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Meanwhile he was cut short by Bloch. “Really,” the latter observed, referring to what Mme de Villeparisis had said as to the etiquette for royal visits. “Do you know, I never knew that” (as though it were strange that he should not have known it).

“Talking of that sort of visit, do you know the stupid joke my nephew Basin played on me yesterday morning?” Mme de Villeparisis asked the librarian. “He told my people, instead of announcing him, to say that it was the Queen of Sweden who had called to see me.”

“What! He made them tell you just like that! I say, he must have a nerve,” exclaimed Bloch with a shout of laughter, while the historian smiled with a stately timidity.

“I was rather surprised, because I had only been back from the country a few days; I had given instructions, so as to be left in peace for a while, that no one was to be told that I was in Paris, and I wondered how the Queen of Sweden could have heard so soon, and in any case didn’t leave me a couple of days to get my breath,” went on Mme de Villeparisis, leaving her guests under the impression that a visit from the Queen of Sweden was in itself nothing unusual for their hostess.

And it was true that if earlier in the day Mme de Villeparisis had been checking the documentation of her Memoirs with the archivist, she was now quite unconsciously trying out their effect on an average audience representative of that from which she would eventually have to recruit her readers. Hers might differ in many ways from a really fashionable salon from which many of the bourgeois ladies whom she entertained would have been absent and where one would have seen instead such brilliant leaders of fashion as Mme Leroi had in course of time managed to secure, but this distinction is not perceptible in her Memoirs, in which certain mediocre connexions of the author’s have disappeared because there is no occasion to refer to them; while the absence of ladies who did not visit her leaves no gap because, in the necessarily restricted space at the author’s disposal, only a few persons can appear, and if these persons are royal personages, historic personalities, then the maximum impression of elegance which any volume of memoirs can convey to the public is achieved. In the opinion of Mme Leroi, Mme de Villeparisis’s salon was third-rate; and Mme de Villeparisis felt the sting of Mme Leroi’s opinion. But hardly anyone today remembers who Mme Leroi was, her opinions have vanished into thin air, and it is the salon of Mme de Villeparisis, frequented as it was by the Queen of Sweden, and as it had been by the Duc d’Aumale, the Duc de Broglie, Thiers, Montalembert, Mgr. Dupanloup, which will be regarded as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by that posterity which has not changed since the days of Homer and Pindar, and for which the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-royal, and the friendship of kings, of leaders of the people and other eminent men.

Now of all these Mme de Villeparisis had her share in her present salon and in the memories—sometimes slightly touched up—by means of which she extended it into the past. And then there was M. de Norpois who, while unable to restore his friend to any substantial position in society, on the other hand brought to her house such foreign or French statesmen as might have need of his services and knew that the only effective method of securing them was to pay court to Mme de Villeparisis. Perhaps Mme Leroi also knew these European celebrities. But, as an agreeable woman who shunned anything that smacked of the bluestocking, she would as little have thought of mentioning the Eastern Question to a Prime Minister as of discussing the nature of love with a novelist or a philosopher. “Love?” she had once replied to a pretentious lady who had asked for her views on love, “I make it often but I never talk about it.” When she had any of these literary or political lions in her house she contented herself, as did the Duchesse de Guermantes, with setting them down to play poker. They often preferred this to