As I had supposed before making the acquaintance of Mme. de Villeparisis

at Balbec, there was a vast difference between the world in which she

lived and that of Mme. de Guermantes. Mme. de Villeparisis was one of

those women who, born of a famous house, entering by marriage into

another no less famous, do not for all that enjoy any great position in

the social world, and, apart from a few duchesses who are their nieces

or sisters-in-law, perhaps even a crowned head or two, old family

friends, see their drawing-rooms filled only by third rate people, drawn

from the middle classes or from a nobility either provincial or tainted

in some way, whose presence there has long since driven away all such

smart and snobbish folk as are not obliged to come to the house by ties

of blood or the claims of a friendship too old to be ignored. Certainly

I had no difficulty after the first few minutes in understanding how

Mme. de Villeparisis, at Balbec, had come to be so well informed, better

than ourselves even, as to the smallest details of the tour through

Spain which my father was then making with M. de Norpois. Even this,

however, did not make it possible to rest content with the theory that

the intimacy—of more than twenty years’ standing—between Mme. de

Villeparisis and the Ambassador could have been responsible for the

lady’s loss of caste in a world where the smartest women boasted the

attachment of lovers far less respectable than him, not to mention that

it was probably years since he had been anything more to the Marquise

than just an old friend. Had Mme. de Villeparisis then had other

adventures in days gone by? Being then of a more passionate temperament

than now, in a calm and religious old age which nevertheless owed some

of its mellow colouring to those ardent, vanished years, had she somehow

failed, in the country neighbourhood where she had lived for so long, to

avoid certain scandals unknown to the younger generation who simply took

note of their effect in the unequal and defective composition of a

visiting list bound, otherwise, to have been among the purest of any

taint of mediocrity? That “sharp tongue” which her nephew ascribed to

her, had it in those far-off days made her enemies? Had it driven her

into taking advantage of certain successes with men so as to avenge

herself upon women? All this was possible; nor could the exquisitely

sensitive way in which—giving so delicate a shade not merely to her

words but to her intonation—Mme. de Villeparisis spoke of modesty or

generosity be held to invalidate this supposition; for the people who

not only speak with approval of certain virtues but actually feel their

charm and shew a marvellous comprehension of them (people in fact who

will, when they come to write their memoirs, present a worthy picture of

those virtues) are often sprung from but not actually part of the

silent, simple, artless generation which practised them. That generation

is reflected in them but is not continued. Instead of the character

which it possessed we find a sensibility, an intelligence which are not

conducive to action. And whether or not there had been in the life of

Mme. de Villeparisis any of those scandals, which (if there had) the

lustre of her name would have blotted out, it was this intellect,

resembling rather that of a writer of the second order than that of a

woman of position, that was undoubtedly the cause of her social

degradation.

It is true that they were not specially elevating, the qualities, such

as balance and restraint, which Mme. de Villeparisis chiefly extolled;

but to speak of restraint in a manner that shall be entirely adequate,

the word “restraint” is not enough, we require some of the qualities of

authorship which presuppose a quite unrestrained exaltation; I had

remarked at Balbec that the genius of certain great artists was

completely unintelligible to Mme. de Villeparisis; and that all she

could do was to make delicate fun of them and to express her

incomprehension in a graceful and witty form. But this wit and grace, at

the point to which she carried them, became themselves—on another plane,

and even although they were employed to belittle the noblest

masterpieces—true artistic qualities. Now the effect of such qualities

on any social position is a morbid activity of the kind which doctors

call elective, and so disintegrating that the most firmly established

pillars of society are hard put to it to hold out for any length of

time. What artists call intellect seems pure presumption to the

fashionable world which, unable to place itself at the sole point of

view from which they, the artists, look at and judge things, incapable

of understanding the particular attraction to which they yield when they

choose an expression or start a friendship, feel in their company an

exhaustion, an irritation, from which antipathy very shortly springs.

And yet in her conversation, and the same may be said of the _Memoirs_

which she afterwards published, Mme. de Villeparisis shewed nothing but

a sort of grace that was eminently social. Having passed by great works

without mastering, sometimes without even noticing them, she had

preserved from the period in which she had lived and which, moreover,

she described with great aptness and charm, little more than the most

frivolous of the gifts that they had had to offer her. But a narrative

of this sort, even when it treats exclusively of subjects that are not

intellectual, is still a work of the intellect, and to give in a book or

in conversation, which is almost the same thing, a deliberate impression

of frivolity, a serious touch is required which a purely frivolous

person would be incapable of supplying. In a certain book of

reminiscences written by a woman and regarded as a masterpiece, the

phrase that people quote as a model of airy grace has always made me

suspect that, in order to arrive at such a pitch of lightness, the

author must originally have had a rather stodgy education, a boring

culture, and that as a girl she probably appeared to her friends an

insufferable prig. And between certain literary qualities and social

failure the connexion is so inevitable that when we open Mme. de

Villeparisis’s _Memoirs_ to-day, on any page a fitting epithet, a

sequence of metaphors will suffice to enable the reader to reconstruct

the deep but icy bow which must have been bestowed on the old Marquise

on the staircases of the Embassies by a snob like Mme. Leroi, who

perhaps may have left a card on her when she went to call on the

Guermantes, but never set foot in her house for fear of losing caste

among all the doctors’ or solicitors’ wives whom she would find there. A

bluestocking Mme. de Villeparisis had perhaps been in her earliest

youth, and, intoxicated with the ferment of her own knowledge, had

perhaps failed to realise the importance of not applying to people in

society, less intelligent and less educated than herself, those cutting

strokes which the injured party never forgets.

Moreover, talent is not a separate appendage which one artificially

attaches to those qualities which make for social success, in order to

create from the whole what people in society call a “complete woman”. It

is the living product of a certain moral complexion, from which as a

rule many moral qualities are lacking and in which there predominates a

sensibility of which other manifestations such as we do not notice in a

book may make themselves quite distinctly felt in the course of a life,

certain curiosities for instance, certain whims, the desire to go to

this place or that for one’s own amusement and not with a view to the

extension, the maintenance or even the mere exercise of one’s social

relations. I had seen at Balbec Mme. de Villeparisis hemmed in by a

bodyguard of her own servants without even a glance, as she passed, at

the people sitting in the hall of the hotel. But I had had a

presentiment that this abstention was due not to indifference, and it

seemed that she had not always confined herself to it. She would get a

sudden craze to know some one or other because she had seen him and

thought him good-looking, or merely because she had been told that he

was amusing, or because he had struck her as different from the people

she knew, who at this period, when she had not yet begun to appreciate

them because she imagined that they would never fail her, belonged, all

of them, to the purest cream of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To the

bohemian, the humble middle-class gentleman whom she had marked out with

her favour she was obliged to address invitations the importance of

which he was unable to appreciate, with an insistence which began

gradually to depreciate her in the eyes of the snobs who were in the

habit of estimating the smartness of a house by the people whom its

mistress excluded rather than by those whom she entertained. Certainly,

if at a given moment in her youth Mme. de Villeparisis, surfeited with

the satisfaction of belonging to the fine flower of the aristocracy, had

found a sort of amusement in scandalising the people among whom she

lived, and in deliberately impairing her own position in society, she

had begun to attach its full importance to that position once it was

definitely lost. She had wished to shew the Duchesses that she was

better than they, by saying and doing all the things that they dared not

say or do. But now that they all, save such as were closely related to

her, had ceased to call, she felt herself diminished, and sought once

more to reign, but with another sceptre than that of wit. She would have

liked to attract to her house all those women whom she had taken such

pains to drive away. How many women’s lives, lives of which little

enough is known (for we all live in different worlds according to our

ages, and the discretion of their elders prevents the young from forming

any clear idea of the past and so completing the cycle), have been

divided in this way into contrasted periods, the last being entirely

devoted to the reconquest of what in the second has been so

light-heartedly flung on the wind. Flung on the wind in what way? The

young people are all the less capable of imagining it, since they see

before them an elderly and respectable Marquise de Villeparisis and have

no idea that the grave diarist of the present day, so dignified beneath

her pile of snowy hair, can ever have been a gay midnight-reveller who

was perhaps the delight in those days, devoured the fortunes perhaps of

men now sleeping in their graves; that she should also have set to work,

with a persevering and natural industry, to destroy the position which

she owed to her high birth does not in the least imply that even at that

remote period Mme. de Villeparisis did not attach great importance to

her position. In the same way the web of isolation, of inactivity in

which a neurasthenic lives may be woven by him from morning to night

without therefore seeming endurable, and while he is hastening to add

another mesh to the net which holds him captive, it is possible that he

is dreaming only of dancing, sport and travel. We are at work every

moment upon giving its form to our life, but we do so by copying

unintentionally, like the example in a book, the features of the person

that we are and not of him who we should like to be. The disdainful bow

of Mme. Leroi might to some extent be expressive of the true nature of

Mme. de Villeparisis; it in no way corresponded to her ambition.

No doubt at the same moment at which Mme. Leroi was—to use an expression

beloved of Mme. Swann—“cutting” the Marquise, the latter could seek

consolation in remembering how Queen Marie-Amélie had once said to her:

“You are just like a daughter to me.” But such marks of royal

friendship, secret and unknown to the world, existed for the Marquise

alone, dusty as the diploma of an old Conservatoire medallist. The only

true social advantages are those that create life, that can disappear

without the person who has benefited by them needing to try to keep them

or to make them public, because on the same day a hundred others will

take their place. And for all that she could remember the Queen’s using

those words to her, she would nevertheless have bartered them gladly for

the permanent faculty of being asked everywhere which Mme. Leroi

possessed, as in a restaurant a great but unknown artist whose genius is

written neither in the lines of his bashful face nor in the antiquated

cut of his threadbare coat, would willingly be even the young

stock-jobber, of the lowest grade of society, who is sitting with a

couple of actresses at a neighbouring table to which in an obsequious

and incessant chain come hurrying manager, head waiter, pages and even

the scullions who file out of the kitchen to salute him, as in the

fairy-tales, while the wine waiter advances, dust-covered like his

bottles, limping and dazed, as if on his way up from the cellar he had

twisted his foot before emerging into the light of day.

It must be remarked, however, that in Mme. de Villeparisis’s

drawing-room the absence of Mme. Leroi, if it distressed the lady of the

house, passed unperceived by the majority of her guests. They were

entirely ignorant of the peculiar position which Mme. Leroi occupied, a

position known only to the fashionable world, and never doubted that

Mme. de Villeparisis’s receptions were, as the readers of her _Memoirs_

to-day are convinced that they must have been, the most brilliant in

Paris.

