I looked at M. de Charlus. Undoubtedly his magnificent head, though

repellent, yet far surpassed that of any of his relatives; you would

have called him an Apollo grown old; but an olive-hued, bilious juice

seemed ready to start from the corners of his evil mouth; as for

intellect, one could not deny that his, over a vast compass, had taken

in many things which must always remain unknown to his brother

Guermantes. But whatever the fine words with which he coloured all his

hatreds, one felt that, even if there was now an offended pride, now a

disappointment in love, or a rancour, or sadism, a love of teasing, a

fixed obsession, this man was capable of doing murder, and of proving by

force of logic that he had been right in doing it and was still superior

by a hundred cubits in moral stature to his brother, his sister-in-law,

or any of the rest. “Just as, in Velazquez’s _Lances_,” he went on, “the

victor advances towards him who is the humbler in rank, as is the duty

of every noble nature, since I was everything and you were nothing, it

was I who took the first steps towards you. You have made an idiotic

reply to what it is not for me to describe as an act of greatness. But I

have not allowed myself to be discouraged. Our religion inculcates

patience. The patience I have shewn towards you will be counted, I hope,

to my credit, and also my having only smiled at what might be denounced

as impertinence, were it within your power to offer any impertinence to

me who surpass you in stature by so many cubits; but after all, Sir, all

this is now neither here nor there. I have subjected you to the test

which the one eminent man of our world has ingeniously named the test of

excessive friendliness, and which he rightly declares to be the most

terrible of all, the only one that can separate the good grain from the

tares. I could scarcely reproach you for having undergone it without

success, for those who emerge from it triumphant are very few. But at

least, and this is the conclusion which I am entitled to draw from the

last words that we shall exchange on this earth, at least I intend to

hear nothing more of your calumnious fabrications.” So far, I had never

dreamed that M. de Charlus’s rage could have been caused by an

unflattering remark which had been repeated to him; I searched my

memory; I had not spoken about him to anyone. Some evil-doer had

invented the whole thing. I protested to M. de Charlus that I had said

absolutely nothing about him. “I don’t think I can have annoyed you by

saying to Mme. de Guermantes that I was a friend of yours.” He gave a

disdainful smile, made his voice climb to the supreme pitch of its

highest register, and there, without strain, attacking the shrillest and

most insolent note: “Oh! Sir,” he said, returning by the most gradual

stages to a natural intonation, and seeming to revel as he went in the

oddities of this descending scale, “I think that you are doing yourself

an injustice when you accuse yourself of having said that we were

_friends_. I do not look for any great verbal accuracy in anyone who

could readily mistake a piece of Chippendale for a rococo _chaire_, but

really I do not believe,” he went on, with vocal caresses that grew more

and more winning and brought to hover over his lips what was actually a

charming smile, “I do not believe that you can ever have said, or

thought, that we were _friends_! As for your having boasted that you had

been _presented_ to me, had _talked_ to me, _knew_ me slightly, had

obtained, almost without solicitation, the prospect of coming one day

under my _protection_, I find it on the contrary very natural and

intelligent of you to have done so. The extreme difference in age that

there is between us enables me to recognise without absurdity that that

_presentation_, those _talks_, that vague prospect of future _relations_

were for you, it is not for me to say an honour, but still, when all is

said and done, an advantage as to which I consider that your folly lay

not in divulging it but in not having had the sense to keep it. I will

go so far as to say,” he went on, passing abruptly for a moment from his

arrogant wrath to a gentleness so tinged with melancholy that I expected

him to burst into tears, “that when you left unanswered the proposal I

made to you here in Paris it seemed to me so unheard-of an act on your

part, coming from you who had struck me as well brought up and of a good

_bourgeois_ family,” (on this adjective alone his voice sounded a little

whistle of impertinence) “that I was foolish enough to imagine all the

excuses that never really happen, letters miscarrying, addresses copied

down wrong. I can see that on my part it was great foolishness, but

Saint Bonaventure preferred to believe that an ox could fly rather than

that his brother was capable of lying. Anyhow, that is all finished now,

the idea did not attract you, there is no more to be said. It seems to

me only that you might have brought yourself,” (and there was a genuine

sound of weeping in his voice) “were it only out of consideration for my

age, to write to me. I had conceived and planned for you certain

infinitely seductive things, which I had taken good care not to tell

you. You have preferred to refuse without knowing what they were; that

is your affair. But, as I tell you, one can always _write_. In your

place, and indeed in my own, I should have done so. I like my place, for

that reason, better than yours—I say ‘for that reason’ because I believe

that we are all equal, and I have more fellow-feeling for an intelligent

labourer than for many of our dukes. But I can say that I prefer my

place to yours, because what you have done, in the whole course of my

life, which is beginning now to be a pretty long one, I am conscious

that I have never done.” His head was turned away from the light, and I

could not see if his eyes were dropping tears as I might have supposed

from his voice. “I told you that I had taken a hundred steps towards

you; the only effect of that has been to make you retire two hundred

from me. Now it is for me to withdraw, and we shall know one another no

longer. I shall retain not your name but your story, so that at moments

when I might be tempted to believe that men have good hearts, good

manners, or simply the intelligence not to allow an unparalleled

opportunity to escape them, I may remember that that is ranking them too

highly. No, that you should have said that you knew me, when it was

true—for henceforward it ceases to be true—I regard that as only

natural, and I take it as an act of homage, that is to say something

pleasant. Unfortunately, elsewhere and in other circumstances, you have

uttered remarks of a very different nature.” “Sir, I swear to you that I

have said nothing that could insult you.” “And who says that I am

insulted?” he cried with fury, flinging himself into an erect posture on

the seat on which hitherto he had been reclining motionless, while, as

the pale frothing serpents stiffened in his face, his voice became

alternately shrill and grave, like the deafening onrush of a storm. (The

force with which he habitually spoke, which used to make strangers turn

round in the street, was multiplied an hundredfold, as is a musical

_forte_ if, instead of being played on the piano, it is played by an

orchestra, and changed into a _fortissimo_ as well. M. de Charlus

roared.) “Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You

evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking? Do you imagine that

the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type,

heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips

of my august toes?” A moment before this my desire to persuade M. de

Charlus that I had never said, nor heard anyone else say any evil of him

had given place to a mad rage, caused by the words which were dictated

to him solely, to my mind, by his colossal pride. Perhaps they were

indeed the effect, in part at any rate, of this pride. Almost all the

rest sprang from a feeling of which I was then still ignorant, and for

which I could not therefore be blamed for not making due allowance. I

could at least, failing this unknown element, have mingled with his

pride, had I remembered the words of Mme. de Guermantes, a trace of

madness. But at that moment the idea of madness never even entered my

head. There was in him, according to me, only pride, in me there was

only fury. This fury (at the moment when M. de Charlus ceased to shout,

in order to refer to his august toes, with a majesty that was

accompanied by a grimace, a nausea of disgust at his obscure

blasphemers), this fury could contain itself no longer. With an

impulsive movement, I wanted to strike something, and, a lingering trace

of discernment making me respect the person of a man so much older than

myself, and even, in view of their dignity as works of art, the pieces

of German porcelain that were grouped around him, I flung myself upon

the Baron’s new silk hat, dashed it to the ground, trampled upon it,

began blindly pulling it to pieces, wrenched off the brim, tore the

crown in two, without heeding the vociferations of M. de Charlus, which

continued to sound, and, crossing the room to leave it, opened the door.

One on either side of it, to my intense stupefaction, stood two footmen,

who moved slowly away, so as to appear only to have been casually

passing in the course of their duty. (I afterwards learned their names;

one was called Burnier the other Charmel.) I was not taken in for a

moment by this explanation which their leisurely gait seemed to offer

me. It was highly improbable; three others appeared to me to be less so;

one that the Baron sometimes entertained guests against whom, as he

might happen to need assistance (but why?), he deemed it necessary to

keep reinforcements posted close at hand. The second was that, drawn by

curiosity, they had stopped to listen at the keyhole, not thinking that

I should come out so quickly. The third, that, the whole of the scene

which M. de Charlus had made with me having been prepared and acted, he

had himself told them to listen, from a love of the spectacular

combined, perhaps, with a “_nunc erudimini_” from which each would

derive a suitable profit.

My anger had not calmed that of M. de Charlus, my departure from the

room seemed to cause him acute distress; he called me back, made his

servants call me back, and finally, forgetting that a moment earlier,

when he spoke of his “august toes”, he had thought to make me a witness

of his own deification, came running after me at full speed, overtook me

in the hall, and stood barring the door. “There, now,” he said, “don’t

be childish; come back for a minute; he who loveth well chasteneth well,

and if I have chastened you well it is because I love you well.” My

anger had subsided; I let the word “chasten” pass, and followed the

Baron, who, summoning a footman, ordered him without a trace of

self-consciousness to clear away the remains of the shattered hat, which

was replaced by another. “If you will tell me, Sir, who it is that has

treacherously maligned me,” I said to M. de Charlus, “I will stay here

to learn his name and to confute the impostor.” “Who? Do you not know?

Do you retain no memory of the things you say? Do you think that the

people who do me the service of informing me of those things do not

begin by demanding secrecy? And do you imagine that I am going to betray

a person to whom I have given my promise?” “Sir, is it impossible then

for you to tell me?” I asked, racking my brains in a final effort to

discover (and discovering no one) to whom I could have spoken about M.

de Charlus. “You did not hear me say that I had given a promise of

secrecy to my informant?” he said in a snapping voice. “I see that with

your fondness for abject utterances you combine one for futile

persistence. You ought to have at least the intelligence to profit by a

final conversation, and so to speak as to say something that does not

mean precisely nothing.” “Sir,” I replied, moving away from him, “you

insult me; I am unarmed, because you are several times my age, we are

not equally matched; on the other hand, I cannot convince you; I have

already sworn to you that I have said nothing.” “I am lying, then, am

I?” he cried in a terrifying tone, and with a bound forwards that

brought him within a yard of myself. “Some one has misinformed you.”

Then in a gentle, affectionate, melancholy voice, as in those symphonies

which are played without any break between the different movements, in

which a graceful _scherzo_, amiable and idyllic, follows the

thunder-peals of the opening pages: “It is quite possible,” he told me.

“Generally speaking, a remark repeated at second hand is rarely true. It

is your fault if, not having profited by the opportunities of seeing me

which I had held out to you, you have not furnished me, by that open

speech of daily intercourse which creates confidence, with the unique

and sovereign remedy against a spoken word which made you out a traitor.

Either way, true or false, the remark has done its work. I can never

again rid myself of the impression it made on me. I cannot even say that

he who chasteneth well loveth well, for I have chastened you well enough

but I no longer love you.” While saying this he had forced me to sit

down and had rung the bell. A different footman appeared. “Bring

something to drink and order the brougham.” I said that I was not

thirsty and besides had a carriage waiting. “They have probably paid him

and sent him away,” he told me, “you needn’t worry about that. I am

ordering a carriage to take you home.... If you’re anxious about the

time..... I could have given you a room here....” I said that my mother

would be uneasy. “Ah! Of course, yes. Well, true or false, the remark

has done its work. My affection, a trifle premature, had flowered too

soon, and, like those apple trees of which you spoke so poetically at

Balbec, it has been unable to withstand the first frost.” If M. de

Charlus’s affection for me had not been destroyed, he could hardly have

acted differently, since, while assuring me that we were no longer

acquainted, he made me sit down, drink, asked me to stay the night, and

was going now to send me home. He had indeed an air of dreading the

moment at which he must part from me and find himself alone, that sort

of slightly anxious fear which his sister-in-law and cousin Guermantes

had appeared to me to be feeling when she had tried to force me to stay

a little longer, with something of the same momentary fondness for

myself, of the same effort to prolong the passing minute.

