was married to a Duc de Sagan or a Prince de Ligne? Especially as there was infinitely more in the newspapers about these sham salons than about the genuine ones. Indeed these old ladies’ “swell” nephews—and Saint-Loup the foremost of them—when asked by a friend to introduce him into society would say: “I’ll take you to my aunt Villeparisis’s, or to my aunt X’s—you meet interesting people there.” They knew very well that this would mean less trouble for themselves than trying to get the said friend invited by the smart nieces or sisters-in-law of these ladies. Certain very old men, and young women who had heard it from those men, told me that if these ladies were no longer received in society it was because of the extraordinary dissoluteness of their conduct, which, when I objected that dissolute conduct was not necessarily a barrier to social success, was represented to me as having gone far beyond anything to be met with today. The misconduct of these solemn dames who held themselves so erect assumed on the lips of those who hinted at it something that I was incapable of imagining, something proportionate to the magnitude of prehistoric days, to the age of the mammoth. In a word, these three Parcae with their white or blue or pink hair had been the ruin of an incalculable number of gentlemen. It struck me that the men of today exaggerated the vices of those fabulous times, like the Greeks who created Icarus, Theseus, Heracles out of men who had been but little different from those who long afterwards deified them. But one does not tabulate the sum of a person’s vices until he has almost ceased to be in a fit state to practise them, when from the magnitude of his social punishment, which is then nearing the completion of its term and which alone one can estimate, one measures, one imagines, one exaggerates the magnitude of the crime that has been committed. In that gallery of symbolical figures which is “society,” the really dissolute women, the true Messalinas, invariably present the solemn aspect of a lady of at least seventy, with an air of lofty distinction, who entertains everyone she can but not everyone she would like to, to whose house women whose own conduct is not above reproach refuse to go, to whom the Pope regularly sends his Golden Rose, and who as often as not has written a book about Lamartine’s early years that has been crowned by the French Academy.
“How d’ye do, Alix?” Mme de Villeparisis greeted the lady with the Marie-Antoinette hair-style, which lady cast a searching glance round the assembly to see whether there was not in this drawing-room any item that might be a valuable addition to her own, in which case she would have to discover it for herself, for Mme de Villeparisis, she was sure, would be malevolent enough to hide it from her. Thus Mme de Villeparisis took good care not to introduce Bloch to the old lady for fear of his being asked to produce the same play that he was arranging for her in the drawing-room of the Quai Malaquais. Besides, it was only tit for tat. For the evening before the old lady had had Mme Ristori reciting verses, and had taken care that Mme de Villeparisis, from whom she had filched the Italian artist, should not hear of this function until it was over. So that she should not read it first in the newspapers and feel ruffled, the old lady had come in person to tell her about it, showing no sense of guilt. Mme de Villeparisis, judging that the introduction of myself was unlikely to have the same drawbacks as that of Bloch, made me known to the Marie-Antoinette of the Quai Malaquais. The latter, who sought, by making the fewest possible movements, to preserve in her old age those lines, as of a Coysevox goddess, which had years ago charmed the young men of fashion and which spurious poets still celebrated in rhyming couplets—and had acquired the habit of a lofty and compensating stiffness common to all those whom a personal uncomeliness obliges to be continually making advances—just perceptibly lowered her head with a frigid majesty, and, turning the other way, took no more