On the occasion of this first call which, after leaving Saint-Loup, I

went to pay on Mme. de Villeparisis, following the advice given by M. de

Norpois to my father, I found her in her drawing-room hung, with yellow

silk, against which the sofas and the admirable armchairs upholstered in

Beauvais tapestry stood out with the almost purple redness of ripe

raspberries. Side by side with the Guermantes and Villeparisis portraits

one saw those—gifts from the sitters themselves—of Queen Marie-Amélie,

the Queen of the Belgians, the Prince de Joinville and the Empress of

Austria. Mme. de Villeparisis herself, capped with an old-fashioned

bonnet of black lace (which she preserved with the same instinctive

sense of local or historical colour as a Breton innkeeper who, however

Parisian his customers may have become, feels it more in keeping to make

his maids dress in coifs and wide sleeves), was seated at a little desk

on which in front of her, as well as her brushes, her palette and an

unfinished flower-piece in water-colours, were arranged in glasses, in

saucers, in cups, moss-roses, zinnias, maidenhair ferns, which on

account of the sudden influx of callers she had just left off painting,

and which had the effect of being piled on a florist’s counter in some

eighteenth-century mezzotint. In this drawing-room, which had been

slightly heated on purpose because the Marquise had caught cold on the

journey from her house in the country, there were already when I arrived

a librarian with whom Mme. de Villeparisis had spent the morning in

selecting the autograph letters to herself from various historical

personages which were to figure in facsimile as documentary evidence in

the _Memoirs_ which she was preparing for the press, and a historian,

solemn and tongue-tied, who hearing that she had inherited and still

possessed a portrait of the Duchesse de Montmorency, had come to ask her

permission to reproduce it as a plate in his work on the Fronde; a party

strengthened presently by the addition of my old friend Bloch, now a

rising dramatist, upon whom she counted to secure the gratuitous

services of actors and actresses at her next series of afternoon

parties. It was true that the social kaleidoscope was in the act of

turning and that the Dreyfus case was shortly to hurl the Jews down to

the lowest rung of the social ladder. But, for one thing, the

anti-Dreyfus cyclone might rage as it would, it is not in the first hour

of a storm that the waves are highest. In the second place, Mme. de

Villeparisis, leaving a whole section of her family to fulminate against

the Jews, had hitherto kept herself entirely aloof from the Case and

never gave it a thought. Lastly, a young man like Bloch, whom no one

knew, might pass unperceived, whereas leading Jews, representatives of

their party, were already threatened. He had his chin pointed now by a

goat-beard, wore double glasses and a long frock coat, and carried a

glove like a roll of papyrus in his hand. The Rumanians, the Egyptians,

the Turks may hate the Jews. But in a French drawing-room the

differences between those peoples are not so apparent, and an Israelite

making his entry as though he were emerging from the heart of the

desert, his body crouching like a hyaena’s, his neck thrust obliquely

forward, spreading himself in profound “salaams”, completely satisfies a

certain taste for the oriental. Only it is essential that the Jew should

not be actually “in” society, otherwise he will readily assume the

aspect of a lord and his manners become so Gallicised that on his face a

rebellious nose, growing like a nasturtium in any but the right

direction, will make one think rather of Mascarille’s nose than of

Solomon’s. But Bloch, not having been rendered supple by the gymnastics

of the Faubourg, nor ennobled by a crossing with England or Spain,

remained for a lover of the exotic as strange and savoury a spectacle,

in spite of his European costume, as one of Decamps’s Jews. Marvellous

racial power which from the dawn of time thrusts to the surface, even in

modern Paris, on the stage of our theatres, behind the pigeonholes of

our public offices, at a funeral, in the street, a solid phalanx,

setting their mark upon our modern ways of hairdressing, absorbing,

making us forget, disciplining the frock coat which on them remains not

at all unlike the garment in which Assyrian scribes are depicted in

ceremonial attire on the frieze of a monument at Susa before the gates

of the Palace of Darius. (Later in the afternoon Bloch might have

imagined that it was out of anti-semitic malice that M. de Charlus

inquired whether his first name was Jewish, whereas it was simply from

aesthetic interest and love of local colour.) But, to revert for a

moment, when we speak of racial persistence we do not accurately convey

the impression we receive from Jews, Greeks, Persians, all those peoples

whom it is better to leave with their differences. We know from

classical paintings the faces of the ancient Greeks, we have seen

Assyrians on the walls of a palace at Susa. And so we feel, on

encountering in a Paris drawing-room Orientals belonging to one or other

group, that we are in the presence of creatures whom the forces of

necromancy must have called to life. We knew hitherto only a superficial

image; behold it has gained depth, it extends into three dimensions, it

moves. The young Greek lady, daughter of a rich banker and the latest

favourite of society, looks exactly like one of those dancers who in the

chorus of a ballet at once historical and aesthetic symbolise in flesh

and blood the art of Hellas; and yet in the theatre the setting makes

these images somehow trite; the spectacle, on the other hand, to which

the entry into a drawing-room of a Turkish lady or a Jewish gentleman

admits us, by animating their features makes them appear stranger still,

as if they really were creatures evoked by the effort of a medium. It is

the soul (or rather the pigmy thing to which—up to the present, at any

rate—the soul is reduced in this sort of materialisation), it is the

soul of which we have caught glimpses hitherto in museums alone, the

soul of the ancient Greeks, of the ancient Hebrews, torn from a life at

once insignificant and transcendental, which seems to be enacting before

our eyes this disconcerting pantomime. In the young Greek lady who is

leaving the room what we seek in vain to embrace is the figure admired

long ago on the side of a vase. I felt that if I had in the light of

Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room taken photographs of Bloch, they

would have furnished of Israel the same image—so disturbing because it

does not appear to emanate from humanity, so deceiving because all the

same it is so strangely like humanity—which we find in spirit

photographs. There is nothing, to speak more generally, not even the

insignificance of the remarks made by the people among whom we spend our

lives, that does not give us a sense of the supernatural, in our

every-day world where even a man of genius from whom we expect, gathered

as though around a turning table, to learn the secret of the Infinite

utters only these words—the same that had just issued from the lips of

Bloch: “Take care of my top hat.”

“Oh, Ministers, my dear sir,” Mme. de Villeparisis was saying,

addressing herself specially to my friend, and picking up the thread of

a conversation which had been broken by my arrival: “nobody ever wanted

to see them. I was only a child at the time, but I can remember so well

the King begging my grandfather to invite M. Decazes to a rout at which

my father was to dance with the Duchesse de Berry. ‘It will give me

pleasure, Florimond,’ said the King. My grandfather, who was a little

deaf, thought he had said M. de Castries, which seemed a perfectly

natural thing to ask. When he understood that it was M. Decazes, he was

furious at first, but he gave in, and wrote a note the same evening to

M. Decazes, begging him to pay my grandfather the compliment and give

him the honour of his presence at the ball which he was giving the

following week. For we were polite, sir, in those days, and no hostess

would have dreamed of simply sending her card and writing on it ‘Tea’ or

‘Dancing’ or ‘Music‘. But if we understood politeness we were not

incapable of impertinence either. M. Decazes accepted, but the day

before the ball it was given out that my grandfather felt indisposed and

had cancelled his invitations. He had obeyed the King, but he had not

had M. Decazes at his ball.... Yes, sir, I remember M. Molé very well,

he was a clever man—he shewed that in his reception of M. de Vigny at

the Academy—but he was very pompous, and I can see him now coming

downstairs to dinner in his own house with his tall hat in his hand.”

“Ah! that is typically suggestive of what must have been a pretty

perniciously philistine epoch, for it was no doubt a universal habit to

carry one’s hat in one’s hand in one’s own house,” observed Bloch,

anxious to make the most of so rare an opportunity of learning from an

eyewitness details of the aristocratic life of another day, while the

librarian, who was a sort of intermittent secretary to the Marquise,

gazed at her tenderly as though he were saying to the rest of us:

“There, you see what she’s like, she knows everything, she has met

everybody, you can ask her anything you like, she’s quite amazing.”

“Oh, dear, no,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis, drawing nearer to her as

she spoke the glass containing the maiden-hair which presently she would

begin again to paint, “it was a habit M. Molé had; that was all. I never

saw my father carry his hat in the house, except of course when the King

came, because the King being at home wherever he is the master of the

house is only a visitor then in his own drawing-room.”

“Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of ...” ventured M. Pierre,

the historian of the Fronde, but so timidly that no one paid any

attention. Having been suffering for some weeks from a nervous insomnia

which resisted every attempt at treatment, he had given up going to bed,

and, half-dead with exhaustion, went out only whenever his work made it

imperative. Incapable of repeating at all often these expeditions which,

simple enough for other people, cost him as much effort as if, to make

them, he was obliged to come down from the moon, he was surprised to be

brought up so frequently against the fact that other people’s lives were

not organised on a constant and permanent basis so as to furnish the

maximum utility to the sudden outbursts of his own. He sometimes found

the doors shut of a library which he had reached only after setting

himself artificially on his feet and in a frock coat like some automaton

in a story by Mr. Wells. Fortunately he had found Mme. de Villeparisis

at home and was going to be shewn the portrait.

Meanwhile he was cut short by Bloch. “Indeed,” the latter remarked,

referring to what Mme. de Villeparisis had said as to the etiquette for

royal visits. “Do you know, I never knew that,” as though it were

strange that he should not have known it always.

“Talking of that sort of visit, you heard the stupid joke my nephew

Basin played on me yesterday morning?” Mme. de Villeparisis asked the

librarian. “He told my people, instead of announcing him, to say that it

was the Queen of Sweden who had called to see me.”

“What! He made them tell you just like that! I say, he must have a

nerve,” exclaimed Bloch with a shout of laughter, while the historian

smiled with a stately timidity.

“I was quite surprised, because I had only been back from the country a

few days; I had specially arranged, just to be left in peace for a

little, that no one was to be told that I was in Paris, and I asked

myself how the Queen of Sweden could have heard so soon,” went on Mme.

de Villeparisis, leaving her guests amazed to find that a visit from the

Queen of Sweden was in itself nothing out of the common to their

hostess.

