Characters fall in and out of love, marry up, disgrace themselves, disappear for hundreds of pages, die. Intermittence, he observes, is a law not just of society but also of the soul. “Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn,” he writes, “society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed to be immovable, and composes a fresh pattern.” The chessboard movements of Proust’s actors are just one element of his grand design, however. Another Proustian axiom concerns social mobility.
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