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Swann drew me aside for a moment while his wife talked to the Princess about the weather and the animals recently added to the Zoo. “That is the Princesse Mathilde,” he told me, “you know who I mean, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Dumas. Just fancy, she’s the niece of Napoleon I. She had offers of marriage from Napoleon III and the Emperor of Russia. Isn’t that interesting? Talk to her a little. But I hope she won’t keep us standing here for an hour! . . . I met Taine the other day,” he went on, addressing the Princess, “and he told me Your Highness was vexed with him.” “He’s behaved like a perfect peeg!” she said gruffly, pronouncing the word cochon as though she referred to Joan of Arc’s contemporary, Bishop Cauchon. “After his article on the Emperor I left my card on him with p. p. c. on it.”6

I felt the surprise that one feels on opening the correspondence of that Duchesse d’Orléans who was by birth a Princess Palatine. And indeed Princesse Mathilde, animated by sentiments so entirely French, expressed them with a straightforward bluntness that recalled the Germany of an older generation, and was inherited, doubtless, from her Württemberger mother. This somewhat rough and almost masculine frankness she softened, as soon as she began to smile, with an Italian languor. And the whole person was clothed in an outfit so typically Second Empire that—for all that the Princess wore it simply and solely, no doubt, from attachment to the fashions that she had loved when she was young—she seemed to have deliberately planned to avoid the slightest discrepancy in historic colour, and to be satisfying the expectations of those who looked to her to evoke the memory of another age. I whispered to Swann to ask her whether she had known Musset. “Very slightly, Monsieur,” was the answer, given in a tone which seemed to feign annoyance at the question, and of course it was by way of a joke that she called Swann Monsieur, since they were intimate friends. “I had him to dine once. I had invited him for seven o’clock. At half-past seven, as he had not appeared, we sat down to dinner. He arrived at eight, bowed to me, took his seat, never opened his lips, and went off after dinner without letting me hear the sound of his voice. Of course he was dead drunk. That hardly encouraged me to make another attempt.” We were standing a little way off, Swann and I. “I hope this little audience is not going to last much longer,” he muttered, “the soles of my feet are hurting. I can’t think why my wife keeps on making conversation. When we get home it will be she who complains of being tired, and she knows I simply cannot go on standing like this.”

For Mme Swann, who had had the news from Mme Bontemps, was in the process of telling the Princess that the Government, having at last begun to realise the depth of its shoddiness, had decided to send her an invitation to be present on the platform in a few days’ time, when the Tsar Nicholas was to visit the Invalides. But the Princess who, in spite of appearances, in spite of the character of her entourage, which consisted mainly of artists and literary people, had remained at heart and showed herself, whenever she had to take action, the niece of Napoleon, replied: “Yes, Madame, I received it this morning and I sent it back to the Minister, who must have had it by now. I told him that I had no need of an invitation to go to the Invalides. If the Government desires my presence there, it will not be on the platform but in our vault, where the Emperor’s tomb is. I have no need of a card to admit me there. I have my own keys. I go in and out when I choose. The Government has only to let me know whether it wishes me to be present or not. But if I do go to the Invalides, it will be down below or nowhere at all.”

At that moment we were saluted, Mme Swann and I, by a young man who greeted her without stopping, and whom I was not aware that she knew; it was Bloch. When I asked her about him, she told me that he had been introduced to her by Mme Bontemps, and that he was employed in the