My Year With Proust - Day 166

"I was barely conscious of who Albertine Simonet was.  She had certainly no conception of what she was one day to mean to me.  Even the name, Simonet, which I had already heard spoken on the beach, I should have spelt with a double 'n' had I been asked to write it down, never dreaming of the importance which the family attached to there being but one.  The further we descend the social scale the more we fine that snobbery fastens on to mere trifles which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to each individual, surprise us more.  Possibly there had been Simonnets who had done badly in business, or worse still.  The fact remains that the Simonets never failed, it appeared, to be annoyed if anyone doubled their 'n.' They were as proud, perhaps, of being the only Simonets in the world with one 'n' instead of two as the Montmorencys of being the premier barons of France.  I asked Elstir whether these girls lived at Balbec; yes, he told me, some of them at any rate.  The villa in which one of them lived was precisely at the far end of the beach, where the cliffs of Canapville began.  Since this girl was a great friend of Albertine Simonet, this was one more reason for me to believe that it was indeed the latter whom I had met that day when I was with my grandmother."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 903-904

I initially decided to include this section mainly because it provided more background information on Albertine, will will play such an increasingly important role in the story.  However, it also reminds me of a subject that I've discussed before: my family's comically elevated sense of its "place" when I was growing up.  Again, we were a funny lot because there was always  this sense that we were actually about one and a half generations removed from yellow class hillbillies, but that was often counter-balanced by this mythology of the Scudders who had come over from England in the 1600s.  We even had one of those little crests (doubtless probably half-fabricated).  If I remember correctly, our motto was: nunquam non paratus.  My Latin is very rusty, but I suspect it would translate out as something akin to "never not prepared," or, in my mind, and I would argue truthfully, not really prepared either.  That I think would be a more accurate and noble motto, at least for me.  It's not as if I'm not proud of who we are, because if nothing else we came a long way in a relatively short amount of time, but I also don't take our lineage that seriously.  Mainly I think we were Puritan lunatics who were reminded that if we really weren't that happy in England we could leave (sort of the early 17th century version of the old Atlanta line, "you do know that Delta flies north, too, Yankee.").  There is a whole line of our family that have done generations of amazing work in India, which I've recounted elsewhere on the blog, but it's not my wing of the family.  As my father used to say, "We're just plain folks, your mother and me," in a sing-song voice.