“Unfortunately,” he went on, “I have not the power to make blossom again

what has once been destroyed. My affection for you is quite dead.

Nothing can revive it. I believe that it is not unworthy of me to

confess that I regret it. I always feel myself to be a little like

Victor Hugo’s Boaz: ‘I am widowed and alone, and the darkness gathers

o’er me.’”

I passed again with him through the big green drawing-room. I told him,

speaking quite at random, how beautiful I thought it. “Ain’t it?” he

replied. “It’s a good thing to be fond of something. The woodwork is

Bagard. What is rather charming, d’you see, is that it was made to match

the Beauvais chairs and the consoles. You observe, it repeats the same

decorative design. There used to be only two places where you could see

this, the Louvre and M. d’Hinnisdal’s house. But naturally, as soon as I

had decided to come and live in this street, there cropped up an old

family house of the Chimays which nobody had ever seen before because it

came here expressly for _me_. On the whole, it’s good. It might perhaps

be better, but after all it’s not bad. Some pretty things, ain’t there?

These are portraits of my uncles, the King of Poland and the King of

England, by Mignard. But why am I telling you all this? You must know it

as well as I do, you were waiting in this room. No? Ah, then they must

have put you in the blue drawing-room,” he said with an air that might

have been either impertinence, on the score of my want of interest, or

personal superiority, in not having taken the trouble to ask where I had

been kept waiting. “Look now, in this cabinet I have all the hats worn

by Mlle. Elisabeth, by the Princesse de Lamballe, and by the Queen. They

don’t interest you, one would think you couldn’t see. Perhaps you are

suffering from an affection of the optic nerve. If you like this kind of

beauty better, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out

between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation. You hear:

Beethoven has come to join him.” And indeed one could hear the first

chords of the third part of the Pastoral Symphony, “Joy after the

Storm”, performed somewhere not far away, on the first landing no doubt,

by a band of musicians. I innocently inquired how they happened to be

playing that, and who the musicians were. “Ah, well, one doesn’t know.

One never does know. They are unseen music. Pretty, ain’t it?” he said

to me in a slightly impertinent tone, which, nevertheless, suggested

somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “But you care about as much

for it as a fish does for little apples. You want to go home, regardless

of any want of respect for Beethoven or for me. You are uttering your

own judgment and condemnation,” he added, with an affectionate and

mournful air, when the moment had come for me to go. “You will excuse my

not accompanying you home, as good manners ordain that I should,” he

said to me. “Since I have decided not to see you again, spending five

minutes more in your company would make very little difference to me.

But I am tired, and I have a great deal to do.” And then, seeing that it

was a fine night: “Very well, yes, I will come in the carriage, there is

a superb moon which I shall go on to admire from the Bois after I have

taken you home. What, you don’t know how to shave; even on a night when

you’ve been dining out, you have still a few hairs here,” he said,

taking my chin between two fingers, so to speak magnetised, which after

a moment’s resistance ran up to my ears, like the fingers of a barber.

“Ah! It would be pleasant to look at the ‘blue light of the moon’ in the

Bois with some one like yourself,” he said to me with a sudden and

almost involuntary gentleness, then, in a sadder tone: “For you are

nice, all the same; you could be nicer than anyone,” he went on, laying

his hand in a fatherly way on my shoulder. “Originally, I must say that

I found you quite insignificant.” I ought to have reflected that he must

find me so still. I had only to recall the rage with which he had spoken

to me, barely half-an-hour before. In spite of this I had the impression

that he was, for the moment, sincere, that his kindness of heart was

prevailing over what I regarded as an almost delirious condition of

susceptibility and pride. The carriage was waiting beside us, and still

he prolonged the conversation. “Come along,” he said abruptly, “jump in,

in five minutes we shall be at your door. And I shall bid you a good

night which will cut short our relations, and for all time. It is

better, since we must part for ever, that we should do so, as in music,

on a perfect chord.” Despite these solemn affirmations that we should

never see one another again, I could have sworn that M. de Charlus,

annoyed at having forgotten himself earlier in the evening and afraid of

having hurt my feelings, would not have been displeased to see me once

again. Nor was I mistaken, for, a moment later: “There, now,” he said,

“if I hadn’t forgotten the most important thing of all. In memory of

your grandmother, I have had bound for you a curious edition of Mme. de

Sévigné. That is what is going to prevent this from being our last

meeting. One must console oneself with the reflexion that complicated

affairs are rarely settled in a day. Just look how long they took over

the Congress of Vienna.” “But I could call for it without disturbing

you,” I said obligingly. “Will you hold your tongue, you little fool,”

he replied with anger, “and not give yourself the grotesque appearance

of regarding as a small matter the honour of being probably (I do not

say certainly, for it will perhaps be one of my servants who hands you

the volumes) received by me.” Then, regaining possession of himself: “I

do not wish to part from you on these words. No dissonance, before the

eternal silence of the dominant.” It was for his own nerves that he

seemed to dread an immediate return home after harsh words of

dissension. “You would not care to come to the Bois?” he addressed me in

a tone not so much interrogative as affirmative, and that not, as it

seemed to me, because he did not wish to make me the offer but because

he was afraid that his self-esteem might meet with a refusal. “Oh, very

well,” he went on, still postponing our separation, “it is the moment

when, as Whistler says, the _bourgeois_ go to bed” (perhaps he wished

now to capture me by my self-esteem) “and the right time to begin to

look at things. But you don’t even know who Whistler was!” I changed the

conversation and asked him whether the Princesse d’Iéna was an

intelligent person. M. de Charlus stopped me, and, adopting the most

contemptuous tone that I had yet heard him use, “Oh! There, Sir,” he

informed me, “you are alluding to an order of nomenclature with which I

have no concern. There is perhaps an aristocracy among the Tahitians,

but I must confess that I know nothing about it. The name which you have

just mentioned, strangely enough, did sound in my ears only a few days

ago. Some one asked me whether I would condescend to allow them to

present to me the young Duc de Guastalla. The request astonished me, for

the Duc de Guastalla has no need to get himself presented to me, for the

simple reason that he is my cousin, and has known me all his life; he is

the son of the Princesse de Parme, and, as a young kinsman of good

upbringing, he never fails to come and pay his respects to me on New

Year’s Day. But, on making inquiries, I discovered that it was not my

relative who was meant but the son of the person in whom you are

interested. As there exists no Princess of that title, I supposed that

my friend was referring to some poor wanton sleeping under the Pont

d’Iéna, who had picturesquely assumed the title of Princesse d’Iéna,

just as one talks about the Panther of the Batignolles, or the Steel

King. But no, the reference was to a rich person who possesses some

remarkable furniture which I had seen and admired at an exhibition, and

which has this advantage over the name of its owner that it is genuine.

As for this self-styled Duc de Guastalla, he, I supposed, must be my

secretary’s stockbroker; one can procure so many things with money. But

no; it was the Emperor, it appears, who amused himself by conferring on

these people a title which simply was not his to give. It was perhaps a

sign of power, or of ignorance, or of malice; in any case, I consider,

it was an exceedingly scurvy trick to play on these unconscious

usurpers. But really, I cannot help you by throwing any light on the

matter; my knowledge begins and ends with the Faubourg Saint-Germain,

where, among all the Courvoisiers and Gallardons, you will find, if you

can manage to secure an introduction, plenty of mangy old cats taken

straight out of Balzac who will amuse you. Naturally, all that has

nothing to do with the position of the Princesse de Guermantes, but

without me and my ‘Open, Sesame’ her portals are unapproachable.” “It is

really very lovely, isn’t it, Sir, the Princesse de Guermantes’s

mansion?” “Oh, it’s not very lovely. It’s the loveliest thing in the

world. Next to the Princess herself, of course.” “The Princesse de

Guermantes is better than the Duchesse de Guermantes?” “Oh! There’s no

comparison.” (It is to be observed that, whenever people in society have

the least touch of imagination, they will crown or dethrone, to suit

their affections or their quarrels, those whose position appeared most

solid and unalterably fixed.)

“The Duchesse de Guermantes” (possibly, in not calling her “Oriane”, he

wished to set a greater distance between her and myself) “is delightful,

far superior to anything you can have guessed. But, after all, she is

incommensurable with her cousin. The Princess is exactly what the people

in the Markets might imagine Princess Metternich to have been, but old

Metternich believed she had started Wagner, because she knew Victor

Maurel. The Princesse de Guermantes, or rather her mother, knew the man

himself. Which is a distinction, not to mention the incredible beauty of

the lady. And the Esther gardens alone!” “One can’t see them?” “No, you

would have to be invited, but they never invite _anyone_ unless I

intervene.” But at once withdrawing, after casting it at me, the bait of

this offer, he held out his hand, for we had reached my door. “My part

is played, Sir, I will simply add these few words. Another person will

perhaps some day offer you his affection, as I have done. Let the

present example serve for your instruction. Do not neglect it. Affection

is always precious. What one cannot do by oneself in this life, because

there are things which one cannot ask, nor do, nor wish, nor learn by

oneself, one can do in company, and without needing to be Thirteen, as

in Balzac’s story, or Four, as in _The Three Musketeers_. Good-bye.”

He must have been feeling tired and have abandoned the idea of going to

look at the moonlight, for he asked me to tell his coachman to drive

home. At once he made a sharp movement as though he had changed his

mind. But I had already given the order, and, so as not to lose any more

time, went across now to ring the bell, without its entering my head

that I had been meaning to tell M. de Charlus, about the German Emperor

and General Botha, stories which had been an hour ago such an obsession

but which his unexpected and crushing reception had sent flying far out

of my mind.

On entering my room I saw on my desk a letter which Françoise’s young

footman had written to one of his friends and had left lying there. Now

that my mother was away, there was no liberty which he had the least

hesitation in taking; I was the more to blame of the two for taking that

of reading the letter which, without an envelope, lay spread out before

me and (which was my sole excuse) seemed to offer itself to my eye.

“Dear Friend and Cousin,

“I hope this finds you in good health, and the same with all the young

folk, particularly my young godson Joseph whom I have not yet had the

pleasure of meeting but whom I prefer to you all as being my godson,

these relics of the heart they have their dust also, upon their blest

remains let us not lay our hands. Besides dear friend and cousin who

can say that to-morrow you and your dear wife my cousin Marie, will

not both of you be cast headlong down into the bottom of the sea, like

the sailor clinging to the mast on high, for this life is but a dark

valley. Dear friend I must tell you that my principal occupation,

which will astonish you I am certain, is now poetry which I love

passionately, for one must somehow pass the time away. And so dear

friend do not be too surprised if I have not answered your last letter

before now, in place of pardon let oblivion come. As you are aware,

Madame’s mother has passed away amid unspeakable sufferings which

fairly exhausted her as she saw as many as three doctors. The day of

her interment was a great day for all Monsieur’s relations came in

crowds as well as several Ministers. It took them more than two hours

to get to the cemetery, which will make you all open your eyes pretty

wide in your village for they certainly won’t do as much for mother

Michu. So all my life to come can be but one long sob. I am amusing

myself enormously with the motorcycle of which I have recently

learned. What would you say, my dear friends, if I arrived suddenly

like that at full speed at Les Ecorces. But on that head I shall no

more keep silence for I feel that the frenzy of grief sweeps its

reason away. I am associating with the Duchesse de Guermantes, people

whose very names you have never heard in our ignorant villages.

