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By Root 1870 0

her once, but she (finding a willing accomplice in the man himself, in the person of his self-esteem) has managed to persuade him that he is one of those who have had her for nothing. Such is society, where every being is double, and where the most thoroughly exposed, the most notorious, will be known to a certain other only as protected by a shell, by a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity. There were in Paris two thoroughly decent men whom Saint-Loup no longer greeted when he saw them and to whom he could not refer without a tremor in his voice, calling them exploiters of women: this was because they had both been ruined by Rachel.

“There’s only one thing I blame myself for,” Mme de Marsantes murmured in my ear, “and that is for telling him that he wasn’t nice. Such an adorable, unique son, like no one else in the world—to have told him, the only time I see him, that he wasn’t nice to me! I’d sooner have been given a beating, because I’m sure that whatever pleasure he may be having this evening, and he hasn’t many, will be spoiled for him by that unfair word. But I mustn’t keep you, Monsieur, since you’re in a hurry.”

Mme de Marsantes bade me good-bye anxiously. Those feelings concerned Robert, and she was sincere. But she ceased to be so on becoming a grand lady again: “I have been so interested, so happy, so charmed to have this little talk with you. Thank you! Thank you!”

And with a humble air she fastened on me a look of ecstatic gratitude, as though my conversation had been one of the keenest pleasures she had experienced in her life. This charming expression went very well with the black flowers on her white patterned skirt; they were those of a great lady who knew her business.

“I can’t leave at once. I must wait for M. de Charlus. I’m going with him.”

Mme de Villeparisis overheard these last words. They appeared to vex her. Had the matter not been one which couldn’t involve a sentiment of that nature, it would have struck me that what seemed to be alarmed at that moment in Mme de Villeparisis was her sense of decency. But this hypothesis never even entered my mind. I was delighted with Mme de Guermantes, with Saint-Loup, with Mme de Marsantes, with M. de Charlus, with Mme de Villeparisis; I did not stop to reflect, and I spoke light-heartedly, and at random.

“You’re leaving here with my nephew Palamède?” she asked me.

Thinking that it might produce a highly favourable impression on Mme de Villeparisis if she learned that I was on intimate terms with a nephew whom she esteemed so greatly, “He has asked me to walk home with him,” I answered blithely. “I’m delighted. As a matter of fact, we’re better friends than you think, and I’ve quite made up my mind that we’re going to be better friends still.”

From being vexed, Mme de Villeparisis seemed to have become worried. “Don’t wait for him,” she said to me with a preoccupied air. “He is talking to M. de Faffenheim. He’s already forgotten what he said to you. You’d much better go now quickly while his back is turned.”

I was not myself in any hurry to join Robert and his mistress. But Mme de Villeparisis seemed so anxious for me to go that, thinking perhaps that she had some important business to discuss with her nephew, I bade her good-bye. Next to her M. de Guermantes, superb and Olympian, was ponderously seated. One felt that the notion, omnipresent in all his limbs, of his vast riches, as though they had been smelted in a crucible into a single human ingot, gave an extraordinary density to this man who was worth so much. When I said good-bye to him he rose politely from his seat, and I sensed the inert and compact mass of thirty millions which his old-fashioned French breeding activated and raised up until it stood before me. I seemed to be looking at that statue of Olympian Zeus which Phidias is said to have cast in solid gold. Such was the power that a Jesuit education had over M. de Guermantes, over the body of M. de Guermantes at least, for it did not reign with equal mastery over the ducal mind. M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but