the songbirds and cherry trees of her childhood, to the bed in which her mother had died, and which she still vividly saw.  But in spite of all this wealth of background, once she had come to Paris and entered our service she had acquired - as, a fortiori, anyone else would have done in her place - the ideas, the system of interpretation used by the servants on the other floors, compensating for the respect which she was obliged to show to us by repeating the rude words that the cook on the fourth floor had used to her mistress, with a servile gratification so intense that, for the first time in our lives, feeling a sort of solidarity with the detestable occupant of the fourth floor flat, we said to ourselves that possibly we too were 'employers' after all.  This alteration in Francoise's character was perhaps inevitable.  Certain ways of life are so abnormal that they are bound to produce certain characteristic faults; such was the life led by the King of Versailles among his courtiers, a life as strange as that of a Pharaoh or a Doge - and, far more even than this, the life of his courtiers.  The life led by servants is probably of an even more monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing.  but it was actually in details more intimate still that I should have been obliged, even if I had dismissed Francoise, to keep the same servant."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 61-62

I'm mainly including this section because it paints a lovely picture of Francoise, Proust's servant, who plays such a consistent, albeit usually background, role in the novel.  However, it also raises very interesting issues relating to the social life of the time. Years ago I remember reading an article which, I think, stated that a century ago (when Remembrance of Things Past was being written) the second most common job in the US was some form of domestic servant.  Why I remember this, and often can't find my car, is anyone's guess.  I don't know if I believe it (either the statistic or my memory of the statistic) completely - and it's not the same as what it might have been in Europe (although I suspect it would have been more common in Europe) - but I do know that it was common for folks in the burgeoning middle class (and not simply the rich) to have domestic servants.  I'm fairly comfortably in the middle class today, and have days (although not aspirations therein) when I think I'm almost in the upper middle class, and the thought of having a servant just seems insane.  Even in Proust's age he pointing out what a "monstrous abnormality" it was, not to have it but because of what it did to both "employers" and servants alike.  Of course, Proust's station in life was above that of the middle class.  Far more intelligent and scholarly people than me have read and written on Proust, obviously, and certainly on the issues of society and class.  We live in an age when we talk a lot about white privilege, and although we should talk about it a lot more - and I'm always stunned when people don't understand that they were viewing the world from a place of privilege.  To be fair, some of my most glaring moments of white privilege - times when I learned and relearned the lesson - came overseas, when I, as a white American, was treated much better than the citizens of the country where I was visiting.  Sadly, so few Americans actually go overseas, and yet few people are better positioned to go overseas, and thus they miss the opportunity to learn valuable lessons like this.  What better proof of the unspoken nature of class and privilege do you need than Proust and his parents having to struggle with the concept that they were "employers"?


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