Therefore it is with pleasure that I am going to send the works of

Racine, of Victor Hugo, of Pages Choisies de Chenedolle, of Alfred de

Musset, for I would cure the land in which I saw the light of

ignorance which leads unerringly to crime. I can think of nothing more

to say to you and send you like the pelican wearied by a long flight

my best regards as well as to your wife my godson and your sister

Rose. May it never be said of her: And Rose she lived only as live the

roses, as has been said by Victor Hugo, the sonnet of Arvers, Alfred

de Musset, all those great geniuses who for that cause have had to die

upon the blazing scaffold like Jeanne d’Arc. Hoping for your next

letter soon, receive my kisses like those of a brother.

“Périgot (Joseph).”

We are attracted by every form of life which represents to us something

unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered. In spite of

this, the mysterious utterances by means of which M. de Charlus had led

me to imagine the Princesse de Guermantes as an extraordinary creature,

different from anyone that I knew, were not sufficient to account for

the stupefaction in which I was plunged, speedily followed by the fear

that I might be the victim of some bad joke planned by some one who

wanted to send me to the door of a house to which I had not been

invited, when, about two months after my dinner with the Duchess and

while she was at Cannes, having opened an envelope the appearance of

which had not led me to suppose that it contained anything out of the

common, I read the following words engraved on a card: “The Princesse de

Guermantes, _née_ Duchesse en Bavière, At Home, the ——th.” No doubt to

be invited to the Princesse de Guermantes’s was perhaps not, from the

social point of view, any more difficult than to dine with the Duchess,

and my slight knowledge of heraldry had taught me that the title of

Prince is not superior to that of Duke. Besides, I told myself that the

intelligence of a society woman could not be essentially so

heterogeneous to that of her congeners as M. de Charlus made out, nor so

heterogeneous to that of any one other woman in society. But my

imagination, like Elstir engaged upon rendering some effect of

perspective without reference to a knowledge of the laws of nature which

he might quite well possess, depicted for me not what I knew but what it

saw; what it saw, that is to say what the name shewed it. Now, even

before I had met the Duchess, the name Guermantes preceded by the title

of Princess, like a note or a colour or quantity, profoundly modified

from the surrounding values by the mathematical or aesthetic sign that

governs it, had already suggested to me something entirely different.

With that title one finds one’s thoughts straying instinctively to the

memoirs of the days of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the English Court, the

Queen of Scots, the Duchesse d’Aumale; and I imagined the town house of

the Princesse de Guermantes as more or less frequented by the Duchesse

de Longueville and the great Condé, whose presence there rendered it

highly improbable that I should ever make my way into it.

Many of the things that M. de Charlus had told me had driven a vigorous

spur into my imagination and, making it forget how much the reality had

disappointed me at Mme. de Guermantes’s (people’s names are in this

respect like the names of places), had swung it towards Oriane’s cousin.

For that matter, M. de Charlus misled me at times as to the imaginary

value and variety of people in society only because he was himself at

times misled. And this, perhaps, because he did nothing, did not write,

did not paint, did not even read anything in a serious and thorough

manner. But, superior by several degrees to the people in society, if it

was from them and the spectacle they afforded that he drew the material

for his conversation, he was not for that reason understood by them.

Speaking as an artist, he could at the most reveal the fallacious charm

of people in society. But reveal it to artists alone, with relation to

whom he might be said to play the part played by the reindeer among the

Esquimaux. This precious animal plucks for them from the barren rocks

lichens and mosses which they themselves could neither discover nor

utilise, but which, once they have been digested by the reindeer, become

for the inhabitants of the far North a nourishing form of food.

To which I may add that the pictures which M. de Charlus drew of society

were animated with plenty of life by the blend of his ferocious hatreds

and his passionate affections. Hatreds directed mainly against the young

men, adoration aroused principally by certain women.

If among these the Princesse de Guermantes was placed by M. de Charlus

upon the most exalted throne, his mysterious words about the

“unapproachable Aladdin’s palace” in which his cousin dwelt were not

sufficient to account for my stupefaction. Apart from whatever may be

due to the divers subjective points of view, of which I shall have to

speak later, in these artificial magnifications, the fact remains that

there is a certain objective reality in each of these people, and

consequently a difference among them. And how, when it comes to that,

could it be otherwise? The humanity with which we consort and which

bears so little resemblance to our dreams is, for all that, the same

that, in the Memoirs, in the Letters of eminent persons, we have seen

described and have felt a desire to know. The old man of complete

insignificance whom we met at dinner is the same who wrote that proud

letter, which (in a book on the War of 1870) we read with emotion, to

Prince Friedrich-Karl. We are bored at a dinner-table because our

imagination is absent, and because it is bearing us company we are

interested in a book. But the people in question are the same. We should

like to have known Mme. de Pompadour, who was so valuable a patron of

the arts, and we should have been as much bored in her company as among

the modern Egerias, at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a

second call, so uninteresting do we find them. The fact remains,

nevertheless, that these differences do exist. People are never exactly

similar to one another, their mode of behaviour with regard to

ourselves, at, one might say, the same level of friendship, reveals

differences which, in the end, offer compensations. When I knew Mme. de

Montmorency, she loved to say unpleasant things to me, but if I was in

need of a service she would squander, in the hope of obtaining it for me

effectively, all the credit at her disposal, without counting the cost.

Whereas some other woman, Mme. de Guermantes for example, would never

have wished to hurt my feelings, never said anything about me except

what might give me pleasure, showered on me all those tokens of

friendship which formed the rich manner of living, morally, of the

Guermantes, but, had I asked her for the least thing above and beyond

that, would not have moved an inch to procure it for me, as in those

country houses where one has at one’s disposal a motor-car and a special

footman, but where it is impossible to obtain a glass of cider, for

which no provision has been made in the arrangements for a party. Which

was for me the true friend, Mme. de Montmorency, so glad always to annoy

me and always so ready to oblige, or Mme. de Guermantes, distressed by

the slightest offence that might have been given me and incapable of the

slightest effort to be of use to me? The types of the human mind are so

varied, so opposite, not only in literature but in society, that

Baudelaire and Mérimée are not the only people who have the right to

despise one another mutually. These peculiarities continue to form in

everyone a system of attitudes, of speech, of actions, so coherent, so

despotic, that when we are in the presence of anyone his or her system

seems to us superior to the rest. With Mme. de Guermantes, her words,

deduced like a theorem from her type of mind, seemed to me the only ones

that could possibly be said. And I was, at heart, of her opinion when

she told me that Mme. de Montmorency was stupid and kept an open mind

towards all the things she did not understand, or when, having heard of

some spiteful remark by that lady, she said: “That is what you call a

good woman; it is what I call a monster.” But this tyranny of the

reality which confronts us, this preponderance of the lamplight which

turns the dawn—already distant—as pale as the faintest memory,

disappeared when I was away from Mme. de Guermantes, and a different

lady said to me, putting herself on my level and reckoning the Duchess

as placed far below either of us: “Oriane takes no interest, really, in

anything or anybody,” or even (what in the presence of Mme. de

Guermantes it would have seemed impossible to believe, so loudly did she

herself proclaim the opposite): “Oriane is a snob.” Seeing that no

mathematical process would have enabled one to convert Mme. d’Arpajon

and Mme. de Montpensier into commensurable quantities, it would have

been impossible for me to reply, had anyone asked me which of the two

seemed to me superior to the other.

Now, among the peculiar characteristics of the drawing-room of the

Princesse de Guermantes, the one most generally quoted was a certain

exclusiveness, due in part to the royal birth of the Princess, but

especially to the almost fossilised rigidity of the aristocratic

prejudices of the Prince, prejudices which, incidentally, the Duke and

Duchess had made no scruple about deriding in front of me, and which

naturally were to make me regard it as more improbable than ever that I

should have been invited to a party by this man who reckoned only in

royalties and dukes, and at every dinner-party made a scene because he

had not been put in the place to which he would have been entitled under

Louis XIV, a place which, thanks to his immense erudition in matters of

history and genealogy, he was the only person who knew. For this reason,

many of the people in society placed to the credit of the Duke and

Duchess the differences which distinguished them from their cousins.

“The Duke and Duchess are far more modern, far more intelligent, they

don’t think of nothing, like the other couple, but how many quarterings

one has, their house is three hundred years in advance of their

cousins’,” were customary remarks, the memory of which made me tremble

as I looked at the card of invitation, to which they gave a far greater

probability of its having been sent me by some practical joker.

If the Duke and Duchess had not been still at Cannes, I might have tried

to find out from them whether the invitation which I had received was

genuine. This state of doubt in which I was plunged was not due, as I

flattered myself for a time by supposing, to a sentiment which a man of

fashion would not have felt and which, consequently, a writer, even if

he belonged apart from his writership to the fashionable caste, ought to

reproduce in order to be thoroughly “objective” and to depict each class

differently. I happened, in fact, only the other day, in a charming

volume of memoirs, to come upon the record of uncertainties analogous to

those which the Princesse de Guermantes’s card made me undergo. “Georges

and I” (or “Hély and I”, I have not the book at hand to verify the

reference) “were so keen to be asked to Mme. Delessert’s that, having

received an invitation from her, we thought it prudent, each of us

independently, to make certain that we were not the victims of an April

fool.” Now, the writer is none other than the Comte d’Haussonville (he

who married the Duc de Broglie’s daughter) and the other young man who

“independently” makes sure that he is not having a practical joke played

on him is, according to whether he is called Georges or Hély, one or

other of the two inseparable friends of M. d’Haussonville, either M.

d’Harcourt or the Prince de Chalais.

The day on which the party was to be given at the Princesse de

Guermantes’s, I learned that the Duke and Duchess had just returned to

Paris. The Princess’s ball would not have brought them back, but one of

their cousins was seriously ill, and moreover the Duke was greatly taken

up with a revel which was to be held the same night, and at which he

himself was to appear as Louis XI and his wife as Isabel of Bavaria. And

I determined to go and see her that morning. But, having gone out early,

they had not yet returned; I watched first of all from a little room,

which had seemed to me to be a good look-out post, for the arrival of

their carriage. As a matter of fact I had made a singularly bad choice

in my observatory from which I could barely make out our courtyard, but

I did see into several others, and this, though of no value to me,

occupied my mind for a time. It is not only in Venice that one has those

outlooks on to several houses at once which have proved so tempting to

painters; it is just the same in Paris. Nor do I cite Venice at random.