Earlier in the day Mme. de Villeparisis might have been collaborating

with the librarian in arranging the illustrations to her _Memoirs_; now

she was, quite unconsciously, trying their effect on an average public

typical of that from which she would eventually have to enlist her

readers. Hers might be different in many ways from a really fashionable

drawing-room in which you would have been struck by the absence of a

number of middle class ladies to whom Mme. de Villeparisis was “at

home”, and would have noticed instead such brilliant leaders of fashion

as Mme. Leroi had in course of time managed to secure, but this

distinction is not perceptible in her _Memoirs_, from which certain

unimportant friendships of the author have disappeared because there is

never any occasion to refer to them; while the absence of those who did

not come to see her leaves no gap because, in the necessarily restricted

space at the author’s disposal, only a few persons can appear, and if

these persons are royal personages, historic personalities, then the

utmost impression of distinction which any volume of memoirs can convey

to the public is achieved. In the opinion of Mme. Leroi, Mme. de

Villeparisis’s parties were third-rate; and Mme. de Villeparisis felt

the sting of Mme. Leroi’s opinion. But hardly anyone to-day remembers

who Mme. Leroi was, her opinions have vanished into thin air, and it is

the drawing-room of Mme. de Villeparisis, frequented as it was by the

Queen of Sweden, and as it had been by the Duc d’Aumale, the Duc de

Broglie, Thiers, Montalembert, Mgr. Dupanloup, which will be looked upon

as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by that posterity

which has not changed since the days of Homer and Pindar, and for which

the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-royal, and the

friendship of kings, the leaders of the people and other eminent men.

Now of all this Mme. de Villeparisis had her share in the people who

still came to her house and in the memories—sometimes slightly “touched

up”—by means of which she extended her social activity into the past.

And then there was M. de Norpois who, while unable to restore his friend

to any substantial position in society, did indeed bring to her house

such foreign or French statesmen as might have need of his services and

knew that the only effective method of securing them was to pay court to

Mme. de Villeparisis. Possibly Mme. Leroi also knew these European

celebrities. But, as a well-mannered woman who avoids anything that

suggests the bluestocking, she would as little have thought of

mentioning the Eastern question to her Prime Ministers as of discussing

the nature of love with her novelists and philosophers. “Love?” she had

once replied to a pushing lady who had asked her: “What are your views

on love?”—“Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.” When

she had any of these literary or political lions in her house she

contented herself, as did the Duchesse de Guermantes, with setting them

down to play poker. They often preferred this to the serious

conversations on general ideas in which Mme. de Villeparisis forced them

to engage. But these conversations, ridiculous as in the social sense

they may have been, have furnished the _Memoirs_ of Mme. de Villeparisis

with those admirable passages, those dissertations on politics which

read so well in volumes of autobiography, as they do in Corneille’s

tragedies. Furthermore, the parties of the Villeparisis of this world

are alone destined to be handed down to posterity, because the Lerois of

this world cannot write, and, if they could, would not have the time.

And if the literary bent of the Villeparisis is the cause of the Lerois‘

disdain, the disdain of the Lerois does, in its turn, a singular service

to the literary bent of the Villeparisis by affording the bluestockings

that leisure which the career of letters requires. God, Whose Will it is

that there should be a few books in the world well written, breathes

with that purpose such disdain into the hearts of the Lerois, for He

knows that if these should invite the Villeparisis to dinner the latter

would at once rise from their writing tables and order their carriages

to be round at eight.

Presently there came into the room, with slow and solemn step, an old

lady of tall stature who, beneath the raised brim of her straw hat,

revealed a monumental pile of snowy hair in the style of

Marie-Antoinette. I did not then know that she was one of three women

who were still to be seen in Parisian society and who, like Mme. de

Villeparisis, while all of the noblest birth, had been reduced, for

reasons which were now lost in the night of time and could have been

told us only by some old gallant of their period, to entertaining only

certain of the dregs of society who were not sought after elsewhere.

Each of these ladies had her own “Duchesse de Guermantes”, the brilliant

niece who came regularly to pay her respects, but none of them could

have succeeded in attracting to her house the “Duchesse de Guermantes”

of either of the others. Mme. de Villeparisis was on the best of terms

with these three ladies, but she did not like them. Perhaps the

similarity between their social position and her own gave her an

impression of them which was not pleasing. Besides, soured bluestockings

as they were, seeking by the number and frequency of the drawing-room

comedies which they arranged in their houses to give themselves the

illusion of a regular salon, there had grown up among them a rivalry

which the decay of her fortune in the course of a somewhat tempestuous

existence reduced for each of them, when it was a question of securing

the kind assistance of a professional actor or actress, into a sort of

struggle for life. Furthermore, the lady with the Marie-Antoinette hair,

whenever she set eyes on Mme. de Villeparisis, could not help being

reminded of the fact that the Duchesse de Guermantes did not come to her

Fridays. Her consolation was that at these same Fridays she could always

count on having, blood being thicker than water, the Princesse de Poix,

who was her own personal Guermantes, and who never went near Mme. de

Villeparisis, albeit Mme. de Poix was an intimate friend of the Duchess.

Nevertheless from the mansion on the Quai Malaquais to the drawing-rooms

of the Rue de Tournon, the Rue de la Chaise and the Faubourg

Saint-Honoré, a bond as compelling as it was hateful united the three

fallen goddesses, as to whom I would fain have learned by searching in

some dictionary of social mythology through what gallant adventure, what

sacrilegious presumption, they had incurred their punishment. Their

common brilliance of origin, the common decay of their present state

entered largely, no doubt, into the necessity which compelled them,

while hating one another, to frequent one another’s society. Besides,

each of them found in the others a convenient way of being polite to her

own guests. How should these fail to suppose that they had scaled the

most inaccessible peak of the Faubourg when they were introduced to a

lady with a string of titles whose sister was married to a Duc de Sagan

or a Prince de Ligne? Especially as there was infinitely more in the

newspapers about these sham salons than about the genuine ones. Indeed

these old ladies’ “men about town” nephews—and Saint-Loup the foremost

of them—when asked by a friend to introduce him to people, would answer

at once “I will take you to see my aunt Villeparisis,” (or whichever it

was) “you meet interesting people there.” They knew very well that this

would mean less trouble for themselves than trying to get the said

friends invited by the smart nieces or sisters-in-law of these ladies.

Certain very old men, and young women who had heard it from those men,

told me that if these ladies were no longer received in society it was

because of the extraordinary irregularity of their conduct, which, when

I objected that irregular conduct was not necessarily a barrier to

social success, was represented to me as having gone far beyond anything

that we know to-day. The misconduct of these solemn dames who held

themselves so erect assumed on the lips of those who hinted at it

something that I was incapable of imagining, proportionate to the

magnitude of prehistoric days, to the age of the mammoth. In a word,

these three Parcae with their white or blue or red locks had spun the

fatal threads of an incalculable number of gentlemen. I felt that the

people of to-day exaggerated the vices of those fabulous times, like the

Greeks who created Icarus, Theseus, Heracles out of men who had been but

little different from those who long afterwards deified them. But one

does not tabulate the sum of a person’s vices until he has almost ceased

to be in a fit state to practise them, when from the magnitude of his

social punishment, which is then nearing the completion of its term and

which alone one can estimate, one measures, one imagines, one

exaggerates that of the crime that has been committed. In that gallery

of symbolical figures which is “society”, the really light women, the

true Messalinas, invariably present the solemn aspect of a lady of at

least seventy, with an air of lofty distinction, who entertains everyone

she can but not everyone she would like to have, to whose house women

will never consent to go whose own conduct falls in any way short of

perfection, to whom the Pope regularly sends his Golden Rose, and who as

often as not has written—on the early days of Lamartine—an essay that

has been crowned by the French Academy. “How d’ye do, Alix?” Mme. de

Villeparisis greeted the Marie-Antoinette lady, which lady cast a

searching glance round the assembly to see whether there was not in this

drawing-room any item that might be a valuable addition to her own, in

which case she would have to discover it for herself, for Mme. de

Villeparisis, she was sure, would be spiteful enough to try to keep it

from her. Thus Mme. de Villeparisis took good care not to introduce

Bloch to the old lady for fear of his being asked to produce the same

play that he was arranging for her in the drawing-room of the Quai

Malaquais. Besides it was only tit for tat. For, the evening before, the

old lady had had Mme. Ristori, who had recited, and had taken care that

Mme. de Villeparisis, from whom she had filched the Italian artist,

should not hear of this function until it was over. So that she should

not read it first in the newspapers and feel annoyed, the old lady had

come in person to tell her about it, shewing no sense of guilt. Mme. de

Villeparisis, considering that an introduction of myself was not likely

to have the same awkward results as that of Bloch, made me known to the

Marie-Antoinette of the Quai Malaquais. The latter, who sought, by

making the fewest possible movements, to preserve in her old age those

lines, as of a Coysevox goddess, which had years ago charmed the young

men of fashion and which spurious poets still celebrated in rhymed

charades—and had acquired the habit of a lofty and compensating

stiffness common to all those whom a personal degradation obliges to be

continually making advances—just perceptibly lowered her head with a

frigid majesty, and, turning the other way, took no more notice of me

than if I had not existed. By this crafty attitude she seemed to be

assuring Mme. de Villeparisis: “You see, I’m nowhere near him; please

understand that I’m not interested—in any sense of the word, you old

cat—in little boys.” But when, twenty minutes later, she left the room,

taking advantage of the general conversation, she slipped into my ear an

invitation to come to her box the following Friday with another of the

three, whose high-sounding name—she had been born a Choiseul,

moreover—had a prodigious effect on me.

“I understand, sir, that you are thinkin’ of writin’ somethin’ about

Mme. la Duchesse de Montmorency,” said Mme. de Villeparisis to the

historian of the Fronde in that grudging tone which she allowed, quite

unconsciously, to spoil the effect of her great and genuine kindness, a

tone due to the shrivelling crossness, the sense of grievance that is a

physiological accompaniment of age, as well as to the affectation of

imitating the almost rustic speech of the old nobility: “I’m goin’ to

let you see her portrait, the original of the copy they have in the

Louvre.”

She rose, laying down her brushes beside the flowers, and the little

apron which then came into sight at her waist, and which she wore so as

not to stain her dress with paints, added still further to the

impression of an old peasant given by her bonnet and her big spectacles,

and offered a sharp contrast to the luxury of her appointments, the

butler who had brought in the tea and cakes, the liveried footman for

whom she now rang to light up the portrait of the Duchesse de

Montmorency, Abbess of one of the most famous Chapters in the East of

France. Everyone had risen. “What is rather amusin’,” said our hostess,

“is that in these Chapters where our great-aunts were so often made

Abbesses, the daughters of the King of France would not have been

admitted. They were very close corporations.” “Not admit the King’s

daughters,” cried Bloch in amazement, “why ever not?” “Why, because the

House of France had not enough quarterin’s after that low marriage.”

