My Years With Proust - Day 503

   The day may come when dressmakers will move in society - nor should I find it at all shocking.  Jupien's niece, being an exception, cannot yet be regarded as a portent, for one swallow does not make a summer.  At all events, if the very modest advancement of Jupien's niece did scandalise some people, Morel was not among them, for on certain points his stupidity was so intense that not only did he label "rather a fool" this girl who was a thousand times cleverer than himself, and foolish perhaps only in loving him, but he actually to be adventuresses, dressmakers' assistants in disguise playing at being ladies, the highly reputable ladies who invited her to their houses and whose invitations she accepted without a trace of vanity.  Naturally these were not Guermantes, or even people who knew the Guermantes, but rich and elegant middle-class women broad-minded enough to feel that it is no disgrace to invite a dressmaker to your house and at the same time snobbish enough to derive some satisfaction from patronising a girl whom His Highness the Baron de Charlus was in the habit, in all propriety of course, of visiting daily.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 41-42

Throughout this discussion of Remembrance of Things Past we have dealt, endlessly, with issues of class and of masks, and in this section, both. In yesterday's post we saw the Baron's anger at the common turn of phrase that Jupien's niece had used in talking to him, but at the same time M. de Charlus favored her, even supporting her marriage to the violinist Morel.  We need to keep in mind that both Morel and Jupien are ex-lovers (or maybe not even ex) lovers of the Baron, so this all comes together as a very chummy, and incestuous, charade.  Obviously, the concept of marrying a "beard" is not new.  All this also shows the complex, and decaying, social world of the time.  Yesterday the Baron was pitching a fit about her common language, but he's happy with her marrying into his "family," and that engagement has opened all sorts of social doors for a dressmaker that would normally be off-limits.  Now, it could simply be, at least partially,, as Proust suggests, that it is a case of "elegant middle-class women" wanting to please the Baron, but it's also true that they are "broad-minded enough to feel that it is no shame."  As Proust himself tell us, "The day may come when dressmakers will move in society - nor should I find it at all shocking."  The times they are a changin'.  One has to wonder how much, despite Proust's comment to the contrary, they are a changin' for him.  He's very much a critic, although a subtle one, of societal norms, but he's also clearly a product of those very same norms.