The common view that equates the upper classes with individualism obscures the fundamental cohesion found in the great families. The idea of grand-bourgeois individualism is all the more misleading in that this individualism is only, in its manifestations, the transliteration of the habits of the group. By its own social magic, the haut bourgeois is so well adapted to the world in which he lives, that being himself is sufficient to meet the requirements of circumstance and of other people, in the ineffable sense of the achievement of being and of irreducible individuality.