Bloch’s bewilderment increased. “A low marriage? The House of France?

When was that?” “Why, when they married into the Medicis,” replied Mme.

de Villeparisis in the most natural manner. “It’s a fine picture, ain’t

it, and in a perfect state of preservation,” she added.

“My dear,” put in the Marie-Antoinette lady, “surely you remember that

when I brought Liszt to see you he said that it was this one that was

the copy.”

“I should bow to any opinion of Liszt on music, but not on painting.

Besides, he was quite off his head then, and I don’t remember his ever

saying anything of the sort. But it wasn’t you that brought him here.

I had met him any number of times at dinner at Princess

Sayn-Wittgenstein’s.”

Alix’s shot had missed fire; she stood silent, erect and motionless.

Plastered with layers of powder, her face had the appearance of a face

of stone. And, as the profile was noble, she seemed, on a triangular and

moss-grown pedestal hidden by her cape, the time-worn stucco goddess of

a park.

“Ah, I see another fine portrait,” began the historian.

The door opened and the Duchesse de Guermantes entered the room.

“Well, how are you?” Mme. de Villeparisis greeted her without moving her

head, taking from her apron-pocket a hand which she held out to the

newcomer; and then ceasing at once to take any notice of her niece, in

order to return to the historian: “That is the portrait of the Duchesse

de La Rochefoucauld....”

A young servant with a bold manner and a charming face (but so finely

chiselled, to ensure its perfection, that the nose was a little red and

the rest of the skin slightly flushed as though they were still smarting

from the recent and sculptural incision) came in bearing a card on a

salver.

“It is that gentleman who has been several times to see Mme. la

Marquise.”

“Did you tell him I was at home?”

“He heard the voices.”

“Oh, very well then, shew him in. It’s a man who was introduced to me,”

she explained. “He told me he was very anxious to come to the house. I

certainly never said he might. But here he’s taken the trouble to call

five times now; it doesn’t do to hurt people’s feelings. Sir,” she went

on to me, “and you, Sir,” to the historian of the Fronde, “let me

introduce my niece, the Duchesse de Guermantes.”

The historian made a low bow, as I did also, and since he seemed to

suppose that some friendly remark ought to follow this salute, his eyes

brightened and he was preparing to open his mouth when he was once more

frozen by the sight of Mme. de Guermantes who had taken advantage of the

independence of her torso to throw it forward with an exaggerated

politeness and bring it neatly back to a position of rest without

letting face or eyes appear to have noticed that anyone was standing

before them; after breathing a gentle sigh she contented herself with

manifesting the nullity of the impression that had been made on her by

the sight of the historian and myself by performing certain movements of

her nostrils with a precision that testified to the absolute inertia of

her unoccupied attention.

The importunate visitor entered the room, making straight for Mme. de

Villeparisis with an ingenuous, fervent air: it was Legrandin.

“Thank you so very much for letting me come and see you,” he began,

laying stress on the word “very”. “It is a pleasure of a quality

altogether rare and subtle that you confer on an old solitary; I assure

you that its repercussion....” He stopped short on catching sight of me.

“I was just shewing this gentleman a fine portrait of the Duchesse de La

Rochefoucauld, the wife of the author of the _Maxims_; it’s a family

picture.”

Mme. de Guermantes meanwhile had greeted Alix, with apologies for not

having been able, that year as in every previous year, to go and see

her. “I hear all about you from Madeleine,” she added.

“She was at luncheon with me to-day,” said the Marquise of the Quai

Malaquais, with the satisfying reflexion that Mme. de Villeparisis could

never say that.

Meanwhile I had been talking to Bloch, and fearing, from what I had been

told of his father’s change of attitude towards him, that he might be

envying my life, I said to him that his must be the happier of the two.

My remark was prompted solely by my desire to be friendly. But such

friendliness readily convinces those who cherish a high opinion of

themselves of their own good fortune, or gives them a desire to convince

other people. “Yes, I do lead a delightful existence,” Bloch assured me

with a beatified smile. “I have three great friends; I do not wish for

one more; an adorable mistress; I am infinitely happy. Rare is the

mortal to whom Father Zeus accords so much felicity.” I fancy that he

was anxious principally to extol himself and to make me envious. Perhaps

too there was some desire to shew originality in his optimism. It was

evident that he did not wish to reply in the commonplace phraseology

that everybody uses: “Oh, it was nothing, really,” and so forth, when,

to my question: “Was it a good show?” put with regard to an afternoon

dance at his house to which I had been prevented from going, he replied

in a level, careless tone, as if the dance had been given by some one

else: “Why, yes, it was quite a good show, couldn’t have been better. It

was really charming!”

“What you have just told us interests me enormously,” said Legrandin to

Mme. de Villeparisis, “for I was saying to myself only the other day

that you shewed a marked likeness to him in the clear-cut turn of your

speech, in a quality which I will venture to describe by two

contradictory terms, monumental rapidity and immortal instantaneousness.

I should have liked this afternoon to take down all the things you say;

but I shall remember them. They are, in a phrase which comes, I think,

from Joubert, friends of the memory. You have never read Joubert? Oh! he

would have admired you so! I will take the liberty this evening of

sending you a set of him, it is a privilege to make you a present of his

mind. He had not your strength. But he had a great deal of charm all the

same.”

I would have gone up to Legrandin at once and spoken to him, but he kept

as far away from me as he could, no doubt in the hope that I might not

overhear the stream of flattery which, with a remarkable felicity of

expression, he kept pouring out, whatever the topic, to Mme. de

Villeparisis.

She shrugged her shoulders, smiling, as though he had been trying to

make fun of her, and turned to the historian.

“And this is the famous Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, who was

married first of all to M. de Luynes.”

“My dear, speaking of Mme. de Luynes reminds me of Yolande; she came to

me yesterday evening, and if I had known that you weren’t engaged I’ld

have sent round to ask you to come. Mme. Ristori turned up quite by

chance, and recited some poems by Queen Carmen Sylva in the author’s

presence. It was too beautiful!”

“What treachery!” thought Mme. de Villeparisis. “Of course that was what

she was whispering about the other day to Mme. de Beaulaincourt and Mme.

de Chaponay. I had no engagement,” she replied, “but I should not have

come. I heard Ristori in her great days, she’s a mere wreck now. Besides

I detest Carmen Sylva’s poetry. Ristori came here once, the Duchess of

Aosta brought her, to recite a canto of the _Inferno_, by Dante. In that

sort of thing she’s incomparable.”

Alix bore the blow without flinching. She remained marble. Her gaze was

piercing and blank, her nose proudly arched. But the surface of one

cheek was scaling. A faint, strange vegetation, green and pink, was

invading her chin. Perhaps another winter would level her with the dust.

“Now, sir, if you are fond of painting, look at the portrait of Mme. de

Montmorency,” Mme. de Villeparisis said to Legrandin, to stop the flow

of compliments which was beginning again.

Seizing her opportunity, while his back was turned, Mme. de Guermantes

pointed to him, with an ironical, questioning look at her aunt.

“It’s M. Legrandin,” murmured Mme. de Villeparisis, “he has a sister

called Mme. de Cambremer, not that that conveys any more to you than it

does to me.”

“What! Oh, but I know her quite well!” exclaimed Mme. de Guermantes, and

put her hand over her lips. “That is to say, I don’t know her, but for

some reason or other Basin, who meets the husband heaven knows where,

took it into his head to tell the wretched woman she might call on me.

And she did. I can’t tell you what it was like. She informed me that she

had been to London, and gave me a complete catalogue of all the things

in the British Museum. And this very day, the moment I leave your house,

I’m going, just as you see me now, to drop a card on the monster. And

don’t for a moment suppose that it’s an easy thing to do. On the

pretence that she’s dying of some disease she’s always at home, it

doesn’t matter whether you arrive at seven at night or nine in the

morning, she’s ready for you with a dish of strawberry tarts.

“No, but seriously, you know, she is a monstrosity,” Mme. de Guermantes

replied to a questioning glance from her aunt. “She’s an impossible

person, she talks about ‘plumitives’ and things like that.” “What does

‘plumitive’ mean?” asked Mme. de Villeparisis. “I haven’t the slightest

idea!” cried the Duchess in mock indignation. “I don’t want to know. I

don’t speak that sort of language.” And seeing that her aunt really did

not know what a plumitive was, to give herself the satisfaction of

shewing that she was a scholar as well as a purist, and to make fun of

her aunt, now, after making fun of Mme. de Cambremer: “Why, of course,”

she said, with a half-laugh which the last traces of her pretended ill

humour kept in check, “everybody knows what it means; a plumitive is a

writer, a person who holds a pen. But it’s a dreadful word. It’s enough

to make your wisdom teeth drop out. Nothing will ever make me use words

like that.

“And so that’s the brother, is it? I hadn’t realized that yet. But after

all it’s not inconceivable. She has the same doormat docility and the

same mass of information like a circulating library. She’s just as much

of a flatterer as he is, and just as boring. Yes, I’m beginning to see

the family likeness now quite plainly.”

“Sit down, we’re just going to take a dish of tea,” said Mme. de

Villeparisis to her niece. “Help yourself; you don’t want to look at the

pictures of your great-grandmothers, you know them as well as I do.”

Presently Mme. de Villeparisis sat down again at her desk and went on

with her painting. The rest of the party gathered round her, and I took

the opportunity to go up to Legrandin and, seeing no harm myself in his

presence in Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room and never dreaming how

much my words would at once hurt him and make him believe that I had

deliberately intended to hurt him, say: “Well, sir, I am almost excused

for coming to a tea-party when I find you here too.” M. Legrandin

concluded from this speech (at least this was the opinion which he

expressed of me a few days later) that I was a thoroughly spiteful

little wretch who delighted only in doing mischief.

