The Smart Set

Before I read Daniel Karlin’s excellent new book Proust’s English, I had never given a thought to the word “smart” as part of the French lexicon. Either its vogue in French is long passed, as Karlin suggests, or I do not travel in sufficiently “smart” company when I am in France, but I have never heard the word used in French, where it means roughly “fashionable” or, as we might say in English, “chic.” It can have this sense in English too although it is not the most common English meaning. I remember accompanying my mother on shopping expeditions when I was a little boy. She had a favorite saleswoman at a clothing store who would say as she surveyed my mother’s appearance in a dress she had just tried on, “Angela, you look so smart in that.” This usage endured in English far longer than it seems to have done in French. Jane Austen, in a letter of 1805 (when she was nineteen), says, in speaking of a certain Miss Seymour, “neither her dress nor her air have anything of the Dash or Stilishness which the Browns talked of; quite the contrary indeed, her dress is not even smart … ” The word must still be used this way although I haven’t encountered it in some time. Among younger speakers, it may have been replaced, at least for a while, by “cool.”

Karlin tells us that Remy de Gourmont, who disapproved of both this sort of borrowing and this specific borrowing, said that “smart” had thirteen meanings in English but only one in French. The word occurs in A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) twice, both times in the language of the affected and vulgar Odette de Crécy, a former prostitute for the carriage trade with whom the discreet and cultivated Swann falls in love, thus suggesting that love is not merely blind but deaf too. Odette is surprised to discover that Swann lives on the quai d’Orléans. She is the second character in the novel to remark on his neighborhood. The first is, according to the narrator, “the only member of the family who was mildly vulgar,” his great-aunt. She, like Odette, finds the quai d’Orléans to be an incongruous address for Swann. The great-aunt in question is parochial and complacent, but not sufficiently vulgar to say, as Odette does, that it is not a “smart” enough address for him. She is, however, sufficiently vulgar to point out that Swann’s father was a stock broker who left his son a substantial fortune, so that Swann could easily have lived on the boulevard Haussmann or on the rue de l’Opéra had he wanted to.

Now, anyone who knows Paris today will be puzzled by this comment. The quai d’Orléans is the very attractive bank that runs along the southwest quadrant of the Île Saint-Louis; it offers a view of the Seine through a row of aspen trees and a magnificent view of the back of Notre-Dame—the subject of a haunting photograph by Eugène Atget. According to Jacques Hillairet, the historian of Paris streets, it lost some of its old mansions when two streets were cut through in the nineteenth century, but it retained others and was home to several minor writers and collectors at about the time that Swann would have lived there. It is incomparably more attractive than the soulless boulevard Haussmann (where Proust himself lived for much of his life after his mother’s death) or the avenue de l’Opéra, both of which were almost new at the time. Given the choice, today anyone who could afford it would prefer the quai d’Orléans to either of these addresses. If we were speaking of New York, it would be like saying, God knows why he lives in that rambling old brownstone in Carnegie Hill when he could live in the Trump Tower if he wanted to. Odette is, of course, just the sort of person who would find the Trump Tower “smart.”

Things were a bit different in Swann’s time; the avenue de l’Opéra was not so relentlessly commercial as it is today, and the right bank adjacent to the Île Saint-Louis had not undergone the remarkable restoration that was to transform it after 1964. Still the Île Saint-Louis was physically attractive and retained its special aura. It is the newest enclave of old Paris, surrounded as it is by the truly historic core of the city but not having been built on until the seventeenth century. It is a perfect place for Swann, connoisseur, collector, writer manqué who once imagined he would publish a study of Vermeer.

But for Odette, it was not “smart.” A conspicuous sheen is essential to smartness, since it is a surface quality. Copies of antiques can be smarter than genuine antiques. When Swann criticizes one of her friends’ false antiques, Odette lets slip what she really thinks of Swann’s mansion on the quai d’Orléans: “You wouldn’t want her to live like you do among broken furniture and worn out carpets.” It brings to mind the old master paintings Duveen ruined, so he could sell them to millionaire collectors who liked their paintings to have a polished surface. There are a couple of very shiny Holbeins in the Frick Collection.

“Smart” does not mean intelligent in French, and of course genuine intelligence is almost never chic, being too rare to be recognized by the vulgar. There is instead a sort of “display intelligence,” a mask worn by people of modest intellectual gifts and even by truly intelligent people who are eager to appear intelligent to people too stupid or inexperienced to be able to recognize the genuine article. Dr. Cottard is an example of the first and Swann himself is an example of the second.

A similar anxiety to appear intelligent occurs surprisingly often among academics. The very people one would imagine should be confident of their intelligence, if not necessarily of their achievements, are anxious to appear intelligent, and they refer to the quality for which they want to be recognized as being “smart.” In speech, the word frequently receives the same sort of emphasis that the saleswoman used about my mother’s appearance in a new dress: smart. As in, “he’s really smart.” Most of these people who worry about being smart are worried about something that includes an element of fashion. For this reason, it is important above all to resist anything “not smart.”

Louis Menand has noticed this phenomenon: “Academics suffer from an anxiety that if they repeat what they imagine other self-respecting professionals already know they will seem naïve or, even worse, ‘not smart.’”