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By Root 1697 0

astonished that the Duchesse de Bourgogne, who can scarcely conceal her grief, should be looking so woebegone, and, anxious that the gaiety of the court shall be at once resumed, encouraging his courtiers to sit down to the card-tables by ordering the Duc de Bourgogne to start a game of brelan. Now, not only in his social or business activities, but in his most spontaneous utterances, his ordinary preoccupations, his daily routine, one found a similar contrast in M. de Guermantes. The Guermantes were no more susceptible to grief than other mortals; it could indeed be said that they had less real sensibility; on the other hand one saw their names every day in the social columns of the Gaulois on account of the prodigious number of funerals at which they would have felt it culpable of them not to have their presence recorded. As the traveller discovers, almost unaltered, the houses roofed with turf, the terraces which may have met the eyes of Xenophon or St Paul, so in the manners of M. de Guermantes, a man who was heart-warming in his graciousness and revolting in his hardness, a slave to the pettiest obligations and derelict as regards the most solemn pacts, I found still intact after more than two centuries that aberration, peculiar to the life of the court under Louis XIV, which transfers the scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality to questions of pure form.

The other reason for the friendliness shown me by the Princesse de Parme was that she was convinced beforehand that everything that she saw at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, people and things alike, was of a superior quality to anything she had at home. It is true that in every other house she also behaved as if this was the case; not merely did she go into raptures over the simplest dish, the most ordinary flowers, but she would ask permission to send round next morning, for the purpose of copying the recipe or examining the variety of blossom, her head cook or head gardener, personages with large emoluments who kept their own carriages and above all their professional pretensions, and were deeply humiliated at having to come to inquire after a dish they despised or to take a cutting of a variety of carnation that was not half as fine, as variegated, did not produce as large a blossom as those which they had long been growing for her at home. But if, wherever she went, this astonishment on the part of the Princess at the sight of the most commonplace things was factitious, and intended to show that she did not derive from the superiority of her rank and riches a pride forbidden by her early instructors, habitually dissembled by her mother and intolerable in the sight of her Creator, it was, on the other hand, in all sincerity that she regarded the drawing-room of the Duchesse de Guermantes as a privileged place in which she could progress only from surprise to delight. To a certain extent, it is true, though not nearly enough to justify this state of mind, the Guermantes were different from the rest of society; they were more precious and rare. They had given me at first sight the opposite impression; I had found them vulgar, similar to all other men and women, but this was because before meeting them I had seen them, as I saw Balbec, Florence or Parma, as names. Naturally enough, in this drawing-room, all the women whom I had imagined as being like Dresden figures were after all more like the great majority of women. But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after first disappointing the imagination because they resembled their fellow-men rather more than their name, could subsequently, though to a lesser degree, hold out to one’s intelligence certain distinctive characteristics. Their physique, the colour—a peculiar pink that merged at times into purple—of their skins, a certain almost lustrous blondness of the finely spun hair even in the men, massed in soft golden tufts, half wall-growing lichen, half catlike fur (a luminous brilliance to which corresponded a certain intellectual glitter, for if people spoke of the