It is of its poorer quarters that certain poor quarters of Paris make

one think, in the morning, with their tall, wide chimneys to which the

sun imparts the most vivid pinks, the brightest reds; it is a whole

garden that flowers above the houses, and flowers in such a variety of

tints that one would call it, planted on top of the town, the garden of

a tulip-fancier of Delft or Haarlem. And then also, the extreme

proximity of the houses, with their windows looking opposite one another

on to a common courtyard, makes of each casement the frame in which a

cook sits dreamily gazing down at the ground below, in which farther off

a girl is having her hair combed by an old woman with the face, barely

distinguishable in the shadow, of a witch: thus each courtyard provides

for the adjoining house, by suppressing all sound in its interval, by

leaving visible a series of silent gestures in a series of rectangular

frames, glazed by the closing of the windows, an exhibition of a hundred

Dutch paintings hung in rows. Certainly from the Hôtel de Guermantes one

did not have the same kind of view, but one had curious views also,

especially from the strange trigonometrical point at which I had placed

myself and from which one’s gaze was arrested by nothing nearer than the

distant heights formed by the comparatively vague plots of ground which

preceded, on a steep slope, the mansion of the Marquise de Plassac and

Mme. de Tresmes, cousins (of the most noble category) of M. de

Guermantes, whom I did not know. Between me and this house (which was

that of their father, M. de Bréquigny) nothing but blocks of buildings

of low elevation, facing in every conceivable direction, which, without

blocking the view, increased the distance with their diagonal

perspective. The red-tiled turret of the coach-house in which the

Marquis de Frécourt kept his carriages did indeed end in a spire that

rose rather higher, but was so slender that it concealed nothing, and

made one think of those picturesque old buildings in Switzerland which

spring up in isolation at the foot of a mountain. All these vague and

divergent points on which my eyes rested made more distant apparently

than if it had been separated from us by several streets or by a series

of foothills the house of Mme. de Plassac, actually quite near but

chimerically remote as in an Alpine landscape. When its large paned

windows, glittering in the sunlight like flakes of rock crystal, were

thrown open so as to air the rooms, one felt, in following from one

floor to the next the footmen whom it was impossible to see clearly but

who were visibly shaking carpets, the same pleasure as when one sees in

a landscape by Turner or Elstir a traveller in a mail-coach, or a guide,

at different degrees of altitude on the Saint-Gothard. But from this

point of view in which I had ensconced myself I should have been in

danger of not seeing M. or Mme. de Guermantes come in, so that when in

the afternoon I was free to resume my survey I simply stood on the

staircase, from which the opening of the carriage-gate could not escape

my notice, and it was on this staircase that I posted myself, albeit

there did not appear there, so entrancing with their footmen rendered

minute by distance and busily cleaning, the Alpine beauties of the

Bréquigny-Tresmes mansion. Now this wait on the staircase was to have

for me consequences so considerable, and to reveal to me a picture no

longer Turneresque but ethical, of so great importance, that it is

preferable to postpone the account of it for a little while by

interposing first that of my visit to the Guermantes when I knew that

they had come home. It was the Duke alone who received me in the

library. As I went in there came out a little man with snow-white hair,

a look of poverty, a little black neckcloth such as was worn by the

lawyer at Combray and by several of my grandfather’s friends, but of a

more timid aspect than they, who, making me a series of profound bows,

refused absolutely to go downstairs until I had passed him. The Duke

shouted after him from the library something which I did not understand,

and the other responded with further bows, addressed to the wall, for

the Duke could not see him, but endlessly repeated nevertheless, like

the purposeless smiles on the faces of people who are talking to one

over the telephone; he had a falsetto voice, and saluted me afresh with

the humility of a man of business. And he might, for that matter, have

been a man of business from Combray, so much was he in the style,

provincial, out of date and mild, of the small folk, the modest elders

of those parts. “You shall see Oriane in a minute,” the Duke told me

when I had entered the room. “As Swann is coming in presently and

bringing her the proofs of his book on the coinage of the Order of

Malta, and, what is worse, an immense photograph he has had taken

shewing both sides of each of the coins, Oriane preferred to get dressed

early so that she can stay with him until it’s time to go out to dinner.

We have such a heap of things in the house already that we don’t know

where to put them all, and I ask myself where on earth we are going to

stick this photograph. But I have too good-natured a wife, who is too

fond of giving people pleasure. She thought it would be polite to ask

Swann to let her see side by side on one sheet the heads of all those

Grand Masters of the Order whose medals he has found at Rhodes. I said

Malta, didn’t I, it is Rhodes, but it’s all the same Order of Saint John

of Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, she is interested in them only

because Swann makes a hobby of it. Our family is very much mixed up in

the whole story; even at the present day, my brother, whom you know, is

one of the highest dignitaries in the Order of Malta. But I might have

told all that to Oriane, she simply wouldn’t have listened to me. On the

other hand, it was quite enough that Swann’s researches into the

Templars (it’s astonishing the passion that people of one religion have

for studying others) should have led him on to the history of the

Knights of Rhodes, who succeeded the Templars, for Oriane at once to

insist on seeing the heads of these Knights. They were very small fry

indeed compared with the Lusignans, Kings of Cyprus, from whom we

descend in a direct line. But so far, as Swann hasn’t taken them up,

Oriane doesn’t care to hear anything about the Lusignans.” I could not

at once explain to the Duke why I had come. What happened was that

several relatives or friends, including Mme. de Silistrie and the

Duchesse de Montrose, came to pay a call on the Duchess, who was often

at home before dinner, and not finding her there stayed for a short

while with the Duke. The first of these ladies (the Princesse de

Silistrie), simply attired, with a dry but friendly manner, carried a

stick in her hand. I was afraid at first that she had injured herself,

or was a cripple. She was on the contrary most alert. She spoke

regretfully to the Duke of a first cousin of his own—not on the

Guermantes side, but more illustrious still, were that possible—whose

health, which had been in a grave condition for some time past, had

grown suddenly worse. But it was evident that the Duke, while full of

pity for his cousin’s lot, and repeating “Poor Mama! He’s such a good

fellow!” had formed a favourable prognosis. The fact was that the dinner

at which the Duke was to be present amused him, the big party at the

Princesse de Guermantes’s did not bore him, but above all he was to go

on at one o’clock in the morning with his wife to a great supper and

costume ball, with a view to which a costume of Louis XI for himself,

and one of Isabel of Bavaria for his wife were waiting in readiness. And

the Duke was determined not to be disturbed amid all these gaieties by

the sufferings of the worthy Amanien d’Osmond. Two other ladies carrying

sticks, Mme. de Plassac and Mme. de Tresmes, both daughters of the Comte

de Bréquigny, came in next to pay Basin a visit, and declared that

cousin Mama’s state left no room now for hope. The Duke shrugged his

shoulders, and to change the conversation asked whether they were going

that evening to Marie-Gilbert’s. They replied that they were not, in

view of the state of Amanien who was in his last agony, and indeed they

had excused themselves from the dinner to which the Duke was going, the

other guests at which they proceeded to enumerate: the brother of King

Theodosius, the Infanta Maria Concepcion, and so forth. As the Marquis

d’Osmond was less nearly related to them than he was to Basin, their

“defection” appeared to the Duke to be a sort of indirect reproach aimed

at his own conduct. And so, albeit they had come down from the heights

of the Bréquigny mansion to see the Duchess (or rather to announce to

her the alarming character, incompatible for his relatives with

attendance at social gatherings, of their cousin’s illness) they did not

stay long, and, each armed with her alpenstock, Walpurge and Dorothée

(such were the names of the two sisters) retraced the craggy path to

their citadel. I never thought of asking the Guermantes what was the

meaning of these sticks, so common in a certain part of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain. Possibly, looking upon the whole parish as their domain,

and not caring to hire cabs, they were in the habit of taking long

walks, for which some old fracture, due to immoderate indulgence in the

chase, and to the falls from horseback which are often the fruit of that

indulgence, or simply rheumatism caused by the dampness of the left bank

and of old country houses made a stick necessary. Perhaps they had not

set out upon any such long expedition through the quarter, but, having

merely come down into their garden (which lay at no distance from that

of the Duchess) to pick the fruit required for stewing, had looked in on

their way home to bid good evening to Mme. de Guermantes, though without

going so far as to bring a pair of shears or a watering-can into her

house. The Duke appeared touched that I should have come to see them so

soon after their return to Paris. But his face grew dark when I told him

that I had come to ask his wife to find out whether her cousin really

had invited me. I had touched upon one of those services which M. and

Mme. de Guermantes were not fond of rendering. The Duke explained to me

that it was too late, that if the Princess had not sent me an invitation

it would make him appear to be asking her for one, that his cousins had

refused him one once before, and he had no wish to appear either

directly or indirectly to be interfering with their visiting list, be

“meddling”; finally, he could not even be sure that he and his wife, who

were dining out that evening, would not come straight home afterwards,

that in that case their best excuse for not having gone to the

Princess’s party would be to conceal from her the fact of their return

to Paris, instead of hastening to inform her of it, as they must do if

they sent her a note, or spoke to her over the telephone about me, and

certainly too late to be of any use, since, in all probability, the

Princess’s list of guests would be closed by now. “You’ve not fallen

foul of her in any way?” he asked in a suspicious tone, the Guermantes

living in a constant fear of not being informed of the latest society

quarrels, and so of people’s trying to climb back into favour on their

shoulders. Finally, as the Duke was in the habit of taking upon himself

all decisions that might seem not very good-natured: “Listen, my boy,”

he said to me suddenly, as though the idea had just come into his head,

“I would really rather not mention at all to Oriane that you have been

speaking to me about it. You know how kind-hearted she is; besides, she

has an enormous regard for you, she would insist on sending to ask her

cousin, in spite of anything I might say to the contrary, and if she is

tired after dinner, there will be no getting out of it, she will be

forced to go to the party. No, decidedly, I shall say nothing to her

about it. Anyhow, you will see her yourself in a minute. But not a word

about that matter, I beg of you. If you decide to go to the party, I

have no need to tell you what a pleasure it will be to us to spend the

evening there with you.” The motives actuating humanity are too sacred

for him before whom they are invoked not to bow to them, whether he

believes them to be sincere or not; I did not wish to appear to be

weighing in the balance for a moment the relative importance of my

invitation and the possible tiredness of Mme. de Guermantes, and I

promised not to speak to her of the object of my visit, exactly as

though I had been taken in by the little farce which M. de Guermantes

had performed for my benefit. I asked him if he thought there was any

chance of my seeing Mme. de Stermaria at the Princess’s. “Why, no,” he

replied with the air of an expert; “I know the name you mention, from

having seen it in lists of club members, it is not at all the type of

person who goes to Gilbert’s. You will see nobody there who is not

excessively proper and intensely boring, duchesses bearing titles which

one thought were extinct years ago and which they have revived for the

occasion, all the Ambassadors, heaps of Coburgs, foreign royalties, but

you mustn’t hope for the ghost of a Stermaria. Gilbert would be taken

ill at the mere thought of such a thing.

“Wait now, you’re fond of painting, I must shew you a superb picture I

bought from my cousin, partly in exchange for the Elstirs, which frankly

did not appeal to us. It was sold to me as a Philippe de Champaigne, but

I believe myself that it’s by some one even greater. Would you like to

know my idea? I believe it to be a Velazquez, and of the best period,”

said the Duke, looking me boldly in the eyes, whether to learn my

impression or in the hope of enhancing it. A footman came in. “Mme. la

Duchesse has told me to ask M. le Duc if M. le Duc will be so good as to

see M. Swann, as Mme. la Duchesse is not quite ready.” “Shew M. Swann

in,” said the Duke, after looking at his watch and seeing that he had

still a few minutes before he need go to dress. “Naturally my wife, who

told him to come, is not ready. There’s no use saying anything before

Swann about Marie-Gilbert’s party,” said the Duke. “I don’t know whether

he’s been invited. Gilbert likes him immensely, because he believes him

to be the natural grandson of the Duc de Berri, but that’s a long story.

