
07 Aug When the title of nobility is not shown-off… (ALAIN DE BOTTON)
One foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922) travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is late and the staff, judging their client on the basis of a shabby coat and an unfamiliar name, assume that a nobody has entered their establishment. They therefore patronize him, take him to a table around which an arctic draught is blowing and are slow to offer him anything to drink or eat.
But, a quarter of an hour later, the marquis arrives, identifies his friend and at a stroke transforms the narrator’s value in the eyes of the staff. The manager bows deeply before him, draws out the menu, recites the specials of the day with evocative flourishes, compliments him on his clothes and, so as to prevent him thinking that these courtesies are in any way dependent on his link to an aristocrat, occasionally gives him a surreptitious little smile which seems to indicate a wholly personal affection. When the narrator asks him for some bread, the manager clicks his heels and exclaims:
‘ “Certainly, Monsieur le baron!” “I am not a baron,” I told him in a tone of mock sadness. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Monsieur le comte!” I had no time to lodge a second protest, which would no doubt have promoted me to the rank of marquis.’
However satisfactory the volte-face, the underlying dynamic is bleak, for the manager has not of course amended his snobbish value-system in any way. He has merely rewarded someone differently within its brutal confines – and only rarely do we have the opportunity to find a Marquis de Saint-Loup or a Prince Charming who can speak on our behalf to convince the world of the nobility of our souls. We are more commonly made to finish our dinner in the arctic draught.
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton