Saint-Loup, for another thing, is by way of being a family black sheep: seemingly uninterested in social success, a devoted student of Nietzsche and Proudhon, we are told that his head was full of “socialistic spoutings,” and that he was “imbued with the most prgound contempt for his caste.”
2005, Joseph Frank, “5: Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, in Michael J. Hoffman, Patrick D. Murphy, editors, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, page 70