(Otherwise, you can imagine! My cousin, who falls in a fit if he sees a

Jew a mile off.) But now, don’t you see, the Dreyfus case has made

things more serious. Swann ought to have realised that he more than

anyone must drop all connexion with those fellows, instead of which he

says the most offensive things.” The Duke called back the footman to

know whether the man who had been sent to inquire at cousin Osmond’s had

returned. His plan was as follows: as he believed, and rightly, that his

cousin was dying, he was anxious to obtain news of him before his death,

that is to say before he was obliged to go into mourning. Once covered

by the official certainty that Amanien was still alive, he could go

without a thought to his dinner, to the Prince’s party, to the midnight

revel at which he would appear as Louis XI, and had made the most

exciting assignation with a new mistress, and would make no more

inquiries until the following day, when his pleasures would be at an

end. Then one would put on mourning if the cousin had passed away in the

night. “No, M. le Duc, he is not back yet.” “What in the Name of God!

Nothing is ever done in this house till the last minute,” cried the

Duke, at the thought that Amanien might still be in time to “croak” for

an evening paper, and so make him miss his revel. He sent for the

_Temps_, in which there was nothing. I had not seen Swann for a long

time, and asked myself at first whether in the old days he used to clip

his moustache, or had not his hair brushed up vertically in front, for I

found in him something altered; it was simply that he was indeed greatly

“altered” because he was very ill, and illness produces in the face

modifications as profound as are created by growing a beard or by

changing the line of one’s parting. (Swann’s illness was the same that

had killed his mother, who had been attacked by it at precisely the age

which he had now reached. Our existences are in truth, owing to

heredity, as full of cabalistic ciphers, of horoscopic castings as if

there really were sorcerers in the world. And just as there is a certain

duration of life for humanity in general, so there is one for families

in particular, that is to say, in any one family, for the members of it

who resemble one another.) Swann was dressed with an elegance which,

like that of his wife, associated with what he now was what he once had

been. Buttoned up in a pearl-grey frock-coat which emphasised the

tallness of his figure, slender, his white gloves stitched in black, he

carried a grey tall hat of a specially wide shape which Delion had

ceased now to make except for him, the Prince de Sagan, the Marquis de

Modène, M. Charles Haas and Comte Louis de Turenne. I was surprised at

the charming smile and affectionate handclasp with which he replied to

my greeting, for I had imagined that after so long an interval he would

not recognise me at once; I told him of my astonishment; he received it

with a shout of laughter, a trace of indignation and a further grip of

my hand, as if it were throwing doubt on the soundness of his brain or

the sincerity of his affection to suppose that he did not know me. And

yet that was what had happened; he did not identify me, as I learned

long afterwards, until several minutes later when he heard my name

mentioned. But no change in his face, in his speech, in the things he

said to me betrayed the discovery which a chance word from M. de

Guermantes had enabled him to make, with such mastery, with such

absolute sureness did he play the social game. He brought to it,

moreover, that spontaneity in manners and personal initiative, even in

his style of dress, which characterised the Guermantes type. Thus it was

that the greeting which the old clubman, without recognising me, had

given me was not the cold and stiff greeting of the man of the world who

was a pure formalist, but a greeting full of a real friendliness, of a

true charm, such as the Duchesse de Guermantes, for instance, possessed

(carrying it so far as to smile at you first, before you had bowed to

her, if she met you in the street), in contrast to the more mechanical

greeting customary among the ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. In

the same way, again, the hat which, in conformity with a custom that was

beginning to disappear, he laid on the floor by his feet, was lined with

green leather, a thing not usually done, because, according to him, this

kept the hat much cleaner, in reality because it was highly becoming.

“Now, Charles, you’re a great expert, come and see what I’ve got to shew

you, after which, my boys, I’m going to ask your permission to leave you

together for a moment while I go and change my clothes, besides, I

expect Oriane won’t be long now.” And he shewed his “Velazquez” to

Swann. “But it seems to me that I know this,” said Swann with the

grimace of a sick man for whom the mere act of speaking requires an

effort. “Yes,” said the Duke, turned serious by the time which the

expert took in expressing his admiration. “You have probably seen it at

Gilbert’s.” “Oh, yes, of course, I remember.” “What do you suppose it

is?” “Oh, well, if it comes from Gilbert’s, it is probably one of your

_ancestors_,” said Swann with a blend of irony and deference towards a

form of greatness which he would have felt it impolite and absurd to

despise, but to which for reasons of good taste he preferred to make

only a playful reference.

“To be sure, it is,” said the Duke bluntly. “It’s Boson, the I forget

how manieth de Guermantes. Not that I care a damn about that. You know

I’m not as feudal as my cousin. I’ve heard the names mentioned of

Rigaud, Mignard, Velazquez even!” he went on, fastening on Swann the

gaze of an inquisitor and executioner in an attempt at once to read into

his mind and to influence his response. “Well,” he concluded, for when

he was led to provoke artificially an opinion which he desired to hear,

he had the faculty, after a few moments, of believing that it had been

spontaneously uttered; “come, now, none of your flattery, do you think

it’s by one of those big masters I’ve mentioned?” “Nnnnno,” said Swann.

“But after all, I know nothing about these things, it’s not for me to

decide who daubed the canvas. But you’re a dilettante, a master of the

subject, to whom do you attribute it? You’re enough of an expert to have

some idea. What would you put it down as?” Swann hesitated for a moment

before the picture, which obviously he thought atrocious. “A bad joke!”

he replied, with a smile at the Duke who could not check an impulsive

movement of rage. When this had subsided: “Be good fellows, both of you,

wait a moment for Oriane, I must go and put on my swallow-tails and then

I’ll join you. I shall send word to my good woman that you’re both

waiting for her.” I talked for a minute or two with Swann about the

Dreyfus case, and asked him how it was that all the Guermantes were

anti-Dreyfusards. “In the first place because at heart all these people

are anti-semites,” replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from

experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who

supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that

other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a

preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be

done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides,

having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that

is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning

to the spiritual fold of his fathers. “Yes, the Prince de Guermantes,” I

said, “it is true, I’ve heard that he was anti-semitic.” “Oh, that

fellow! I wasn’t even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point

that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred

to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district,

who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle

which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have

had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to

the Rothschilds.” “Are you going to be there this evening, by any

chance?” “Yes,” Swann replied, “although I am far too tired. But he sent

me a wire to tell me that he has something to say to me. I feel that I

shall be too unwell in the next few days to go there or to see him at

home; it would upset me, so I prefer to get it over at once.” “But the

Duc de Guermantes is not anti-semitic?” “You can see quite well that he

is, since he’s an anti-Dreyfusard,” replied Swann, without noticing the

logical fallacy. “That doesn’t prevent my being very sorry that I

disappointed the man—what am I saying? The Duke, I mean—by not admiring

his Mignard or whatever he calls it.” “But at any rate,” I went on,

reverting to the Dreyfus case, “the Duchess, she, now, is intelligent.”

“Yes, she is charming. To my mind, however, she was even more charming

when she was still known as the Princesse des Laumes. Her mind has

become somehow more angular, it was all much softer in the juvenile

great lady, but after all, young or old, men or women, what can you

expect, all these people belong to a different race, one can’t have a

thousand years of feudalism in one’s blood with impunity. Naturally they

imagine that it counts for nothing in their opinions.” “All the same,

Robert de Saint-Loup is a Dreyfusard.” “Ah! So much the better, all the

more as you know that his mother is extremely ‘anti’. I had heard that

he was, but I wasn’t certain of it. That gives me a great deal of

pleasure. It doesn’t surprise me, he’s highly intelligent. It’s a great

thing, that is.”

Dreyfusism had brought to Swann an extraordinary simplicity of mind, and

had imparted to his way of looking at things an impulsiveness, an

inconsistency more noticeable even than had been the similar effects of

his marriage to Odette; this new loss of caste would have been better

described as a recasting, and was entirely to his credit, since it made

him return to the ways in which his forebears had trodden and from which

he had turned aside to mix with the aristocracy. But Swann, just at the

very moment when with such lucidity it had been granted to him, thanks

to the gifts he had inherited from his race, to perceive a truth that

was still hidden from people of fashion, shewed himself nevertheless

quite comically blind. He subjected afresh all his admirations and all

his contempts to the test of a new criterion, Dreyfusism. That the

anti-Dreyfusism of Mme. Bontemps should have made him think her a fool

was no more astonishing than that, when he was first married, he should

have thought her intelligent. It was not very serious either that the

new wave reached also his political judgments and made him lose all

memory of having treated as a man with a price, a British spy (this

latter was an absurdity of the Guermantes set), Clemenceau, whom he

declared now to have always stood up for conscience, to be a man of

iron, like Cornély. “No, no, I never told you anything of the sort.

You’re thinking of some one else.” But, sweeping past his political

judgments, the wave overthrew in Swann his literary judgments also, and

even affected his way of pronouncing them. Barrès had lost all his

talent, and even the books of his early days were feeble, one could

hardly read them again. “You try, you’ll find you can’t struggle to the

end. What a difference from Clemenceau! Personally, I am not

anti-clerical, but when you compare them together you must see that

Barrès is invertebrate. He’s a very great fellow, is old Clemenceau. How

he knows the language!” However, the anti-Dreyfusards were in no

position to criticise these follies. They explained that one was a

Dreyfusard by one’s being of Jewish origin. If a practising Catholic

like Saniette stood out also for a fresh trial, that was because he was

buttonholed by Mme. Verdurin, who behaved like a wild Radical. She was

out above all things against the “frocks”. Saniette was more fool than

knave, and had no idea of the harm that the Mistress was doing him. If

you pointed out that Brichot was equally a friend of Mme. Verdurin and

was a member of the Patrie Française, that was because he was more

intelligent. “You see him occasionally?” I asked Swann, referring to

Saint-Loup. “No, never. He wrote to me the other day hoping that I would

ask the Duc de Mouchy and various other people to vote for him at the

Jockey, where for that matter he got through like a letter through the

post.” “In spite of the Case!” “The question was never raised. However I

must tell you that since all this business began I never set foot in the

place.”

M. de Guermantes returned, and was presently joined by his wife, all

ready now for the evening, tall and proud in a gown of red satin the

skirt of which was bordered with spangles. She had in her hair a long

ostrich feather dyed purple, and over her shoulders a tulle scarf of the

same red as her dress. “How nice it is to have one’s hat lined with

leather,” said the Duchess, whom nothing escaped. “However, with you,

Charles, everything is always charming, whether it’s what you wear or

what you say, what you read or what you do.” Swann meanwhile, without

apparently listening, was considering the Duchess as he would have

studied the canvas of a master, and then sought her gaze, making with

his lips the grimace which implies: “The devil!” Mme. de Guermantes

rippled with laughter. “So my clothes please you? I’m delighted. But I

must say that they don’t please me much,” she went on with a sulking

air. “Good Lord, what a bore it is to have to dress up and go out when

one would ever so much rather stay at home!” “What magnificent rubies!”

“Ah! my dear Charles, at least one can see that you know what you’re

talking about, you’re not like that brute Monserfeuil who asked me if

they were real. I must say that I’ve never seen anything quite like

them. They were a present from the Grand Duchess. They’re a little too

large for my liking, a little too like claret glasses filled to the

brim, but I’ve put them on because we shall be seeing the Grand Duchess

this evening at Marie-Gilbert’s,” added Mme. de Guermantes, never

suspecting that this assertion destroyed the force of those previously

made by the Duke. “What’s on at the Princess’s?” inquired Swann.