“You might at least have the civility to begin by saying how d’ye do to

me,” he replied, without offering me his hand and in a coarse and angry

voice which I had never suspected him of possessing, a voice which

bearing no traceable relation to what he ordinarily said did bear

another more immediate and striking relation to something that he was

feeling at the moment. What happens is that since we are determined

always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any

thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly

there is within us a strange and obscene animal making its voice heard,

the tones of which may inspire as much terror in the listener who

receives the involuntary elliptical irresistible communication of our

defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and uncouthly

proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing a

murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty. I knew, of

course, that idealism, even subjective idealism did not prevent great

philosophers from still having hearty appetites or from presenting

themselves with untiring perseverance for election to the Academy. But

really Legrandin had no occasion to remind people so often that he

belonged to another planet when all his convulsive movements of anger or

affability were governed by the desire to occupy a good position on

this.

“Naturally, when people pester me twenty times on end to go anywhere,”

he went on in lower tones, “although I am perfectly free to do what I

choose, still I can’t behave like an absolute boor.”

Mme. de Guermantes had sat down. Her name, accompanied as it was by her

title, added to her corporeal dimensions the duchy which projected

itself round about her and brought the shadowy, sun-splashed coolness of

the woods of Guermantes into this drawing-room, to surround the tuffet

on which she was sitting. I felt surprised only that the likeness of

those woods was not more discernible on the face of the Duchess, about

which there was nothing suggestive of vegetation, and at the most the

ruddy discolouration of her cheeks—which ought rather, surely, to have

been emblazoned with the name Guermantes—was the effect, but did not

furnish a picture of long gallops in the open air. Later on, when she

had ceased to interest me, I came to know many of the Duchess’s

peculiarities, notably (to speak for the moment only of that one of

which I already at this time felt the charm though without yet being

able to discover what it was) her eyes, in which was held captive as in

a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in France, broadly expansive,

bathed in light even when no sun shone; and a voice which one would have

thought, from its first hoarse sounds, to be almost plebeian, through

which there trailed, as over the steps of the church at Combray or the

pastry-cook’s in the square, the rich and lazy gold of a country sun.

But on this first day I discerned nothing, the warmth of my attention

volatilised at once the little that I might otherwise have been able to

extract from her, in which I should have found some indication of the

name Guermantes. In any case, I told myself that it was indeed she who

was designated for all the world by the title Duchesse de Guermantes:

the inconceivable life which that name signified, this body did indeed

contain; it had just introduced that life into a crowd of different

creatures, in this room which enclosed it on every side and on which it

produced so violent a reaction that I thought I could see, where the

extent of that mysterious life ceased, a fringe of effervescence outline

its frontiers: round the circumference of the circle traced on the

carpet by the balloon of her blue peking skirt, and in the bright eyes

of the Duchess at the point of intersection of the preoccupations, the

memories, the incomprehensible, scornful, amused and curious thoughts

which filled them from within and the outside images that were reflected

on their surface. Perhaps I should have been not quite so deeply stirred

had I met her at Mme. de Villeparisis’s at an evening party, instead of

seeing her thus on one of the Marquise’s “days”, at one of those

tea-parties which are for women no more than a brief halt in the course

of their afternoon’s outing, when, keeping on the hats in which they

have been driving through the streets, they waft into the close

atmosphere of a drawing-room the quality of the fresh air outside, and

give one a better view of Paris in the late afternoon than do the tall,

open windows through which one can hear the bowling wheels of their

victorias: Mme. de Guermantes wore a boating-hat trimmed with

cornflowers, and what they recalled to me was not, among the tilled

fields round Combray where I had so often gathered those flowers, on the

slope adjoining the Tansonville hedge, the suns of bygone years, it was

the scent and dust of twilight as they had been an hour ago, when Mme.

de Guermantes drove through them, in the Rue de la Paix. With a smiling,

disdainful, vague air, and a grimace on her pursed lips, with the point

of her sunshade, as with the extreme tip of an antenna of her mysterious

life, she was tracing circles on the carpet; then, with that indifferent

attention which begins by eliminating every point of contact with what

one is actually studying, her gaze fastened upon each of us in turn;

then inspected the sofas and armchairs, but softened this time by that

human sympathy which is aroused by the presence, however insignificant,

of a thing one knows, a thing that is almost a person; these pieces of

furniture were not like us, they belonged vaguely to her world, they

were bound up with the life of her aunt; then from the Beauvais

furniture her gaze was carried back to the person sitting on it, and

resumed then the same air of perspicacity and that same disapproval

which the respect that Mme. de Guermantes felt for her aunt would have

prevented her from expressing in words, but which she would obviously

have felt had she discovered on the chairs, instead of our presence,

that of a spot of grease or a layer of dust.

That admirable writer G—— entered the room; he had come to pay a call on

Mme. de Villeparisis which he regarded as a tiresome duty. The Duchess,

although delighted to see him again, gave him no sign of welcome, but

instinctively he made straight for her, the charm that she possessed,

her tact, her simplicity making him look upon her as a woman of

exceptional intelligence. He was bound, moreover, in common politeness

to go and talk to her, for, since he was a pleasant and a distinguished

man, Mme. de Guermantes frequently invited him to luncheon even when

there were only her husband and herself besides, or in the autumn to

Guermantes, making use of this intimacy to have him to dinner

occasionally with Royalties who were curious to meet him. For the

Duchess liked to entertain certain eminent men, on condition always that

they were bachelors, a condition which, even when married, they

invariably fulfilled for her, for, as their wives, who were bound to be

more or less common, would have been a blot on a drawing-room in which

there were never any but the most fashionable beauties in Paris, it was

always without them that their husbands were invited; and the Duke, to

avoid hurting any possible susceptibility, used to explain to these

involuntary widowers that the Duchess never had women in the house,

could not endure feminine society, almost as though this had been under

doctor’s orders, and as he might have said that she could not stay in a

room in which there were smells, or eat salt food, or travel with her

back to the engine, or wear stays. It was true that these eminent men

used to see at the Guermantes’ the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de

Sagan (whom Françoise, hearing her constantly mentioned, had taken to

calling, in the belief that this feminine ending was required by the

laws of accidence, “the Sagante”), and plenty more, but their presence

was accounted for by the explanation that they were relatives, or such

very old friends that it was impossible to exclude them. Whether or not

they were convinced by the explanations which the Duc de Guermantes had

given of the singular malady that made it impossible for the Duchess to

associate with other women, the great men duly transmitted them to their

wives. Some of these thought that this malady was only an excuse to

cloak her jealousy, because the Duchess wished to reign alone over a

court of worshippers. Others more simple still thought that perhaps the

Duchess had some peculiar habit, a scandalous past it might be, that

women did not care to go to her house and that she gave the name of a

whim to what was stern necessity. The better among them, hearing their

husbands expatiate on the Duchess’s marvellous brain, assumed that she

must be so far superior to the rest of womankind that she found their

society boring since they could not talk intelligently about anything.

And it was true that the Duchess was bored by other women, if their

princely rank did not render them specially interesting. But the

excluded wives were mistaken when they imagined that she chose to

entertain men alone in order to be free to discuss with them literature,

science and philosophy. For she never referred to these, at least with

the great intellectuals. If, by virtue of a family tradition such as

makes the daughters of great soldiers preserve, in the midst of their

most frivolous distractions, a respect for military matters, she, the

granddaughter of women who had been on terms of friendship with Thiers,

Mérimée and Augier, felt that a place must always be kept in her

drawing-room for men of intellect, she had on the other hand derived

from the manner, at once condescending and intimate, in which those

famous men had been received at Guermantes the foible of looking on men

of talent as family friends whose talent does not dazzle one, to whom

one does not speak of their work, and who would not be at all interested

if one did. Moreover the type of mind illustrated by Mérimée and Meilhac

and Halévy, which was hers also, led her by reaction from the verbal

sentimentality of an earlier generation to a style in conversation that

rejects everything to do with fine language and the expression of lofty

thoughts, so that she made it a sort of element of good breeding when

she was with a poet or a musician to talk only of the food that they

were eating or the game of cards to which they would afterwards sit

down. This abstention had, on a third person not conversant with her

ways, a disturbing effect which amounted to mystification. Mme. de

Guermantes, having asked him whether it would amuse him to come to

luncheon to meet this or that famous poet, devoured by curiosity he

would arrive at the appointed hour. The Duchess was talking to the poet

about the weather. They sat down to luncheon. “Do you like this way of

doing eggs?” she asked the poet. On hearing his approval, which she

shared, for everything in her own house appeared to her exquisite,

including a horrible cider which she imported from Guermantes: “Give

Monsieur some more eggs,” she would tell the butler, while the anxious

fellow-guest sat waiting for what must surely have been the object of

the party, since they had arranged to meet, in spite of every sort of

difficulty, before the Duchess, the poet and he himself left Paris. But

the meal went on, one after another the courses were cleared away, not

without having first provided Mme. de Guermantes with opportunities for

clever witticisms or apt stories. Meanwhile the poet went on eating, and

neither Duke nor Duchess shewed any sign of remembering that he was a

poet. And presently the luncheon came to an end and the party broke up,

without a word having been said about the poetry which, for all that,

everyone admired but to which, by a reserve analogous to that of which

Swann had given me a foretaste, no one might refer. This reserve was

simply a matter of good form. But for the fellow-guest, if he thought at

all about the matter, there was something strangely melancholy about it

all, and these meals in the Guermantes household made him think of the

hours which timid lovers often spend together in talking trivialities

until it is time to part, without—whether from shyness, from audacity or

from awkwardness—the great secret which they would have been happier had

they confessed ever succeeding in passing from their hearts to their

lips. It must, however, he added that this silence with regard to the

serious matters which one was always waiting in vain to see approached,

if it might pass as characteristic of the Duchess, was by no means

constant with her. Mme. de Guermantes had spent her girlhood in a

society somewhat different, equally aristocratic but less brilliant and

above all less futile than that in which she now lived, and one of wide

culture. It had left beneath her present frivolity a sort of bed-rock of

greater solidity, invisibly nutritious, to which indeed the Duchess

would repair in search (very rarely, though, for she detested pedantry)

of some quotation from Victor Hugo or Lamartine which, extremely

appropriate, uttered with a look of true feeling from her fine eyes,

never failed to surprise and charm her audience. Sometimes, even,

without any pretence of authority, pertinently and quite simply, she

would give some dramatist and Academician a piece of sage advice, would

make him modify a situation or alter an ending.

