Proust

 Ma mère, quand il fut question d’avoir pour la première fois M. de Norpois à dîner, ayant exprimé le regret que le Professeur Cottard fût en voyage et qu’elle-même eût entièrement cessé de fréquenter Swann, car l’un et l’autre eussent sans doute intéressé l’ancien ambassadeur, mon père répondit qu’un convive éminent, un savant illustre, comme Cottard, ne pouvait jamais mal faire dans un dîner, mais que Swann, avec son ostentation, avec sa manière de crier sur les toits ses moindres relations, était un vulgaire esbroufeur que le Marquis de Norpois eût sans doute trouvé, selon son expression, « puant ». Or cette réponse de mon père demande quelques mots d’explication, certaines personnes se souvenant peut-être d’un Cottard bien médiocre et d’un Swann poussant jusqu’à la plus extrême délicatesse, en matière mondaine, la modestie et la discrétion. Mais pour ce qui regarde celui-ci, il était arrivé qu’au « fils Swann » et aussi au Swann du Jockey, l’ancien ami de mes parents avait ajouté une personnalité nouvelle (et qui ne devait pas être la dernière), celle de mari d’Odette.

Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu: (complète) (French Edition) (p. 507). BZ editores. Kindle Edition. 

I'm sure I'll never finish Proust. I decided to start with the 2nd volume, since I've started the first many times, and maybe read most of it without ever reading from cover to cover. The words I didn't know here are "esbroufeur" "puant" "poussant"*.  Here we see that Swann, the elegant man of the world, has lowered himself by marrying Odette. Thus his previous existence as the perfect dinner guest has disappeared. Cottard, previously a mediocrity, projects the illusion of being an illustrious savant in comparison to the now lowered Swann. Norpois is apparently a former diplomat, someone that Marcel's family needs to impress. 

I'll never finish because it is just so exquisite that I have to savor each sentence, but at the same time I tend to get lost and need to go back several pages. Here the relative social position of two people have changed, and the young Marcel is observing that from his parents. Swann has had at least two previous personalities and will have more still.   

*esbrofeur is a kind of braggart or show off. Puant is smelly or pretentious. I'm not sure if poussant is forceful or a misprint of puissant, or powerful. 

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I saw a twitter thread by Joyce Carol Oates and she was talking about how Woolf compared Joyce negatively to Proust. Then I remembered that she had a similar feeling of condescension to D.H. Lawrence. I found a passage where she uses Proust against Lawrence too, in very similar terms. It is the upper class (Woolf, Proust) vs. the working class (Joyce, Lawrence). The British Isles produced four great modernist prose writers, if we include Beckett, the late modernist. There are no great British modernist poets, only Yeats from Ireland. Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett outnumber Lawrence and Woolf, who didn't even like each other. Eliot, the American, became the British modernist by self-identification.