“Practically nothing,” the Duke hastened to reply, the question having

made him think that Swann was not invited. “What’s that, Basin? When all

the highways and hedgerows have been scoured? It will be a deathly

crush. What will be pretty, though,” she went on, looking wistfully at

Swann, “if the storm I can feel in the air now doesn’t break, will be

those marvellous gardens. You know them, of course. I was there a month

ago, at the time when the lilacs were in flower, you can’t have any idea

how lovely they were. And then the fountain, really, it’s Versailles in

Paris.” “What sort of person is the Princess?” I asked. “Why, you know

quite well, you’ve seen her here, she’s as beautiful as the day, also

rather an idiot. Very nice, in spite of all her Germanic

high-and-mightiness, full of good nature and stupid mistakes.” Swann was

too subtle not to perceive that the Duchess, in this speech, was trying

to shew the “Guermantes wit”, and at no great cost to herself, for she

was only serving up in a less perfect form an old saying of her own.

Nevertheless, to prove to the Duchess that he appreciated her intention

to be, and as though she had really succeeded in being funny, he smiled

with a slightly forced air, causing me by this particular form of

insincerity the same feeling of awkwardness that used to disturb me long

ago when I heard my parents discussing with M. Vinteuil the corruption

of certain sections of society (when they knew very well that a

corruption far greater sat enthroned at Montjouvain), Legrandin

colouring his utterances for the benefit of fools, choosing delicate

epithets which he knew perfectly well would not be understood by a rich

or smart but illiterate public. “Come now, Oriane, what on earth are you

saying?” broke in M. de Guermantes. “Marie a fool? Why, she has read

everything, she’s as musical as a fiddle.” “But, my poor little Basin,

you’re as innocent as a new-born babe. As if one could not be all that,

and rather an idiot as well. Idiot is too strong a word; no, she’s in

the clouds, she’s Hesse-Darmstadt, Holy Roman Empire, and wa-wa-wa. Her

pronunciation alone makes me tired. But I quite admit that she’s a

charming looney. Simply the idea of stepping down from her German throne

to go and marry, in the most middle-class way, a private citizen. It is

true that she chose him! Yes, it’s quite true,” she went on, turning to

me, “you don’t know Gilbert. Let me give you an idea of him, he took to

his bed once because I had left a card on Mme. Carnot.... But, my little

Charles,” said the Duchess, changing the conversation when she saw that

the story of the card left on the Carnots appeared to irritate M. de

Guermantes, “you know, you’ve never sent me that photograph of our

Knights of Rhodes, whom I’ve learned to love through you, and I am so

anxious to make their acquaintance.” The Duke meanwhile had not taken

his eyes from his wife’s face. “Oriane, you might at least tell the

story properly and not cut out half. I ought to explain,” he corrected,

addressing Swann, “that the British Ambassadress at that time, who was a

very worthy woman, but lived rather in the moon and was in the habit of

making up these odd combinations, conceived the distinctly quaint idea

of inviting us with the President and his wife. We were—Oriane herself

was rather surprised, especially as the Ambassadress knew quite enough

of the people we knew not to invite us, of all things, to so

ill-assorted a gathering. There was a Minister there who is a swindler,

however I pass over all that, we had not been warned in time, were

caught in the trap, and, I’m bound to admit, all these people behaved

most civilly to us. Only, once was enough. Mme. de Guermantes, who does

not often do me the honour of consulting me, felt it incumbent upon her

to leave a card in the course of the following week at the Elysée.

Gilbert may perhaps have gone rather far in regarding it as a stain upon

our name. But it must not be forgotten that, politics apart, M. Carnot,

who for that matter filled his post quite adequately, was the grandson

of a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal which caused the death of

eleven of our people in a single day.” “In that case, Basin, why did you

go every week to dine at Chantilly? The Duc d’Aumale was just as much

the grandson of a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, with this

difference, that Carnot was a brave man and Philippe Egalité a wretched

scoundrel.” “Excuse my interrupting you to explain that I did send the

photograph,” said Swann. “I can’t understand how it hasn’t reached you.”

“It doesn’t altogether surprise me,” said the Duchess, “my servants tell

me only what they think fit. They probably do not approve of the Order

of Saint John.” And she rang the bell. “You know, Oriane, that when I

used to go to Chantilly it was without enthusiasm.” “Without enthusiasm,

but with a nightshirt in a bag, in case the Prince asked you to stay,

which for that matter he very rarely did, being a perfect cad like all

the Orléans lot. Do you know who else are to be dining at Mme. de

Saint-Euverte’s?” Mme. de Guermantes asked her husband. “Besides the

people you know already, she’s asked at the last moment King

Theodosius’s brother.” At these tidings the Duchess’s features breathed

contentment and her speech boredom. “Oh, good heavens, more princes!”

“But that one is well-mannered and intelligent,” Swann suggested. “Not

altogether, though,” replied the Duchess, apparently seeking for words

that would give more novelty to the thought expressed. “Have you ever

noticed with princes that the best-mannered among them are not really

well-mannered? They must always have an opinion about everything. Then,

as they have none of their own, they spend the first half of their lives

asking us ours and the other half serving it up to us second-hand. They

positively must be able to say that one piece has been well played and

the next not so well. When there is no difference. Listen, this little

Theodosius junior (I forget his name) asked me what one called an

orchestral motif. I replied,” said the Duchess, her eyes sparkling while

a laugh broke from her beautiful red lips: “‘One calls it an orchestral

motif.’ I don’t think he was any too well pleased, really. Oh, my dear

Charles,” she went on, “what a bore it can be, dining out. There are

evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps

just as great a bore, because we don’t know what it’s like.” A servant

appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the

porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an

apparent peace between them. “Am I to go up this evening to inquire for

M. le Marquis d’Osmond?” he asked. “Most certainly not, nothing before

to-morrow morning. In fact I don’t want you to remain in the house

to-night. The only thing that will happen will be that his footman, who

knows you, will come to you with the latest report and send you out

after us. Get off, go anywhere you like, have a woman, sleep out, but I

don’t want to see you here before to-morrow morning.” An immense joy

overflowed from the footman’s face. He would at last be able to spend

long hours with his lady-love, whom he had practically ceased to see

ever since, after a final scene with the porter, the Duchess had

considerately explained to him that it would be better, to avoid further

conflicts, if he did not go out at all. He floated, at the thought of

having an evening free at last, in a happiness which the Duchess saw and

guessed its reason. She felt, so to speak, a tightening of the heart and

an itching in all her limbs at the sight of this happiness which an

amorous couple were snatching behind her back, concealing themselves

from her, which left her irritated and jealous. “No, Basin, let him stay

here; I say, he’s not to stir out of the house.” “But, Oriane, that’s

absurd, the house is crammed with servants, and you have the costumier’s

people coming as well at twelve to dress us for this show. There’s

absolutely nothing for him to do, and he’s the only one who’s a friend

of Mama’s footman; I would a thousand times rather get him right away

from the house.” “Listen, Basin, let me do what I want, I shall have a

message for him to take in the evening, as it happens, I can’t tell yet

at what time. In any case you’re not to go out of the house for a single

instant, do you hear?” she said to the despairing footman. If there were

continual quarrels, and if servants did not stay long with the Duchess,

the person to whose charge this guerrilla warfare was to be laid was

indeed irremovable, but it was not the porter; no doubt for the rougher

tasks, for the martyrdoms that it was more tiring to inflict, for the

quarrels which ended in blows, the Duchess entrusted the heavier

instruments to him; but even then he played his part without the least

suspicion that he had been cast for it. Like the household servants, he

admired the Duchess for her kindness of heart; and footmen of little

discernment who came back, after leaving her service, to visit Françoise

used to say that the Duke’s house would have been the finest “place” in

Paris if it had not been for the porter’s lodge. The Duchess “played”

the lodge on them, just as at different times clericalism, freemasonry,

the Jewish peril have been played on the public. Another footman came

into the room. “Why have not they brought up the package that M. Swann

sent here? And, by the way (you’ve heard, Charles, that Mama is

seriously ill?), Jules went up to inquire for news of M. le Marquis

d’Osmond: has he come back yet?” “He’s just come this instant, M. le

Duc. They’re waiting from one moment to the next for M. le Marquis to

pass away.” “Ah! He’s alive!” exclaimed the Duke with a sigh of relief.

“That’s all right, that’s all right: sold again, Satan! While there’s

life there’s hope,” the Duke announced to us with a joyful air. “They’ve

been talking about him as though he were dead and buried. In a week from

now he’ll be fitter than I am.” “It’s the Doctors who said that he

wouldn’t last out the evening. One of them wanted to call again during

the night. The head one said it was no use. M. le Marquis would be dead

by then; they’ve only kept him alive by injecting him with camphorated

oil.” “Hold your tongue, you damned fool,” cried the Duke in a paroxysm

of rage. “Who the devil asked you to say all that? You haven’t

understood a word of what they told you.” “It wasn’t me they told, it

was Jules.” “Will you hold your tongue!” roared the Duke, and, turning

to Swann, “What a blessing he’s still alive! He will regain his strength

gradually, don’t you know. Still alive, after being in such a critical

state, that in itself is an excellent sign. One mustn’t expect

everything at once. It can’t be at all unpleasant, a little injection of

camphorated oil.” He rubbed his hands. “He’s alive; what more could

anyone want? After going through all that he’s gone through, it’s a

great step forward. Upon my word, I envy him having such a temperament.

Ah! these invalids, you know, people do all sorts of little things for

them that they don’t do for us. Now to-day there was a devil of a cook

who sent me up a leg of mutton with _béarnaise_ sauce—it was done to a

turn, I must admit, but just for that very reason I took so much of it

that it’s still lying on my stomach. However, that doesn’t make people

come to inquire for me as they do for dear Amanien. We do too much

inquiring. It only tires him. We must let him have room to breathe.

They’re killing the poor fellow by sending round to him all the time.”

“Well,” said the Duchess to the footman as he was leaving the room, “I

gave orders for the envelope containing a photograph which M. Swann sent

me to be brought up here.” “Madame la Duchesse, it is so large that I

didn’t know if I could get it through the door. We have left it in the

hall. Does Madame la Duchesse wish me to bring it up?” “Oh, in that

case, no; they ought to have told me, but if it’s so big I shall see it

in a moment when I come downstairs.” “I forgot to tell Mme. la Duchesse

that Mme. la Comtesse Molé left a card this morning for Mme. la

Duchesse.” “What, this morning?” said the Duchess with an air of

disapproval, feeling that so young a woman ought not to take the liberty

of leaving cards in the morning. “About ten o’clock, Madame la

Duchesse.” “Shew me the cards.” “In any case, Oriane, when you say that

it was a funny idea on Marie’s part to marry Gilbert,” went on the Duke,

reverting to the original topic of conversation, “it is you who have an

odd way of writing history. If either of them was a fool, it was

Gilbert, for having married of all people a woman so closely related to

the King of the Belgians, who has usurped the name of Brabant which

belongs to us. To put it briefly, we are of the same blood as the

Hesses, and of the elder branch. It is always stupid to talk about

oneself,” he apologised to me, “but after all, whenever we have been not

only at Darmstadt, but even at Cassel and all over Electoral Hesse, the

Landgraves have always, all of them, been most courteous in giving us

precedence as being of the elder branch.” “But really, Basin, you don’t

mean to tell me that a person who was a Major in every regiment in her

country, who had been engaged to the King of Sweden.” “Oriane, that is

too much; anyone would think that you didn’t know that the King of

Sweden’s grandfather was tilling the soil at Pau when we had been ruling

the roost for nine hundred years throughout the whole of Europe.” “That

doesn’t alter the fact that if somebody were to say in the street:

‘Hallo, there’s the King of Sweden,’ everyone would at once rush to see

him as far as the Place de la Concorde, and if he said: ‘There’s M. de

Guermantes,’ nobody would know who M. de Guermantes was.” “What an

argument!” “Besides, I never can understand how, once the title of Duke

of Brabant has passed to the Belgian Royal Family, you can continue to

claim it.”

