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By Root 1814 0

of the genie whose duty it was to ensure the maintenance of the aristocratic way of life and who, always invisible but evidently lurking at one moment in the entrance hall, at another in the drawing-room, at a third in her dressing-room, reminded the servants of this woman who did not believe in titles to address her as “Madame la Duchesse,” and reminded this woman herself, who cared only for reading and was no respecter of persons, to go out to dinner with her sister-in-law when eight o’clock struck, and to put on a low-necked dress for the occasion.

The same family genie represented to Mme de Guermantes the social duties of duchesses, at least of the foremost among them who like herself were also multimillionaires—the sacrifice to boring tea-parties, grand dinners, routs of every kind, of hours in which she might have read interesting books—as unpleasant necessities like rain, which Mme de Guermantes accepted while bringing her irreverent humour to bear on them, though without going so far as to examine the reasons for her acceptance. The curious coincidence whereby Mme de Guermantes’s butler invariably said “Madame la Duchesse” to this woman who believed only in the intellect did not appear to shock her. Never had it entered her head to request him to address her simply as “Madame.” Giving her the utmost benefit of the doubt one might have supposed that, being absent-minded, she caught only the word “Madame” and that the suffix appended to it remained unheard. Only, though she might feign deafness, she was not dumb. And the fact was that whenever she had a message to give to her husband she would say to the butler: “Remind Monsieur le Duc——”

The family genie had other occupations as well, one of which was to inspire them to talk morality. It is true that there were Guermantes who went in for intellect and Guermantes who went in for morals, and that these two groups did not as a rule coincide. But the former—including a Guermantes who had forged cheques, who cheated at cards and was the most delightful of them all, with a mind open to every new and sensible idea—spoke even more eloquently about morals than the others, and in the same strain as Mme de Villeparisis, at the moments when the family genie expressed itself through the lips of the old lady. At corresponding moments one saw the Guermantes suddenly adopt a tone almost as antiquated and as affable as, and (since they themselves had more charm) more affecting than that of the Marquise, to say of a servant: “One feels that she has a thoroughly sound nature, she’s not at all a common girl, she must come of decent parents, she’s certainly a girl who has never gone astray.” At such moments the family genie adopted the form of a tone of voice. But at times it could reveal itself in the bearing also, in the expression on the face, the same in the Duchess as in her grandfather the Marshal, a sort of imperceptible convulsion (like that of the Snake, the genius of the Carthaginian family of Barca) by which my heart had more than once been made to throb, on my morning walks, when before I had recognised Mme de Guermantes I felt her eyes fastened upon me from the inside of a little dairy. This family genie had intervened in a situation which was far from immaterial not merely to the Guermantes but to the Courvoisiers, the rival faction of the family and, though of as noble stock as the Guermantes (it was, indeed, through his Courvoisier grandmother that the Guermantes explained the obsession which led the Prince de Guermantes always to speak of birth and titles as though they were the only things that mattered), their opposite in every respect. Not only did the Courvoisiers not assign to intelligence the same importance as the Guermantes, they had a different notion of it. For a Guermantes (however stupid), to be intelligent meant to have a sharp tongue, to be capable of saying scathing things, to give short shrift; but it meant also the capacity to hold one’s own equally in painting, music, architecture, and to speak English. The Courvoisiers had a less favourable notion