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The Duchess having made no reference to her husband at her aunt’s party, I wondered whether, in view of the rumours of divorce, he would be present at the dinner. But I was soon enlightened on that score, for through the crowd of footmen who stood about in the hall and who (since they must until then have regarded me much as they regarded the children of the evicted cabinet-maker, that is to say with more fellow-feeling perhaps than their master but as a person incapable of being admitted to his house) must have been asking themselves to what this social revolution could be due, I caught sight of M. de Guermantes, who had been watching for my arrival so as to receive me on his threshold and take off my overcoat with his own hands.

“Mme de Guermantes will be as pleased as Punch,” he said to me in a glibly persuasive tone. “Let me help you off with your duds.” (He felt it to be at once companionable and comic to use popular colloquialisms.) “My wife was just the least bit afraid you might defect, although you had fixed a date. We’ve been saying to each other all day: ‘Depend upon it, he’ll never turn up.’ I’m bound to say that Mme de Guermantes was a better prophet than I was. You are not an easy man to get hold of, and I was quite sure you were going to let us down.” And the Duke was such a bad husband, so brutal even (people said), that one felt grateful to him, as one feels grateful to wicked people for their occasional kindness of heart, for those words “Mme de Guermantes” with which he appeared to be spreading a protective wing over the Duchess, so that she might be one with him. Meanwhile, taking me familiarly by the hand, he set about introducing me into his household. Just as some common expression may delight us coming from the lips of a peasant if it points to the survival of a local tradition or shows the trace of some historic event, unknown, it may be, to the person who thus alludes to it, so this politeness on the part of M. de Guermantes, which he was to continue to show me throughout the evening, charmed me as a survival of habits many centuries old, habits of the seventeenth century in particular. The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today in a Homeric hero, or a skilful tactical feint by Hannibal during the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo. Even with certain personages of the court of Louis XIV, when we find signs of courtesy in letters written by them to some man of inferior rank who could be of no service to them whatever, these letters leave us astonished because they reveal to us suddenly in these great noblemen a whole world of beliefs which they never directly express but which govern their conduct, and in particular the belief that they are bound in politeness to feign certain sentiments and to exercise with the most scrupulous care certain obligations of civility.

This imagined remoteness of the past is perhaps one of the things that may enable us to understand how even great writers have found an inspired beauty in the works of mediocre mystifiers such as Ossian. We are so astonished that bards long dead should have modern ideas that we marvel if in what we believe to be an ancient Gaelic epic we come across one which we should have thought as most ingenious in a contemporary. A translator of talent has only to add to an ancient writer whom he is reconstructing more or less faithfully a few passages which, signed with a contemporary name and published separately, would seem agreeable merely; at once he imparts a moving grandeur to his poet, who is thus made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once. The translator was