How To Be a True Aristocrat: A Caution

Yesterday I posted some thoughts (from Proust) on what it takes to be a true aristocrat. I oversimplified. In fact, it takes more than just gracious good nature, and some of the other pieces of the puzzle can be trickier to fit in. There is, for example, the matter of “intelligence.” Apparently it is a subject of some contention between Marcel’s friends, the Guermants, and their relatives and rivals, the Courvoisiers:

Not only did the Courvoisiers not assign to intelligence the same importance as the Guermantes, the had a different notion of it. For a Guermantes (however stupid), to be intelligent meant to have a sharp tongue, to be capable of saying scathing things, to give short shrift; but it meant also the capacity to hold one’s own equally in painting, music, architecture, and to speak English. The Courvoisiers had a less favorable notion of intelligence, and unless one belonged to their world, being intelligent was almost tantamount to “having probably murdered one’s father and mother.” For them intelligence was a sort of burglar’s jimmy by means of which people one did not know from Adam forced the doors of the most reputable drawing-rooms, and it was common knowledge among the Courvoisiers that you always had to pay in the long run for having “those sort” of people in your house.

--Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past,
Vol. II 458(Scott-Moncrief/Kilmartin trans. 1981)