If, in the drawing room of Mme. de Villeparisis, just as in the church

at Combray, on the day of Mlle. Percepied’s wedding, I had difficulty in

discovering, in the handsome, too human face of Mme. de Guermantes the

unknown element of her name, I at least thought that, when she spoke,

her conversation, profound, mysterious, would have a strangeness as of a

mediaeval tapestry or a gothic window. But in order that I should not be

disappointed by the words which I should hear uttered by a person who

called herself Mme. de Guermantes, even if I had not been in love with

her, it would not have sufficed that those words were fine, beautiful

and profound, they would have had to reflect that amaranthine colour of

the closing syllable of her name, that colour which I had on my first

sight of her been disappointed not to find in her person and had driven

to take refuge in her mind. Of course I had already heard Mme. de

Villeparisis, Saint-Loup, people whose intelligence was in no way

extraordinary, pronounce without any precaution this name Guermantes,

simply as that of a person who was coming to see them or with whom they

had promised to dine, without seeming to feel that there were latent in

her name the glow of yellowing woods in autumn and a whole mysterious

tract of country. But this must have been an affectation on their part,

as when the classic poets give us no warning of the profound purpose

which they had, all the same, in writing, an affectation which I myself

also strove to imitate, saying in the most natural tone: “The Duchesse

de Guermantes,” as though it were a name that was just like other names.

And then everybody assured me that she was a highly intelligent woman, a

clever talker, that she was one of a little group of most interesting

people: words which became accomplices of my dream. For when they spoke

of an intelligent group, of clever talk, it was not at all the sort of

intelligence that I knew that I imagined, not even that of the greatest

minds, it was not at all with men like Bergotte that I peopled this

group. No, by intelligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by

the sun, impregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed, had she made the

most intelligent remarks (in the sense in which I understood the word

when it was used of a philosopher or critic), Mme. de Guermantes would

perhaps have disappointed even more keenly my expectation of so special

a faculty than if, in the course of a trivial conversation, she had

confined herself to discussing kitchen recipes or the furnishing of a

country house, to mentioning the names of neighbours and relatives of

her own, which would have given me a picture of her life.

“I thought I should find Basin here, he was meaning to come and see you

to-day,” said Mme. de Guermantes to her aunt.

“I haven’t set eyes on your husband for some days,” replied Mme. de

Villeparisis in a somewhat nettled tone. “In fact, I haven’t seen

him—well, I have seen him once, perhaps—since that charming joke he

played on me of making my servants announce him as the Queen of Sweden.”

Mme. de Guermantes formed a smile by contracting the corners of her

mouth as though she were biting her veil.

“We met her at dinner last night at Blanche Leroi’s. You wouldn’t know

her now, she’s positively enormous; I’m sure she must have something the

matter with her.”

“I was just telling these gentlemen that you said she looked like a

frog.”

Mme. de Guermantes uttered a sort of raucous sound intended to signify

that she acknowledged the compliment.

“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one

before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of

the ox. Or rather, it isn’t quite that, because all her swelling is

concentrated in front of her waist, she’s more like a frog in an

interesting condition.”

“Ah, that is quite clever,” said Mme. de Villeparisis, secretly proud

that her guests should be witnessing this display of her niece’s wit.

“It is purely _arbitrary_, though,” answered Mme. de Guermantes,

ironically detaching this selected epithet, as Swann would have done,

“for I must admit I never saw a frog in the family way. Anyhow, the frog

in question, who, by the way, is not asking for a king, for I never saw

her so skittish as she’s been since her husband died, is coming to dine

with us one day next week. I promised I’ld let you know in good time.”

Mme. de Villeparisis gave vent to a confused growl, from which emerged:

“I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the night before last.

Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me about it, and was

quite amusing, I must say.”

“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,” said Mme.

de Guermantes who, in view of her close friendship with M. de

Bréauté-Consalvi, felt that she must advertise their intimacy by the use

of this abbreviation. “I mean M. Bergotte.”

I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty; in fact,

I thought of him always as mingling with the intellectual section of

humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that mysterious realm of

which I had caught a glimpse through the purple hangings of a theatre

box, behind which, making the Duchess smile, M. de Bréauté was holding

with her, in the language of the gods, that unimaginable thing, a

conversation between people of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I was

stupefied to see the balance upset, and Bergotte rise above M. de

Bréauté. But above all I was dismayed to think that I had avoided

Bergotte on the evening of _Phèdre_, that I had not gone up and spoken

to him, when I heard Mme. de Guermantes say to Mme. de Villeparisis:

“He is the only person I have any wish to know,” went on the Duchess, in

whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of

curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of

her aristocratic snobbishness. “It would be such a pleasure.”

The presence of Bergotte by my side, which it would have been so easy

for me to secure but which I had thought liable to give Mme. de

Guermantes a bad impression of myself, would no doubt, on the contrary,

have had the result that she would have signalled to me to join her in

her box, and would have invited me to bring the eminent writer, one day,

to luncheon.

“I gather that he didn’t behave very well, he was presented to M. de

Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” said Mme. de Guermantes,

dwelling on this odd characteristic as she might have recounted that a

Chinaman had blown his nose on a sheet of paper. “He never once said

‘Monseigneur’ to him,” she added, with an air of amusement at this

detail, as important to her mind as the refusal of a Protestant, during

an audience with the Pope, to go on his knees before his Holiness.

Interested by these idiosyncrasies of Bergotte, she did not, however,

appear to consider them reprehensible, and seemed rather to find a

certain merit in them, though she would have been put to it to say of

what sort. Despite this unusual mode of appreciating Bergotte’s

originality, it was a fact which I was later on not to regard as wholly

negligible that Mme. de Guermantes, greatly to the surprise of many of

her friends, did consider Bergotte more witty than M. de Bréauté. Thus

it is that such judgments, subversive, isolated, and yet after all just,

are delivered in the world of fashion by those rare minds that are

superior to the rest. And they sketch then the first rough outlines of

the hierarchy of values as the next generation will establish it,

instead of abiding eternally by the old standards.

The Comte d’Argencourt, Chargé d’Affaires at the Belgian Legation and a

remote connexion of Mme. de Villeparisis, came limping in, followed

presently by two young men, the Baron de Guermantes and H. H. the Duc de

Châtellerault, whom Mme. de Guermantes greeted with: “How d’ye do, young

Châtellerault,” in a careless tone and without moving from her tuffet,

for she was a great friend of the young Duke’s mother, which had given

him a deep and lifelong respect for her. Tall, slender, with golden hair

and sunny complexions, thoroughly of the Guermantes type, these, two

young men looked like a condensation of the light of the spring evening

which was flooding the spacious room. Following a custom which was the

fashion at that time they laid their silk hats on the floor, by their

feet. The historian of the Fronde thought that they were embarrassed,

like a peasant coming into the mayor’s office and not knowing what to do

with his hat. Feeling that he ought in charity to come to the rescue of

the awkwardness and timidity which he ascribed to them:

“No, no,” he said, “don’t leave them on the floor, they’ll be trodden

on.”

A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils,

shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing azure which froze

the well-meaning historian.

“What is that person’s name?” I was asked by the Baron, who had just

been introduced to me by Mme. de Villeparisis.

“M. Pierre,” I whispered.

“Pierre what?”

“Pierre: it’s his name, he’s a historian, a most distinguished man.”

“Really? You don’t say so.”

“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the

floor,” Mme. de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get

used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves

his in the hall. I tell him when I see him come in that he looks just

like a clockmaker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”

“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Molé’s hat; we

shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said

the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme. de

Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one but

myself overheard him.

“She really is astonishing, the little Duchess,” said M. d’Argencourt,

pointing to Mme. de Guermantes who was talking to G——. “Whenever there’s

a famous man in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her.

Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t always

be M. de Borelli, of course, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel. But then

it’s bound to be M. Pierre Loti or M. Edmond Rostand. Yesterday evening

at the Doudeauvilles’, where by the way she was looking splendid in her

emerald tiara and a pink dress with a long train, she had M. Deschanel

on one side and the German Ambassador on the other: she was holding

forth to them about China; the general public, at a respectful distance

where they couldn’t hear what was being said, were wondering whether

there wasn’t going to be war. Really, you’d have said she was a Queen,

holding her circle.”

Everyone had gathered round Mme. de Villeparisis to watch her painting.

“Those flowers are a truly celestial pink,” said Legrandin, “I should

say sky-pink. For there is such a thing as sky-pink just as there is

sky-blue. But,” he lowered his voice in the hope that he would not be

heard by anyone but the Marquise, “I think I shall still give my vote to

the silky, living flesh tint of your rendering of them. You leave

Pisanello and Van Huysun a long way behind, with their laborious, dead

herbals.”

An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred

to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.

“What makes you think that is that they painted the flowers of their

period, which we don’t have now, but they did it with great skill.”

“Ah! The flowers of their period! That is a most ingenious theory,”

exclaimed Legrandin.

“I see you’re painting some fine cherry blossoms—or are they

mayflowers?” began the historian of the Fronde, not without hesitation

as to the flower, but with a note of confidence in his voice, for he was

beginning to forget the incident of the hats.

“No; they’re apple blossom,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, addressing

her aunt.

“Ah! I see you’re a good countrywoman like me; you can tell one flower

from another.”

“Why yes, so they are! But I thought the season for apple blossom was

over now,” said the historian, seeking wildly to cover his mistake.

“Oh dear, no; far from it, it’s not out yet; the trees won’t be in

blossom for another fortnight, not for three weeks perhaps,” said the

librarian who, since he helped with the management of Mme. de

Villeparisis’s estates, was better informed upon country matters.

“At least three weeks,” put in the Duchess; “even round Paris, where

they’re very far forward. Down in Normandy, don’t you know, at his

father’s place,” she went on, pointing to the young Duc de

Châtellerault, “where they have some splendid apple trees close to the

seashore, like a Japanese screen, they’re never really pink until after

the twentieth of May.”

“I never see them,” said the young Duke, “because they give me hay

fever. Such a bore.”

“Hay fever? I never heard of that before,” said the historian.

“It’s the fashionable complaint just now,” the librarian informed him.

“That all depends, you won’t get it at all, probably, if it’s a good

year for apples. You know Le Normand’s saying: ‘When it’s a good year

for apples ...’,” put in M. d’Argencourt who, not being really French,

was always trying to give himself a Parisian air.

“You’re quite right,” Mme. de Villeparisis told her niece, “these are

from the South. It was a florist who sent them round and asked me to

accept them as a present. You’re surprised, I dare say, Monsieur

Valmère,” she turned to the librarian, “that a florist should make me a

present of apple blossom. Well, I may be an old woman, but I’m not quite

on the shelf yet, I have still a few friends,” she went on with a smile

that might have been taken as a sign of her simple nature but meant

rather, I could not help feeling, that she thought it effective to pride

herself on the friendship of a mere florist when she moved in such

distinguished circles.

