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“But,” went on the Duchess with the faint insolence that went with her natural simplicity, “are you absolutely sure you’re not thinking of someone else? Do you really mean my brother-in-law Palamède? I know he loves mystery, but this seems a bit much.”

I replied that I was absolutely sure, and that M. de Charlus must have misheard my name.

“Well, I must leave you,” said Mme de Guermantes, as though with regret. “I have to look in for a moment at the Princesse de Ligne’s. You aren’t going on there? No? You don’t care for parties? You’re very wise, they’re too boring for words. If only I didn’t have to go! But she’s my cousin; it wouldn’t be polite. I’m sorry, selfishly, for my own sake, because I could have taken you there, and brought you back afterwards, too. Good-bye then; I look forward to seeing you on Friday.”

That M. de Charlus should have blushed to be seen with me by M. d’Argencourt was all very well. But that to his own sister-in-law, who had so high an opinion of him besides, he should deny all knowledge of me, a knowledge that was perfectly natural since I was a friend of both his aunt and his nephew, was something I could not understand.

I must end my account of this incident with the remark that from one point of view there was an element of true grandeur in Mme de Guermantes which consisted in the fact that she entirely obliterated from her memory what other people would have only partially forgotten. Had she never seen me waylaying her, following her, tracking her down on her morning walks, had she never responded to my daily salute with an irritated impatience, had she never sent Saint-Loup about his business when he begged her to invite me to her house, she could not have been more graciously and naturally amiable to me. Not only did she waste no time in retrospective inquiries, in hints, allusions or ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability, without any harking back to the past, without the slightest reticence, something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but any resentment which she might have felt against someone in the past was so entirely reduced to ashes, and those ashes were themselves cast so utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most exquisite simplicity what in so many other people would have been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations, one had the impression of a sort of purification.

But if I was surprised by the modification that had occurred in her opinion of me, how much more did it surprise me to find an even greater change in my feelings for her! Had there not been a time when I could regain life and strength only if—always building new castles in the air!—I had found someone who would obtain for me an invitation to her house and, after this initial boon, would procure many others for my increasingly exacting heart? It was the impossibility of making any headway that had made me leave Paris for Doncières to visit Robert de Saint-Loup. And now it was indeed by the consequence of a letter from him that I was agitated, but on account this time of Mme de Stermaria, not of Mme de Guermantes.

Let me add further, to conclude my account of this evening, that in the course of it there occurred an incident, contradicted a few days later, which surprised me not a little, which caused a breach between myself and Bloch, and which constitutes in itself one of those curious paradoxes the explanation of which will be found in the next part of this work. At this party at Mme de Villeparisis’s, Bloch kept on boasting to me about the friendly attentions shown him by M. de Charlus, who, when he passed him in the street, looked him straight in the face as though he recognised him, was anxious to know him personally, knew quite well who he was. I smiled at first, Bloch having expressed himself so violently at Balbec on the subject of the said M. de Charlus. And I supposed merely that Bloch, like his father in the case of Bergotte, knew the Baron “without