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By Root 1909 0

would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct converse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! if it only rested with me!” than for the satisfaction of making the honour which he himself has managed to secure seem less accessible, a greater distinction. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests of you all, I should prefer to see your father triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words which I assumed to have been dictated, if not by jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of willingness to oblige, and which were later, in the event, to acquire a different meaning.

“You haven’t thought of giving the Institut an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “It might be an enormous success” (which was to say, “give me a colossal advertisement”), he added, smiling at the Ambassador with an obsequious tenderness which made him raise his eyelids and reveal eyes as wide as the sky. I seemed to have seen this look before, though I had met the historian for the first time this afternoon. Suddenly I remembered having seen the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed to be able to cure breathless spasms of the kind from which I suffered by absurd inhalations of plant essences. When, in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a most sensational paper for the Academy of Medicine!” He had not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with the same air of interrogation, timid, suppliant and self-seeking, which I had just wonderingly observed on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological laws, like physical laws, have a more or less general application. And if the requisite conditions are the same, an identical expression lights up the eyes of different human animals, as an identical sunrise lights up places that are a long way apart and that have no connexion with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of commotion, had again gathered round Mme de Villeparisis to watch her at work.

“You know who we’re talking about, Basin?” the Duchess asked her husband.

“I can make a pretty good guess,” said the Duke. “As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.”

“You can’t imagine anything more ridiculous,” went on Mme de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt.

“In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled society people to declare that he was no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a complete imbecile.

“What I fail to understand,” resumed the Duchess, “is how in the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course I know one must never discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might still make fun of modern literature, it had to some extent seeped into her, either through popularisation in the press or through certain conversations, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’ ”

“Mysterious! Oh, I must say, cousin, that’s a bit beyond me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt.

“Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the Duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-natured woman of the world, but also with the uncompromising conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a clubman that