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380 his time their own concrete importance; precedence was related to power, and the privilege of les grandes entrées, for instance, carried with it the likelihood of material advantage. Access to the King's ear was by no means a vain thing, when the King still governed. The present Royalist society in France is the unsubstantial wraith of the Ancien régime: the divorce between rank and power is complete. A King without a Kingdom, a Court without a Government, and an Aristocracy without immunities—they continue to conduct themselves as if they controlled the destinies of France. The remoteness from actuality of the values on which this society is based lends it the mystery and charm of an oriental fairy-tale. And it was this fantastic element which fascinated Proust, and induced him to study, with the passion not of the snob, but of the entomologist, every fine shade and hierarchical distinction in this complicated survival of a vanished world. Of this society Robert de Montesquiou was a prominent member, and one of the most curious features of his life was the way he managed to regulate it by both the unreal values, which he retained from his noble birth, and the aesthetic values, which he acquire from his literary and artistic tastes. Indeed it was this double system of values which made possible his prodigious, his preposterous, his fascinating pride. The aesthete never knew an aristocrat whom he could not despise as a Philistine, the nobleman never met an artist whom he could not look down upon as a roturier. (The only contemporary Englishman who has enjoyed a similar situation appears to have been Lord Alfred Douglas.) Of all Montesquiou's contemporaries, d'Annunzio was the man he admired the most, and whose slights, real or imaginary, he would most easily forgive. A love of splendour, a boundless vanity, and a certain cabotinage were common to both their characters. Even so it is doubtful if the Frenchman ever forgot the obscurity of his idol's origins. "Je vous aime, Montesquiou," Anatole France said,"parce que vous êtes fier." Many readers of the Memoirs will be of the same sentiment. Pride so extravagant ceases to be fatuous: it becomes sublime and when the genius of Proust was inspired to immortalize it, there resulted a creation which can hold its own with the greatest characters in literature.

The Memoirs are disappointing in the meagreness of their references to Proust. They contain however a long note on the first two volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, in which Mon-