THE GUERMANTES WAYplete. We shall encounter most of them again, in their place and
time, and see what further use Proust made of them in his novel.
It remains to ask why he entered them, and why, indeed, this
obscure, half-Jewish, bourgeois young man was ever allowed in.
We needs must love the highest when we see it. Unfortunately,
it is not easy for the idealist young to discern which of the things
they see-nature, art, love, friendship, the noble mind of the
nobly born-is the highest. Proust pursued all these together,
and thought for a long time to find some of them on the Guer-
mantes Way. Perhaps, however they choose, the young are right;
for the highest, whatever it be, is not of this earth, and it matters
little in which of its earthly symbols they may seek it in vain. A
drawing-room, it seemed to Proust, was itself a work of art, of
which its habitues were both the performers and the creators,
devising the formal movements of the mysterious ballet they
danced, inventing the words of the frivolous but portentous
drama they played. Then, too, there was the poetic glamour of
meeting the modem equivalents of characters in Balzac, or the
descendants and namesakes of noble personages of whom he had
read in Saint-Simon's memoirs and Mme de Sevigne's letters.
There was the intellectual fascination of unravelling the mechan-
isms of a world in which the interplay of human passions and
conventions was so peculiarly intense and so exceptionally
disguised. There was the need for enchantment and disenchant-
ment, for the experiences which would go to make his un-
conceived novel. Perhaps deeper still (if an impulse from the
Freudian unconscious can be said to be deeper than an impulse
from the creative unconscious) was his need to prove that he was
not a pariah, the anxious prompting of his inner guilt. He must
be accepted where acceptance would be most difficult and failure
most humiliating, in the company of the elect, in the Faubourg
which was on earth the image, whether real or merely blas-
phemous, of the blessed saints in heaven. And he pursued the
welcoming smile of a noble hostess as at Auteuil he had pursued
his mother's kiss, and for the same reasons.
The influence of Montesquiou in introducing Proust to society
has often been exaggerated. Count Robert acted, as we have seen,
with the least possible energy and at the last possible moment,
when Proust was on the point of attaining the highest levels of
the Faubourg (having already reached the lower) by his own