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By Root 1954 0

the marks of cordiality that I received from others, their compliments, actually distressed me, not only because they did not come from her but because she would never hear of them. And yet even if she had known of them it would not have been of the slightest use to me. But even in the details of an attachment, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. There would be plenty of social success if people were taught upon these lines the art of succeeding.

As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her thoughts filled with the memory of friends whom I did not know and whom she would perhaps be meeting again presently at some other party, the Duchess caught sight of me on my bergère, genuinely indifferent and seeking only to be polite whereas while I was in love I had tried so desperately, without ever succeeding, to assume an air of indifference. She swerved aside, came towards me and, reproducing the smile she had worn that evening at the Opéra, which the painful feeling of being loved by someone she did not love no longer obliterated, “No, don’t move,” she said, gracefully gathering in her immense skirt which otherwise would have occupied the entire bergère. “You don’t mind if I sit down beside you a moment?”

She was taller than me, and further enlarged by the volume of her dress, and I felt myself almost touching her handsome bare arm, round which a faint and ubiquitous down exhaled as it were a perpetual golden mist, and the blonde coils of her hair which wafted their fragrance over me. Having barely room to sit down, she could not turn easily to face me, and so, obliged to look straight in front of her rather than in my direction, assumed the sort of soft and dreamy expression one sees in a portrait.

“Have you any news of Robert?” she inquired.

At that moment Mme de Villeparisis entered the room.

“Well, what a fine time you arrive when we do see you here for once in a way!”

And noticing that I was talking to her niece, and concluding, perhaps, that we were more intimate than she had supposed: “But don’t let me interrupt your conversation with Oriane,” she went on (for the good offices of the procuress are part of the duties of the perfect hostess). “You wouldn’t care to dine with her here on Wednesday?”

It was the day on which I was to dine with Mme de Stermaria, so I declined.

“Saturday, then?”

As my mother was returning on Saturday or Sunday, it would have been unkind not to stay at home every evening to dine with her. I therefore declined this invitation also.

“Ah, you’re not an easy person to get hold of.”

“Why do you never come to see me?” inquired Mme de Guermantes when Mme de Villeparisis had left us to go and congratulate the performers and present the leading lady with a bunch of roses upon which the hand that offered it conferred all its value, for it had cost no more than twenty francs. (This, incidentally, was as high as she ever went when an artist had performed only once. Those who gave their services at all her afternoons and evenings throughout the season received roses painted by the Marquise.) “It’s such a bore never to see each other except in other people’s houses. Since you won’t dine with me at my aunt’s, why not come and dine at my house?”

Various people who had stayed to the last possible moment on one pretext or another, but were at last preparing to leave, seeing that the Duchess had sat down to talk to a young man on a seat so narrow as just to contain them both, thought that they must have been misinformed, that it was not the Duchess but the Duke who was seeking a separation, on my account. Whereupon they hastened to spread abroad this intelligence. I had better grounds than anyone for being aware of its falsity. But I was myself surprised that at one of those difficult periods in which a separation is being effected but is not yet complete, the Duchess, instead of withdrawing from society, should go out of her way to invite a person whom she knew