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By Root 1726 0

any such operation had been performed, it had certainly been done most efficiently, for there remained not an atom of charm to be drawn from this kinsman of the Guermantes. With the result that he found himself at one and the same time the only man in the world who was Prince d’Agrigente and of all the men in the world the one who was perhaps least so. He was, for all that, very glad to be what he was, but as a banker is glad to hold a number of shares in a mine, without caring whether the said mine answers to the charming name of Ivanhoe or Primrose, or is called merely the Premier. Meanwhile, as these introductions which have taken so long to recount but which, beginning as soon as I entered the room, had lasted only a few moments, were drawing to an end at last, and Mme de Guermantes was saying to me in an almost suppliant tone: “I’m sure Basin is tiring you, dragging you round like that from one person to the next. We want you to know our friends, but we’re a great deal more anxious not to tire you, so that you may come again often,” the Duke, with a somewhat awkward and timorous wave of the hand, gave the signal (which he would gladly have given at any time during the hour I had spent in contemplation of the Elstirs) that dinner might now be served.

I should add that one of the guests was still missing, M. de Grouchy, whose wife, a Guermantes by birth, had arrived by herself, her husband being due to come straight from the country where he had been shooting all day. This M. de Grouchy, a descendant of his namesake of the First Empire, of whom it has been falsely said that his absence at the start of the Battle of Waterloo was the principal cause of Napoleon’s defeat, came of an excellent family which, however, was not good enough in the eyes of certain fanatics for blue blood. Thus the Prince de Guermantes, who was to prove less fastidious in later life as far as he himself was concerned, was in the habit of saying to his nieces: “What a misfortune for that poor Mme de Guermantes” (the Vicomtesse de Guermantes, Mme de Grouchy’s mother) “that she has never succeeded in marrying any of her children.” “But, uncle, the eldest girl married M. de Grouchy.” “I don’t call that a husband! However, they say that your uncle François has proposed to the youngest one, so perhaps they won’t all die old maids.”

No sooner had the order to serve dinner been given than with a vast gyratory whirr, multiple and simultaneous, the double doors of the dining-room swung apart; a butler with the air of a court chamberlain bowed before the Princesse de Parme and announced the tidings “Madame is served,” in a tone such as he would have employed to say “Madame is dead,” which, however, cast no gloom over the assembly for it was with a sprightly air and as, in summer, at Robinson24 that the couples advanced one behind the other to the dining-room, separating when they had reached their places, where footmen thrust their chairs in behind them; last of all, Mme de Guermantes advanced towards me to be taken in to dinner, without my feeling the least shadow of the timidity that I might have feared, for, like a huntress whose muscular dexterity has endowed her with natural ease and grace, observing no doubt that I had placed myself on the wrong side of her, she pivoted round me so adroitly that I found her arm resting on mine and was at once naturally attuned to a rhythm of precise and noble movements. I yielded to them all the more readily because the Guermantes attached no more importance to them than does to learning a truly learned man in whose company one is less cowed than in that of a dunce. Other doors opened through which there entered the steaming soup, as though the dinner were being held in a skilfully contrived puppet-theatre, where, at a signal from the puppet-master, the belated arrival of the young guest set all the machinery in motion.

Timid, rather than majestically sovereign, had been this signal from the Duke, to which that vast, ingenious, subservient and sumptuous clockwork, mechanical and human, had responded. The indecisiveness