For my close reading, I want to review text from the bottom of page 252 to the end of the first paragraph on page 255 of Guermantes Way. Wherein, our narrator has just come to pay a visit to Mme de Villeparisis.

Our narrator provides a wonderful description of Mme de Villeparisis in her drawing room, which includes her guests, one of which, Bloch, brings out a more serious discussion from our narrator: “It was true that the social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning and that the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder” (252). Our narrator mentions ‘the Jews’ as if he himself were not one, while acknowledging an event that was becoming extremely significant. This is the first passage we have read, in which our narrator seriously tackles reactions to the Dreyfus affair.

He continues “however fiercely the anti-Dreyfus cyclone might be raging, it is not in the first hour of a storm that the waves are at their worst” (253). It seems, Proust is writing with the benefit of hindsight, knowing now, that even though they were in the heat of the Dreyfus affair, things were to become even worse.

After remarking that Mme de Villeparisis had stayed uninvolved with the Dreyfus affair, our narrator says “a young man like Bloch whom no one knew might pass unnoticed, whereas leading Jews who were representative of their side were already threatened” (253). This quite formally acknowledges that even if one were a Jew, that does not mean they would feel the full weight of this case, as Proust explains further down the page “The Romanians, the Egyptians, the Turks may hate the Jews. But in a French drawing-room the differences between those peoples are not so apparent” (253). So, essentially, to the average French person, the Jews appeared so exotic, that they would be seen as just another Romanian, Egyptian or Turk.

Proust continues and his following depiction is vivid, “a Jew making his entry as though he were emerging from the desert, his body crouching like a hyena’s, his neck thrust forward, offering profound ‘salaams’, completely satisfies a certain taste for the orient” (253). Using one of his beloved descriptions Proust both represents the view of the average French person and attacks it. The French have essentially lumped anyone east of Europe into one ball called ‘the orient’ and he sees the average French person as viewing all of these people like animals, ‘hyenas’, separate from a French person and quite exotic, offering their Salaams, the Arabic word for ‘peace’. Jew or Arab or from the Orient, they are all the same to a French person.

With the previous text in mind, I was unprepared for the assault laid on by Proust in the next sentence “Only it is essential that the Jew in question should not be actually ‘in’ society, otherwise he will readily assume the aspect of a lord and his manners become so Gallicised that on his face a refractory nose, growing like a nasturtium in unexpected directions, will be more reminiscent of Moliere’s Mascarille than of Solomon” (253). This sentence is completely amazing and deserves more analysis than I can give it. Though the comment sounds derogatory, I cannot tell whether Proust is defending or attacking ‘the Jew in question’ but he is stating that if a Jew is to be part of society, rather than an exotic hyena, as in the previous sentence, than he will metamorphoses into a French man, Gallicised (as in becoming French) and whose nose will look like the French character Mascarille rather than that of a Jewish, or ‘Solomon’ nose.

Proust continues by disposing of the idea that Jews are taking over everything (a common myth throughout history) in quite a hilarious way “how marvellous the power of the race which from the depths of the ages thrusts forwards even into modern Paris, in the corridors of our theatres, behind the desks of our public offices, at a funeral, in the street, a solid phalanx, setting their mark upon our modern ways of hairdressing, absorbing, making us forget” etc, etc (253-254).

Proust then backpedals a little and attempts to justify the French position “we know from classical paintings the faces of the ancient Greeks, we have seen Assyrians on the walls of a palace at Susa. And so we feel, on encountering in a Paris drawing-room Orientals belonging to such and such a group, that we are in the presence of supernatural creatures whom the forces of necromancy must have called into being. Hitherto we had only a superficial image; suddenly it has acquired depth, it extends into three dimensions, it moves” (254). Alas, the French have only just seen paintings of these wonderful people that come from the East and are so in awe at having met the real thing that they cannot contain themselves. They are so used to viewing these people in paintings (no matter if they are Jew, or Turk, or Greek, etc) that they have transformed into fictional deities in the French mind and have now returned from the dead. In this sentence our narrator justifies the French position, but his scathing criticism of the way Jews are depicted has already been presented.

As Proust further explains “what we seek in vain to embrace in the shy young Greek is the figure admired long ago on the side of a vase” (255). Yet, for all the adoration heaped upon these deities of the past, forever immortalized in the vases and paintings of the French, the Frenchman finds them to be quite different, in fact, human: “where even a man of genius from whom, gathered as though around a table at seance, we expect to learn the secret of the infinite, simply utters these words, which had just issued from the lips of Bloch: take care of my top hat” (255).