Bloch rose and went over to look at the flowers which Mme. de

Villeparisis was painting.

“Never mind, Marquise,” said the historian, sitting down again, “even

though we should have another of those Revolutions which have stained so

many pages of our history with blood—and, upon my soul, in these days

one can never tell,” he added, with a circular and circumspect glance,

as though to make sure that there was no “disaffected” person in the

room, though he had not the least suspicion that there actually was,

“with a talent like yours and your five languages you would be certain

to get on all right.” The historian of the Fronde was feeling quite

refreshed, for he had forgotten his insomnia. But he suddenly remembered

that he had not slept for the last six nights, whereupon a crushing

weariness, born of his mind, paralysed his limbs, made him bow his

shoulders, and his melancholy face began to droop like an old man’s.

Bloch tried to express his admiration in an appropriate gesture, but

only succeeded in knocking over with his elbow the glass containing the

spray of apple blossom, and all the water was spilled on the carpet.

“Really, you have the fingers of a fairy,” went on (to the Marquise) the

historian who, having his back turned, to me at that moment, had not

noticed Bloch’s clumsiness.

But Bloch took this for a sneer at himself, and to cover his shame in

insolence retorted: “It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.”

Mme. de Villeparisis rang the bell and a footman came to wipe the carpet

and pick up the fragments of glass. She invited the two young men to her

theatricals, and also Mme. de Guermantes, with the injunction:

“Remember to tell Gisèle and Berthe” (the Duchesses d’Auberjon and de

Portefin) “to be here a little before two to help me,” as she might have

told the hired waiters to come early to arrange the tables.

She treated her princely relatives, as she treated M. de Norpois,

without any of the little courtesies which she shewed to the historian,

Cottard, Bloch and myself, and they seemed to have no interest for her

beyond the possibility of serving them up as food for our social

curiosity. This was because she knew that she need not put herself out

to entertain people for whom she was not a more or less brilliant woman

but the touchy old sister—who needed and received tactful handling—of

their father or uncle. There would have been no object in her trying to

shine before them, she could never have deceived them as to the strength

and weakness of her position, for they knew (none so well) her whole

history and respected the illustrious race from which she sprang. But,

above all, they had ceased to be anything more for her than a dead stock

which would not bear fruit again, they would not let her know their new

friends, or share their pleasures. She could obtain from them only their

occasional presence, or the possibility of speaking of them, at her five

o’clock tea-parties as, later on, in her _Memoirs_, of which these

parties were only a sort of rehearsal, a preliminary reading aloud of

the manuscript before a selected audience. And the society which all

these noble kinsmen and kinswomen served to interest, to dazzle, to

enthral, the society of the Cottards, of the Blochs, of the dramatists

who were in the public eye at the moment, of the historians of the

Fronde and such matters; it was in this society that there existed for

Mme. de Villeparisis—failing that section of the fashionable world which

did not call upon her—the movement, the novelty, all the entertainment

of life, it was from people like these that she was able to derive

social benefits (which made it well worth her while to let them meet,

now and then, though without ever coming to know her, the Duchesse de

Guermantes), dinners with remarkable men whose work had interested her,

a light opera or a pantomime staged complete by its author in her

drawing-room, boxes for interesting shows. Bloch got up to go. He had

said aloud that the incident of the broken flower-glass was of no

importance, but what he said to himself was different, more different

still what he thought: “If people can’t train their servants to put

flowers where they won’t be knocked over and wet their guests and

probably cut their hands, it’s much better not to go in for such

luxuries,” he muttered angrily. He was one of those susceptible, highly

strung persons who cannot bear to think of themselves as having made a

blunder which, though they do not admit even to themselves that they

have made it, is enough to spoil their whole day. In a black rage, he

was just making up his mind never to go into society again. He had

reached the point at which some distraction was imperative. Fortunately

in another minute Mme. de Villeparisis was to press him to stay. Either

because she was aware of the general feeling among her friends, and had

noticed the tide of anti-semitism that was beginning to rise, or simply

from carelessness, she had not introduced him to any of the people in

the room. He, however, being little used to society, felt bound before

leaving the room to take leave of them all, to shew his manners, but

without any friendliness; he lowered his head several times, buried his

bearded chin in his collar, scrutinised each of the party in turn

through his glasses with a cold, dissatisfied glare. But Mme. de

Villeparisis stopped him; she had still to discuss with him the little

play which was to be performed in her house, and also she did not wish

him to leave before he had had the pleasure of meeting M. de Norpois

(whose failure to appear puzzled her), although as an inducement to

Bloch this introduction was quite superfluous, he having already decided

to persuade the two actresses whose names he had mentioned to her to

come and sing for nothing in the Marquise’s drawing-room, to enhance

their own reputations, at one of those parties to which all that was

best and noblest in Europe thronged. He had even offered her, in

addition, a tragic actress “with pure eyes, fair as Hera,” who would

recite lyrical prose with a sense of plastic beauty. But on hearing this

lady’s name Mme. de Villeparisis had declined, for it was that of

Saint-Loup’s mistress.

“I have better news,” she murmured in my ear, “I really believe he’s

quite cooled off now, and that before very long they’ll be parted—in

spite of an officer who has played an abominable part in the whole

business,” she added. For Robert’s family were beginning to look with a

deadly hatred on M. de Borodino, who had given him leave, at the

hairdresser’s instance, to go to Bruges, and accused him of giving

countenance to an infamous intrigue. “It’s really too bad of him,” said

Mme. de Villeparisis with that virtuous accent common to all the

Guermantes, even the most depraved. “Too, too bad,” she repeated, giving

the word a trio of ’t’s. One felt that she had no doubt of the Prince’s

being present at all their orgies. But, as kindness of heart was the old

lady’s dominant quality, her expression of frowning severity towards the

horrible captain, whose name she articulated with an ironical emphasis:

“The Prince de Borodino!”—speaking as a woman for whom the Empire simply

did not count, melted into a gentle smile at myself with a mechanical

twitch of the eyelid indicating a vague understanding between us.

“I have a great admiration for de Saint-Loup-en-Bray,” said Bloch,

“dirty dog as he is, because he’s so extremely well-bred. I have a great

admiration, not for him but for well-bred people, they’re so rare,” he

went on, without thinking, since he was himself so extremely ill-bred,

what offence his words were giving. “I will give you an example which I

consider most striking of his perfect breeding. I met him once with a

young gentleman just as he was about to spring into his wheelèd chariot,

after he himself had buckled their splendid harness on a pair of steeds,

whose mangers were heaped with oats and barley, who had no need of the

flashing whip to urge them on. He introduced us, but I did not catch the

gentleman’s name; one never does catch people’s names when one’s

introduced to them,” he explained with a laugh, this being one of his

father’s witticisms. “De Saint-Loup-en-Bray was perfectly calm, made no

fuss about the young gentleman, seemed absolutely at his ease. Well, I

found out, by pure chance, a day or two later, that the young gentleman

was the son of Sir Rufus Israels!”

The end of this story sounded less shocking than its preface, for it

remained quite incomprehensible to everyone in the room. The fact was

that Sir Rufus Israels, who seemed to Bloch and his father an almost

royal personage before whom Saint-Loup ought to tremble, was in the eyes

of the Guermantes world a foreign upstart, tolerated in society, on

whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself, far

from it.

“I learned this,” Bloch informed us, “from the person who holds Sir

Rufus’s power of attorney; he is a friend of my father, and quite an

extraordinary man. Oh, an absolutely wonderful individual,” he assured

us with that affirmative energy, that note of enthusiasm which one puts

only into those convictions that did not originate with oneself.

“Tell me,” Bloch went on, lowering his voice, to myself, “how much do

you suppose Saint-Loup has? Not that it matters to me in the least, you

quite understand, don’t you. I’m interested from the Balzacian point of

view. You don’t happen to know what it’s in, French stocks, foreign

stocks, or land or what?”

I could give him no information whatsoever. Suddenly raising his voice,

Bloch asked if he might open the windows, and without waiting for an

answer, went across the room to do so. Mme. de Villeparisis protested

that he must not, that she had a cold. “Of course, if it’s bad for you!”

Bloch was downcast. “But you can’t say it’s not hot in here.” And

breaking into a laugh he put into the gaze with which he swept the room

an appeal for support against Mme. de Villeparisis. He received none,

from these well-bred people. His blazing eyes, having failed to seduce

any of the guests from their allegiance, faded with resignation to their

normal gravity of expression; he acknowledged his defeat with: “What’s

the temperature? Seventy-two, at least, I should say. I’m not surprised.

I’m simply dripping. And I have not, like the sage Antenor, son of the

river Alpheus, the power to plunge myself in the paternal wave to stanch

my sweat before laying my body in a bath of polished marble and

anointing my limbs with fragrant oils.” And with that need which people

feel to outline for the use of others medical theories the application

of which would be beneficial to their own health: “Well, if you believe

it’s good for you! I must say, I think you’re quite wrong. It’s exactly

what gives you your cold.”

Bloch was overjoyed at the idea of meeting M. de Norpois. He would like,

he told us, to get him to talk about the Dreyfus case. “There’s a

mentality at work there which I don’t altogether understand, and it

would be quite sensational to get an interview out of this eminent

diplomat,” he said in a tone of sarcasm, so as not to appear to be

rating himself below the Ambassador.

Mme. de Villeparisis was sorry that he had said this so loud, but minded

less when she saw that the librarian, whose strong Nationalist views

kept her, so to speak, on leash, was too far off to have overheard. She

was more shocked to hear Bloch, led on by that demon of ill-breeding

which made him permanently blind to the consequences of what he said,

inquiring, with a laugh at the paternal pleasantry: “Haven’t I read a

learned treatise by him in which he sets forth a string of irrefutable

arguments to prove that the Japanese war was bound to end in a Russian

victory and a Japanese defeat? He’s fairly paralytic now, isn’t he? I’m

sure he’s the old boy I’ve seen taking aim at his chair before sliding

across the room to it, as if he was on wheels.”

“Oh, dear, no! Not in the least like that! Just wait a minute,” the

Marquise went on, “I don’t know what he can be doing.”

She rang the bell and, when the servant had appeared, as she made no

secret, and indeed liked to advertise the fact that her old friend spent

the greater part of his time in her house: “Go and tell M. de Norpois to

come in,” she ordered him, “he is sorting some papers in my library; he

said he would be twenty minutes, and I’ve been waiting now for an hour

and three-quarters. He will tell you about the Dreyfus case, anything

you want to know,” she said gruffly to Bloch. “He doesn’t approve much

of the way things are going.”

