Emerging from the shadows of the joyous band of _jeunes filles en fleurs_, with its hint of perversity—we shall have to rewrite our hymns: “There’s a _Freud_ for little children!”—we come to the marvellous Guermantes, with whom Proust has pictured that high-born snobbery—and life without snobbery is like meat without salt—which observers, as they get on in years, come to know is inherent in the upper classes no less, perhaps more, than in the middle classes: a right snobbery, bereft of any meanness or noxious prejudices. These people see France through their family history, and their family history was France. They are Ladies and Gentlemen, with all that that connotes: and in considering them we are conscious of all the rest who are not. Proust, in exploring one path, illuminates the others. We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so of pages), and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which made them, and what they are going to make of the world. As contrasts to these great ones we have those other snobs, the Verdurins, of the “cultured” middle class. Surely never before, in memoir, essay, or fiction, has it all been set down so brilliantly. One wonders what sort of man Proust really was. We know he was a great friend of Léon Daudet—two men, one would have thought, as the poles asunder. We know that he slept by day, and lived and worked by night: we know that he was ill and neurasthenic. We know also that nothing was hidden from him, and that he had an infinite power of expression. He was a very human being with the brain and the pen of a recording angel. Occasionally, lest his cleverness should seem to be superhuman, one comes on a jest or an anecdote which is a “chestnut”; or he becomes a little too intricate, or his neurasthenia shows its cloven hoof: once or twice I am inclined to throw the book down as too tiresome, but I cling to him and grapple with him, and soon feel again that I am enjoying one of the greatest pleasures of my life. One meets with all kinds of people in his work, some of them very odd people; though how very odd is the ordinary normal person! Proust’s odd people may be thought to be modern: yet both in art and in life they are indeed very ancient. They are those for whom—to modernise an old phrase—Life is a _mauvais quart d’heure_ made up of exquisite complexes. Side by side with these “moderns” are the old-fashioned people, notably the Grandmother and Françoise—not Micawber is more definite than this last.