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She shrugged her shoulders, smiling, as though he had been trying to make fun of her, and turned to the historian.

“And this is the famous Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, who was previously married to M. de Luynes.”

“My dear, Mme de Luynes reminds me of Yolande; she came to me yesterday evening, and if I had known that you weren’t engaged I’d have sent round to ask you to come. Mme Ristori turned up quite by chance, and recited some poems by Queen Carmen Sylva13 in the author’s presence. It was too beautiful!”

“What treachery!” thought Mme de Villeparisis. “Of course that was what she was whispering about the other day to Mme de Beaulaincourt and Mme de Chaponay.” . . . “I was free,” she replied, “but I would not have come. I heard Ristori in her great days, she’s a mere wreck now. Besides, I detest Carmen Sylva’s poetry. Ristori came here once—the Duchess of Aosta brought her—to recite a canto of Dante’s Inferno. In that sort of thing she’s incomparable.”

Alix bore the blow without flinching. She remained marble. Her gaze was piercing and blank, her nose proudly arched. But the surface of one cheek was flaking. A faint, strange vegetation, green and pink, was invading her chin. Perhaps another winter would finally lay her low.

“There, Monsieur, if you are fond of painting, look at the portrait of Mme de Montmorency,” Mme de Villeparisis said to Legrandin to interrupt the flow of compliments which was beginning again.

Taking the opportunity of his back being turned, Mme de Guermantes pointed to him with an ironical, questioning look at her aunt.

“It’s M. Legrandin,” murmured Mme de Villeparisis. “He has a sister called Mme de Cambremer, not that that will mean any more to you than it does to me.”

“What! Oh, but I know her very well!” exclaimed Mme de Guermantes, clapping her hand to her mouth. “Or rather I don’t know her, but for some reason or other Basin, who meets the husband heaven knows where, took it into his head to tell the wretched woman she might call on me. And she did. I can’t tell you what it was like. She told me she had been to London, and gave me a complete catalogue of all the things in the British Museum. And just as you see me now, the moment I leave your house, I’m going to drop a card on the monster. And don’t think it’s as easy as all that, because on the pretext that she’s dying of some disease she’s always at home, no matter whether you arrive at seven at night or nine in the morning, she’s ready for you with a plate of strawberry tarts. No, but seriously, you know, she is a monstrosity,” Mme de Guermantes went on in reply to a questioning glance from her aunt. “She’s an impossible person, she talks about ‘scriveners’ and things like that.” “What does ‘scrivener’ mean?” asked Mme de Villeparisis. “I haven’t the slightest idea!” cried the Duchess in mock indignation. “I don’t want to know. I don’t speak that sort of language.” And seeing that her aunt really did not know what a scrivener was, to give herself the satisfaction of showing that she was a scholar as well as a purist, and to make fun of her aunt after having made fun of Mme de Cambremer: “Why, of course,” she said, with a half-laugh which the last traces of her feigned ill-humour kept in check, “everybody knows what it means; a scrivener is a writer, a person who scribbles. But it’s a horror of a word. It’s enough to make your wisdom teeth drop out. Nothing will ever make me use words like that . . . And so that’s the brother, is it? I can’t get used to the idea. But after all it’s not inconceivable. She has the same doormat humility and the same mass of information like a circulating library. She’s just as much of a toady as he is, and just as boring. Yes, I’m beginning to see the family likeness now quite plainly.”

“Sit down, we’re just going to take a dish of tea,” said Mme de Villeparisis to her niece. “Help yourself; you don’t want to look at the pictures of your great-grandmothers, you know them as well as I do.”

Presently Mme de Villeparisis sat down again