For M. de Norpois was not on good terms with the Government of the day,

and Mme. de Villeparisis, although he had never taken the liberty of

bringing any actual Ministers to her house (she still preserved all the

unapproachable dignity of a great lady, and remained outside and above

the political relations which he was obliged to cultivate), was kept

well informed by him of everything that went on. Then, too, the

politicians of the day would never have dared to ask M. de Norpois to

introduce them to Mme. de Villeparisis. But several of them had gone

down to see him at her house in the country when they needed his advice

or help at critical conjunctures. One knew the address. One went to the

house. One did not see its mistress. But at dinner that evening she

would say:

“I hear they’ve been down here bothering you. I trust things are going

better.”

“You are not in a hurry?” she now asked Bloch.

“No, not at all. I wanted to go because I am not very well; in fact

there is some talk of my taking a cure at Vichy for my biliary ducts,”

he explained, articulating the last words with a fiendish irony.

“Why, that’s where my nephew Châtellerault’s got to go, you must fix it

up together. Is he still in the room? He’s a nice boy, you know,” said

Mme. de Villeparisis, and may quite well have meant what she said,

feeling that two people whom she knew had no reason not to be friends

with each other.

“Oh, I dare say he wouldn’t care about that—I don’t really know him—at

least I barely know him. He is sitting over there,” stammered Bloch in

an ecstasy of confusion.

The butler could not have delivered his mistress’s message properly, for

M. de Norpois, to make believe that he had just come in from the street,

and had not yet seen his hostess, had picked up the first hat that he

had found in the hall, and came forward to kiss Mme. de Villeparisis’s

hand with great ceremony, asking after her health with all the interest

that people shew after a long separation. He was not aware that the

Marquise had already destroyed any semblance of reality in this charade,

which she cut short by taking M. de Norpois and Bloch into an adjoining

room. Bloch, who had observed all the courtesy that was being shewn to a

person whom he had not yet discovered to be M. de Norpois, had said to

me, trying to seem at his ease: “Who is that old idiot?” Perhaps, too,

all this bowing and scraping by M. de Norpois had really shocked the

better element in Bloch’s nature, the freer and more straightforward

manners of a younger generation, and he was partly sincere in condemning

it as absurd. However that might be, it ceased to appear absurd, and

indeed delighted him the moment it was himself, Bloch, to whom the

salutations were addressed.

“Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” said Mme. de Villeparisis, “I should like you

to know this gentleman. Monsieur Bloch, Monsieur le Marquis de Norpois.”

She made a point, despite her casual usage of M. de Norpois, of

addressing him always as “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” as a social

convention as well as from an exaggerated respect for his Ambassadorial

rank, a respect which the Marquis had inculcated in her, and also with

an instinctive application to him of the special manner, less familiar

and more ceremonious, in relation to one particular man which, in the

house of a distinguished woman, in contrast to the liberties that she

takes with her other guests, marks that man out instantly as her lover.

M. de Norpois drowned his azure gaze in his white beard, bent his tall

body deep down as though he were bowing before all the famous and (to

him) imposing connotations of the name Bloch, and murmured: “I am

delighted ....” whereat his young listener, moved, but feeling that the

illustrious diplomat was going too far, hastened to correct him, saying:

“Not at all! On the contrary, it is I who am delighted.” But this

ceremony, which M. de Norpois, in his friendship for Mme. de

Villeparisis, repeated for the benefit of every fresh person that his

old friend introduced to him, did not seem to her adequate to the

deserts of Bloch, to whom she said:

“Just ask him anything you want to know; take him into the other room if

it’s more convenient; he will be delighted to talk to you. I think you

wished to speak to him about the Dreyfus case,” she went on, no more

considering whether this would suit M. de Norpois than she would have

thought of asking leave of the Duchesse de Montmorency’s portrait before

having it lighted up for the historian, or of the tea before pouring it

into a cup.

“You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf, but he

will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck very well, and

Cavour. That is so, isn’t it;” she raised her voice, “you knew Bismarck

well?”

“Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me with a

knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the opportunity to

relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt obliged to bring

ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my own which he had

inadvertently taken. “You shewed me a somewhat laboured little thing in

which you went in for a good deal of hair-splitting. I gave you my

opinion quite frankly; what you had written was literally not worth the

trouble of putting it on paper. Are you thinking of letting us have

anything else? You were greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember

rightly.” “You’re not to say anything against Bergotte,” put in the

Duchess. “I don’t dispute his talent as a painter; no one would,

Duchess. He understands all about etching, if not brush-work on a large

scale like M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to me that in these days we have

a tendency to confuse the arts, and forget that the novelist’s business

is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers than to fiddle away at

producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing

your father on Sunday at our good friend A. J.’s,” he went on, turning

again to myself.

I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme. de Guermantes,

that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house,

the help he had refused me for getting to Mme. Swann’s. “Another of my

great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de

Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that

admirable _Bunch of Radishes_ which I remember at the Exhibition and

should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece that is!” And

indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state

what picture I liked best, I should have named this _Bunch of Radishes_.

“A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful

air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it is merely a

sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that

sort ‘masterpiece’, what have you got to say about Hébert’s _Virgin_ or

Dagnan-Bouveret?”

“I heard you refusing to let him bring Robert’s woman,” said Mme. de

Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I

don’t think you’ll miss much, she’s a perfect horror, as you know,

without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.”

“Do you mean to say, you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.

“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before the whole of

Paris, not that that’s anything for me to be proud of,” explained Mme.

de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless, since the actress was

under discussion, to let it be known that she herself had had the first

fruits of her foolishness. “Hallo, I suppose I ought to be going now,”

she added, without moving.

She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words were an

allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a call

together, like a newly married couple, rather than to the often strained

relations that existed between her and the enormous fellow she had

married, who, despite his increasing years, still led the life of a gay

bachelor. Ranging over the considerable party that was gathered round

the tea-table the genial, cynical gaze—dazzled a little by the

brightness of the setting sun—of the little round pupils lodged in the

exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the excellent marksman

that he was could always hit with such perfect aim and precision, the

Duke came forward with a bewildered cautious slowness as though, alarmed

by so brilliant a gathering, he was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts

and interrupting conversations. A permanent smile—suggesting a “Good

King of Yvetot”—slightly pompous, a half-open hand floating like a

shark’s fin by his side, which he allowed to be vaguely clasped by his

old friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled

him, without his having to make a single movement, or to interrupt his

genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the assiduity of them all by

simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear friend; charmed,

Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt;” and, on coming to myself, who was

the most highly favoured, when he had been told my name: “How do, my

young neighbour, how’s your father? What a splendid fellow he is!” He

made no great demonstration except to Mme. de Villeparisis, who gave him

good-day with a nod of her head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her

little apron.

Being formidably rich in a world where everyone was steadily growing

poorer, and having secured the permanent attachment to his person of the

idea of this enormous fortune, he displayed all the vanity of the great

nobleman reinforced by that of the man of means, the refinement and

breeding of the former just managing to control the latter’s

self-sufficiency. One could understand, moreover, that his success with

women, which made his wife so unhappy, was not due merely to his name

and fortune, for he was still extremely good looking, and his profile

retained the purity, the firmness of outline of a Greek god’s.

“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?” M. d’Argencourt

asked the Duchess.

“Well, don’t you see, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies in her

hand, and more lilies on her _dwess_.” Mme. de Guermantes shared her

aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an exceedingly rustic

fashion, but never rolled her ‘r’s like Mme. de Villeparisis.

Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had taken Bloch

into the little recess where they could talk more freely, I went up to

the old diplomat for a moment and put in a word about my father’s

Academic chair. He tried first of all to postpone the conversation to

another day. I pointed out that I was going to Balbec. “What? Going

again to Balbec? Why, you’re a regular globe-trotter.” He listened to

what I had to say. At the name of Leroy-Beaulieu, he looked at me

suspiciously. I conjectured that he had perhaps said something

disparaging to M. Leroy-Beaulieu about my father and was afraid of the

economist’s having repeated it to him. All at once he seemed animated by

a positive affection for my father. And after one of those opening

hesitations out of which suddenly a word explodes as though in spite of

the speaker, whose irresistible conviction prevails over his

half-hearted efforts at silence: “No, no,” he said to me with emotion,

“your father _must not_ stand. In his own interest he must not; it is

not fair to himself; he owes a certain respect to his own really great

merits, which would be compromised by such an adventure. He is too big a

man for that. If he should be elected, he will have everything to lose

and nothing to gain. He is not an orator, thank heaven. And that is the

one thing that counts with my dear colleagues, even if you only talk

platitudes. Your father has an important goal in life; he should march

straight ahead towards it, and not allow himself to turn aside to beat

bushes, even the bushes (more thorny for that matter than flowery) of

the grove of Academe. Besides, he would not get many votes. The Academy

likes to keep a postulant waiting for some time before taking him to its

bosom. For the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I don’t

say. But he must wait until the Society itself comes in quest of him. It

makes a practice, not a very fortunate practice, a fetish rather, of the

_farà da sè_ of our friends across the Alps. Leroy-Beaulieu spoke to me

about all this in a way I did not at all like. I pointed out to him, a

little sharply perhaps, that a man accustomed as he is to dealing with

colonial imports and metals could not be expected to understand the part

played by the imponderables, as Bismarck used to say. But, whatever

happens, your father must on no account put himself forward as a

candidate. _Principis obsta_. His friends would find themselves placed

in a delicate position if he suddenly called upon them for their votes.

Indeed,” he broke forth, with an air of candour, fixing his blue eyes on

my face, “I am going to say a thing that you will be surprised to hear

coming from me, who am so fond of your father. Well, simply because I am

fond of him (we are known as the inseparables—_Arcades ambo_), simply

because I know the immense service that he can still render to his

country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the

helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I

should not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to

understand that I should not.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the

stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote

now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly

dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart,

every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members

the type of character that is the direct converse of his own, less for

the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! If it only rested with me!”

than for the satisfaction of making the election which he himself has

managed to secure seem more difficult, a greater distinction. “I may

tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests of you all, I

should prefer to see your father triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen

years’ time.” Words which I assumed to have been dictated if not by

jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of any willingness to oblige, and

which later on I was to recall when the course of events had given them

a different meaning.