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Failing the visit to Parma which I had never yet made (and which I had wanted to make ever since certain Easter holidays long ago), meeting its Princess—who, I knew, owned the finest palace in that unique city where in any case everything must be homogeneous, isolated as it was from the rest of the world within its polished walls, in the atmosphere, stifling as an airless summer evening on the piazza of a small Italian town, of its compact and almost cloying name—ought to have substituted in a flash, for what I had so often tried to imagine, all that did really exist at Parma, in a sort of fragmentary arrival there without having moved; it was, in the algebra of my imagined journey to the city of Giorgione,21 a simple equation, so to speak, with that unknown quantity. But if I had for many years past—like a perfumer impregnating a solid block of fat—saturated this name, Princesse de Parme, with the scent of thousands of violets, in return, when I set eyes on the Princess, who until then I would have sworn must be the Sanseverina herself, a second process began which was not, I may say, completed until several months had passed, and consisted in expelling, by means of fresh chemical combinations, all the essential oil of violets and all the Stendhalian fragrance from the name of the Princess, and implanting there in their place the image of a little dark woman taken up with good works and so humbly amiable that one felt at once in how exalted a pride that amiability had its roots. Moreover, while identical, barring a few points of difference, with any other great lady, she was as little Stendhalian as is, for example, in the Europe district of Paris, the Rue de Parme, which bears far less resemblance to the name of Parma than to any or all of the neighbouring streets, and reminds one not nearly so much of the Charterhouse in which Fabrice ends his days as of the concourse in the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Her amiability sprang from two causes. The first and more general was the upbringing which this daughter of kings had received. Her mother (not merely related to all the royal families of Europe but furthermore—in contrast to the ducal house of Parma—richer than any reigning princess) had instilled into her from her earliest childhood the arrogantly humble precepts of an evangelical snobbery; and today every line of the daughter’s face, the curve of her shoulders, the movements of her arms, seemed to repeat the lesson: “Remember that if God has caused you to be born on the steps of a throne you ought not to make that a reason for looking down upon those to whom Divine Providence has willed (wherefore His Name be praised) that you should be superior by birth and fortune. On the contrary, you must be kind to the lowly. Your ancestors were Princes of Cleves and Juliers from the year 647; God in His bounty has decreed that you should hold practically all the shares in the Suez Canal and three times as many Royal Dutch as Edmond de Rothschild; your pedigree in a direct line has been established by genealogists from the year 63 of the Christian era; you have as sisters-in-law two empresses. Therefore never seem in your speech to be recalling these great privileges, not that they are precarious (for nothing can alter the antiquity of blood, and the world will always need oil), but because it is unnecessary to point out that you are better born than other people or that your investments are all gilt-edged, since everyone knows these facts already. Be helpful to the needy. Give to all those whom the bounty of heaven has been graciously pleased to put beneath you as much as you can give them without forfeiting your rank, that is to say help in the form of money, even caring for the sick, but of course never any invitations to your soirées, which would do them no possible good and, by diminishing your prestige, would detract from the efficacy of your benevolent activities.”

And so, even at moments when she could not do good, the Princess endeavoured to demonstrate, or rather to let it be thought, by all the external