The footman returned with the Comtesse Molé’s card, or rather what she

had left in place of a card. Alleging that she had none on her, she had

taken from her pocket a letter addressed to herself, and keeping the

contents had handed in the envelope which bore the inscription: “La

Comtesse Molé.” As the envelope was rather large, following the fashion

in notepaper which prevailed that year, this manuscript “card” was

almost twice the size of an ordinary visiting card. “That is what people

call Mme. Molé’s ‘simplicity’,” said the Duchess ironically. “She wants

to make us think that she had no cards on her, and to shew her

originality. But we know all about that, don’t we, my little Charles, we

are quite old enough and quite original enough ourselves to see through

the tricks of a little lady who has only been going about for four

years. She is charming, but she doesn’t seem to me, all the same, to be

quite ‘big’ enough to imagine that she can take the world by surprise

with so little effort as merely leaving an envelope instead of a card

and leaving it at ten o’clock in the morning. Her old mother mouse will

shew her that she knows a thing or two about that.” Swann could not help

smiling at the thought that the Duchess, who was, incidentally, a trifle

jealous of Mme. de Molé’s success, would find it quite in accordance

with the “Guermantes wit” to make some impertinent retort to her

visitor. “So far as the title of Duc de Brabant is concerned, I’ve told

you a hundred times, Oriane...” the Duke continued, but the Duchess,

without listening, cut him short. “But, my little Charles, I’m longing

to see your photograph.” “Ah! _Extinctor draconis latrator Anubis_,”

said Swann. “Yes, it was so charming what you said about that when you

were comparing the Saint George at Venice. But I don’t understand: why

Anubis?” “What’s the one like who was an ancestor of Babal?” asked M. de

Guermantes. “You want to see his bauble?” retorted his wife, dryly, to

shew that she herself scorned the pun. “I want to see them all,” she

added. “Listen, Charles, let us wait downstairs till the carriage

comes,” said the Duke; “you can pay your call on us in the hall, because

my wife won’t let us have any peace until she’s seen your photograph. I

am less impatient, I must say,” he added with a satisfied air. “I am not

easily moved myself, but she would see us all dead rather than miss it.”

“I am entirely of your opinion, Basin,” said the Duchess, “let us go

into the hall; we shall at least know why we have come down from your

study, while we shall never know how we have come down from the Counts

of Brabant.” “I’ve told you a hundred times how the title came into the

House of Hesse,” said the Duke (while we were going downstairs to look

at the photograph, and I thought of those that Swann used to bring me at

Combray), “through the marriage of a Brabant in 1241 with the daughter

of the last Landgrave of Thuringia and Hesse, so that really it is the

title of Prince of Hesse that came to the House of Brabant rather than

that of Duke of Brabant to the House of Hesse. You will remember that

our battle-cry was that of the Dukes of Brabant: ‘Limbourg to her

conqueror!’ until we exchanged the arms of Brabant for those of

Guermantes, in which I think myself that we were wrong, and the example

of the Gramonts will not make me change my opinion.” “But,” replied Mme.

de Guermantes, “as it is the King of the Belgians who is the

conqueror.... Besides the Belgian Crown Prince calls himself Duc de

Brabant.” “But, my dear child, your argument will not hold water for a

moment. You know as well as I do that there are titles of pretension

which can perfectly well exist even if the territory is occupied by

usurpers. For instance, the King of Spain describes himself equally as

Duke of Brabant, claiming in virtue of a possession less ancient than

ours, but more ancient than that of the King of the Belgians. He calls

himself also Duke of Burgundy, King of the Indies Occidental and

Oriental, and Duke of Milan. Well, he is no more in possession of

Burgundy, the Indies or Brabant than I possess Brabant myself, or the

Prince of Hesse either, for that matter. The King of Spain likewise

proclaims himself King of Jerusalem, as does the Austrian Emperor, and

Jerusalem belongs to neither one nor the other.” He stopped for a moment

with an awkward feeling that the mention of Jerusalem might have

embarrassed Swann, in view of “current events”, but only went on more

rapidly: “What you said just now might be said of anyone. We were at one

time Dukes of Aumale, a duchy that has passed as regularly to the House

of France as Joinville and Chevreuse have to the House of Albert. We

make no more claim to those titles than to that of Marquis de

Noirmoutiers, which was at one time ours, and became perfectly regularly

the appanage of the House of La Trémoïlle, but because certain cessions

are valid, it does not follow that they all are. For instance,” he went

on, turning to me, “my sister-in-law’s son bears the title of Prince

d’Agrigente, which comes to us from Joan the Mad, as that of Prince de

Tarente comes to the La Trémoïlles. Well, Napoleon went and gave this

title of Tarente to a soldier, who may have been admirable in the ranks,

but in doing so the Emperor was disposing of what belonged to him even

less than Napoleon III when he created a Duc de Montmorency, since

Périgord had at least a mother who was a Montmorency, while the Tarente

of Napoléon I had no more Tarente about him than Napoleon’s wish that he

should become so. That did not prevent Chaix d’Est-Ange, alluding to our

uncle Condé, from asking the Procureur Impérial if he had picked up the

title of Duc de Montmorency in the moat of Vincennes.”

“Listen, Basin, I ask for nothing better than to follow you to the

ditches of Vincennes, or even to Taranto. And that reminds me, Charles,

of what I was going to say to you when you were telling me about your

Saint George at Venice. We have an idea, Basin and I, of spending next

spring in Italy and Sicily. If you were to come with us, just think what

a difference it would make! I’m not thinking only of the pleasure of

seeing you, but imagine, after all you’ve told me so often about the

remains of the Norman Conquest and of ancient history, imagine what a

trip like that would become if you came with us! I mean to say that even

Basin—what am I saying, Gilbert—would benefit by it, because I feel that

even his claims to the throne of Naples and all that sort of thing would

interest me if they were explained by you in old romanesque churches in

little villages perched on hills like primitive paintings. But now we’re

going to look at your photograph. Open the envelope,” said the Duchess

to a footman. “Please, Oriane, not this evening; you can look at it

to-morrow,” implored the Duke, who had already been making signs of

alarm to me on seeing the huge size of the photograph. “But I like to

look at it with Charles,” said the Duchess, with a smile at once

artificially concupiscent and psychologically subtle, for in her desire

to be friendly to Swann she spoke of the pleasure which she would have

in looking at the photograph as though it were the pleasure an invalid

feels he would find in eating an orange, or as though she had managed to

combine an escapade with her friends with giving information to a

biographer as to some of her favourite pursuits. “All right, he will

come again to see you, on purpose,” declared the Duke, to whom his wife

was obliged to yield. “You can spend three hours in front of it, if that

amuses you,” he added ironically. “But where are you going to stick a

toy of those dimensions?” “Why, in my room, of course. I like to have it

before my eyes.” “Oh, just as you please; if it’s in your room, probably

I shall never see it,” said the Duke, without thinking of the revelation

he was thus blindly making of the negative character of his conjugal

relations. “Very well, you will undo it with the greatest care,” Mme. de

Guermantes told the servant, multiplying her instructions out of

politeness to Swann. “And see that you don’t crumple the envelope,

either.” “So even the envelope has got to be respected!” the Duke

murmured to me, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “But, Swann,” he added,

“I, who am only a poor married man and thoroughly prosaic, what I wonder

at is how on earth you managed to find an envelope that size. Where did

you pick it up?” “Oh, at the photographer’s; they’re always sending out

things like that. But the man is a fool, for I see he’s written on it

‘The Duchesse de Guermantes,’ without putting ‘Madame’.” “I’ll forgive

him for that,” said the Duchesse carelessly; then, seeming to be struck

by a sudden idea which enlivened her, checked a faint smile; but at once

returning to Swann: “Well, you don’t say whether you’re coming to Italy

with us?” “Madame, I am really afraid that it will not be possible.”

“Indeed! Mme. de Montmorency is more fortunate. You went with her to

Venice and Vicenza. She told me that with you one saw things one would

never see otherwise, things no one had ever thought of mentioning

before, that you shewed her things she had never dreamed of, and that

even in the well-known things she had been able to appreciate details

which without you she might have passed by a dozen times without ever

noticing. Obviously, she has been more highly favoured than we are to

be.... You will take the big envelope from M. Swann’s photograph,” she

said to the servant, “and you will hand it in, from me, this evening at

half past ten at Mme. la Comtesse Molé’s.” Swann laughed. “I should like

to know, all the same,” Mme. de Guermantes asked him, “how, ten months

before the time, you can tell that a thing will be impossible.” “My dear

Duchess, I will tell you if you insist upon it, but, first of all, you

can see that I am very ill.” “Yes, my little Charles, I don’t think you

look at all well. I’m not pleased with your colour, but I’m not asking

you to come with me next week, I ask you to come in ten months. In ten

months one has time to get oneself cured, you know.” At this point a

footman came in to say that the carriage was at the door. “Come, Oriane,

to horse,” said the Duke, already pawing the ground with impatience as

though he were himself one of the horses that stood waiting outside.

“Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,”

the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us. “But, my

dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several

months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve

got—which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment—won’t in any

case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a

generous estimate,” replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened

the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out. “What’s that you

say?” cried the Duchess, stopping for a moment on her way to the

carriage, and raising her fine eyes, their melancholy blue clouded by

uncertainty. Placed for the first time in her life between two duties as

incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and

shewing pity for a man who was about to die, she could find nothing in

the code of conventions that indicated the right line to follow, and,

not knowing which to choose, felt it better to make a show of not

believing that the latter alternative need be seriously considered, so

as to follow the first, which demanded of her at the moment less effort,

and thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny

that any existed. “You’re joking,” she said to Swann. “It would be a

joke in charming taste,” replied he ironically. “I don’t know why I am

telling you this; I have never said a word to you before about my

illness. But as you asked me, and as now I may die at any moment.... But

whatever I do I mustn’t make you late; you’re dining out, remember,” he

added, because he knew that for other people their own social

obligations took precedence of the death of a friend, and could put

himself in her place by dint of his instinctive politeness. But that of

the Duchess enabled her also to perceive in a vague way that the dinner

to which she was going must count for less to Swann than his own death.

And so, while continuing on her way towards the carriage, she let her

shoulders droop, saying: “Don’t worry about our dinner. It’s not of any

importance!” But this put the Duke in a bad humour, who exclaimed:

“Come, Oriane, don’t stop there chattering like that and exchanging your

jeremiads with Swann; you know very well that Mme. de Saint-Euverte

insists on sitting down to table at eight o’clock sharp. We must know

what you propose to do; the horses have been waiting for a good five

minutes. I beg your pardon, Charles,” he went on, turning to Swann, “but

it’s ten minutes to eight already. Oriane is always late, and it will

take us more than five minutes to get to old Saint-Euverte’s.”

Mme. de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered

a last farewell to Swann. “You know, we can talk about that another

time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it

quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon,

whatever day you like,” (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved

themselves into luncheons), “you will let me know your day and time,”

and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just

getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried

in a terrifying voice: “Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you

wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs

quick and put on red shoes, or rather,” he said to the footman, “tell

the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.” “But, my

dear,” replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was

leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to

pass out in front of us, could hear, “since we are late.” “No, no, we

have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to

get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we

turned up at half past eight they’ld have to wait for us, but you can’t

possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes. Besides, we shan’t be

the last, I can tell you; the Sassenages are coming, and you know they

never arrive before twenty to nine.” The Duchess went up to her room.

“Well,” said M. de Guermantes to Swann and myself, “we poor,

down-trodden husbands, people laugh at us, but we are of some use all

the same. But for me, Oriane would have been going out to dinner in

black shoes.” “It’s not unbecoming,” said Swann, “I noticed the black

shoes and they didn’t offend me in the least.” “I don’t say you’re

wrong,” replied the Duke, “but it looks better to have them to match the

dress. Besides, you needn’t worry, she would no sooner have got there

than she’ld have noticed them, and I should have been obliged to come

home and fetch the others. I should have had my dinner at nine o’clock.

Good-bye, my children,” he said, thrusting us gently from the door, “get

away, before Oriane comes down again. It’s not that she doesn’t like

seeing you both. On the contrary, she’s too fond of your company. If she

finds you still here she will start talking again, she is tired out

already, she’ll reach the dinner-table quite dead. Besides, I tell you

frankly, I’m dying of hunger. I had a wretched luncheon this morning

when I came from the train. There was the devil of a _béarnaise_ sauce,

I admit, but in spite of that I sha’nt be at all sorry, not at all sorry

to sit down to dinner. Five minutes to eight! Oh, women, women! She’ll

give us both indigestion before to-morrow. She is not nearly as strong

as people think.” The Duke felt no compunction at speaking thus of his

wife’s ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested

him more, appeared to him more important. And so it was simply from good

breeding and good fellowship that, after politely shewing us out, he

cried “from off stage”, in a stentorian voice from the porch to Swann,

who was already in the courtyard: “You, now, don’t let yourself be taken

in by the doctors’ nonsense, damn them. They’re donkeys. You’re as

strong as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Modern Library of the World’s Best Books_

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ADAMS, HENRY The Education of Henry Adams

76

AIKEN, CONRAD A Comprehensive Anthology of

American Verse 101

AIKEN, CONRAD Modern American Poetry 127

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD Winesburg, Ohio 104

BALZAC Droll Stories 193

BEERBOHM, MAX Zuleika Dobson 116

BEMELMANS, LUDWIG My War with the United States

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BENNETT, ARNOLD The Old Wives’ Tale 184

BIERCE, AMBROSE In the Midst of Life 133

BOCCACCIO The Decameron 71

BRONTË, CHARLOTTE Jane Eyre 64

BRONTË, EMILY Wuthering Heights 106

BUCK, PEARL The Good Earth 2

BURTON, RICHARD The Arabian Nights 201

BUTLER, SAMUEL Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

136

BUTLER, SAMUEL The Way of All Flesh 13

CABELL, JAMES BRANCH Jurgen 15

CALDWELL, ERSKINE God’s Little Acre 51

CANFIELD, DOROTHY The Deepening Stream 200

CARROLL, LEWIS Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79

CASANOVA, JACQUES Memoirs of Casanova 165

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CHAUCER The Canterbury Tales 161

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CONRAD, JOSEPH Victory 34

CORNEILLE and RACINE Six Plays of Corneille and

Racine 194

CORVO, FREDERICK BARON A History of the Borgias 192

CUMMINGS, E. E. The Enormous Room 214

DANTE The Divine Comedy 208

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DEFOE, DANIEL Moll Flanders 122

DEWEY, JOHN Human Nature and Conduct 173

DICKENS, CHARLES A Tale of Two Cities 189

DICKENS, CHARLES David Copperfield 110

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DOS PASSOS, JOHN Three Soldiers 205

DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR Crime and Punishment 199

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DUMAS, ALEXANDRE The Three Musketeers 143

DU MAURIER, GEORGE Peter Ibbetson 207

EDMAN, IRWIN The Philosophy of Plato 181

EDMONDS, WALTER D. Rome Haul 191

ELLIS, HAVELOCK The Dance of Life 160

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO Essays and Other Writings 91

FAULKNER, WILLIAM Sanctuary 61

FEUCHTWANGER, LION Power 206

FIELDING, HENRY Joseph Andrews 117

FIELDING, HENRY Tom Jones 185

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FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE Madame Bovary 28

FORESTER, C. S. The African Queen 102

FORSTER, E. M. A Passage to India 218

FRANCE, ANATOLE Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard 22

FRANCE, ANATOLE Penguin Island 210

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GAUTIER, THEOPHILE Mlle. De Maupin, One of

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GEORGE, HENRY Progress and Poverty 36

GIDE, ANDRÉ The Counterfeiters 187

GISSING, GEORGE New Grub Street 125

GISSING, GEORGE Private Papers of Henry

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GLASGOW, ELLEN Barren Ground 25

GOETHE Faust 177

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108)

GOGOL, NIKOLAI Dead Souls 40

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HAMMETT, DASHIELL The Maltese Falcon 45

HAMSUN, KNUT Growth of the Soil 12

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HARDY, THOMAS The Mayor of Casterbridge 17

HARDY, THOMAS The Return of the Native 121

HARDY, THOMAS Tess of the D’Urbervilles 72

HART, LIDDELL The War in Outline 16

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL The Scarlet Letter 93

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST A Farewell to Arms 19

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST The Sun Also Rises 170

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HOMER The Iliad 166

HOMER The Odyssey 167

HORACE The Complete Works of 141

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HUGHES, RICHARD A High Wind in Jamaica 112

HUGO, VICTOR The Hunchback of Notre Dame 35

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JOYCE, JAMES A Portrait of the Artist as a

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LARDNER, RING The Collected Short Stories of

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LAWRENCE, D. H. Sons and Lovers 109

LAWRENCE, D. H. Women in Love 68

LEWIS, SINCLAIR Arrowsmith 42

LEWISOHN, LUDWIG The Island Within 123

LONGFELLOW, HENRY W. Poems 56

LOUYS, PIERRE Aphrodite 77

LUDWIG, EMIL Napoleon 95

LUNDBERG, FERDINAND Imperial Hearst 81

MACHIAVELLI The Prince and The Discourses

of Machiavelli 65

MALRAUX, ANDRÉ Man’s Fate 33

MANN, THOMAS Death in Venice (In Collected

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MANSFIELD, KATHERINE The Garden Party 129

MARQUAND, JOHN P. The Late George Apley 182

MARX, KARL Capital and Other Writings 202

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Best Russian Short Stories,

including Bunin’s The

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Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays

94

Five Great Modern Irish Plays

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The Federalist 139

The Making of Man: An Outline

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The Making of Society: An

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Outline of Abnormal Psychology

152

Outline of Psychoanalysis 66

The Sex Problem in Modern

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MOLIERE Plays 78

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER Human Being 74

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NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH Thus Spake Zarathustra 9

ODETS, CLIFFORD Six Plays of 67

O’NEILL, EUGENE The Emperor Jones, Anna

Christie and The Hairy Ape

146

O’NEILL, EUGENE The Long Voyage Home and Seven

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PASCAL, BLAISE Pensées and The Provincial

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PATER, WALTER The Renaissance 86

PATER, WALTER Marius the Epicurean 90

PEARSON, EDMUND Studies in Murder 113

PEPYS, SAMUEL Samuel Pepys’ Diary 103

PETRONIUS ARBITER The Satyricon 156

PLATO The Republic 153

PLATO The Philosophy of Plato 181

POE, EDGAR ALLAN Best Tales 82

POLO, MARCO The Travels of Marco Polo 196

PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE Flowering Judas 88

PREVOST, ANTOINE Manon Lescaut 85

PROUST, MARCEL Cities of the Plain 220

PROUST, MARCEL The Captive 120

PROUST, MARCEL The Guermantes Way 213

PROUST, MARCEL Swann’s Way 59

PROUST, MARCEL Within a Budding Grove 172

RABELAIS Gargantua and Pantagruel 4

READE, CHARLES The Cloister and the Hearth 62

REED, JOHN Ten Days that Shook the World

215

RENAN, ERNEST The Life of Jesus 140

ROSTAND, EDMOND Cyrano de Bergerac 154

RUSSELL, BERTRAND Selected Papers of Bertrand

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SAROYAN, WILLIAM The Daring Young Man on the

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SCHOPENHAUER The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

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SCHREINER, OLIVE The Story of an African Farm

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SHEEAN, VINCENT Personal History 32

SMOLLETT, TOBIAS Humphry Clinker 159

SPINOZA The Philosophy of Spinoza 60

STEINBECK, JOHN In Dubious Battle 115

STEINBECK, JOHN The Grapes of Wrath 148

STEINBECK, JOHN Tortilla Flat 216

STEINBECK, JOHN Of Mice and Men 29

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STERNE, LAURENCE Tristram Shandy 147

STOKER, BRAM Dracula 31

STONE, IRVING Lust for Life 11

STRACHEY, LYTTON Eminent Victorians 212

SUDERMANN, HERMANN The Song of Songs 162

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THOMPSON, FRANCIS Complete Poems 38

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THUCYDIDES The Complete Writings of 58

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WHITMAN, WALT Leaves of Grass 97

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G57. BROOKS, VAN WYCK. The Flowering of New England.

G58. MALRAUX, ANDRÉ. Man’s Hope.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s Note

You will note in the Table of Contents, that the pagination of the

original text begins with ‘1’ for each of the two Parts. Page references

in these notes below refers to each Part by prefixing ‘1.’ or ‘2.’.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and

are noted here. The references are to the part, page and line in the

original.

1.44.21 Really, Madame d’Ambresac[,/.] Replaced.

1.102.22 from the window[ of] a country house Added.

1.135.29 by the sumpt[u]ous curtains Inserted.

1.155.32 would never venture[.] Restored.

1.157.31 the thought of Mme. de Guermantes[.] Added.

1.185.21 if-I[-]tell-you-a-thing Inserted.

1.194.25 were barely distinguish[i/a]ble Replaced.

1.209.15 discern[a/i]ble at most Replaced.

1.210.19 she’ll perhaps [h/b]e afraid Replaced.

1.213.17 a woman desir[i]ous of earning Removed.

1.290.28 [“]Whenever there’s a famous man Added.

1.311.7 [“]After all, one never does know Added.

1.313.16 to explain it to him.[”] Added.

1.321.8 [“]if they’re all like Gilbert Added.

1.351.7 [“]But I’ve found out Removed.

1.358.27 [‘/“]Damn it, these fellows will see Replaced.

1.381.32 by exposing his strat[e/a]gem. Replaced.

1.393.7 that intermittent familiar[it]y Inserted.

396.22 his [“/‘]haggart[”/’]) of a mother Replaced.

1.418.21 rashes, asthma, ep[l]ilepsy, a terror Inserted.

1.425.24 I said to him: ‘Y[’] mustn’t let go Added.

2.18.4 with a hot needle.[”] Added.

2.40.6 which he had[ had] left ajar. Removed.

2.70.28 the temptation to kiss you.[”] Added.

2.82.24 has been tra[n]smitted Inserted.

2.138.4 plent[l]y plenty of foreigners Inserted.

2.220.14 on the afternoon of[ of] “Teaser Augustus”. Removed.

2.250.7 with the s[ta/at]isfaction which he derived Transposed.

2.174.20 r[yh/hy]thm of precise and noble movements Transposed.

2.290.10 all go quite smooth[l]y. Inserted.

2.282.17 of their conversation, [oc/co]mments which Transposed.

2.331.5 _Feuilles d’A[n/u]tomne_ Inverted.

2.348.12 regard[n/l]ess of any want Replaced.