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By Root 1968 0

into the substance of stylish manners, hitherto rather hollow and dry, everything that one would naturally have liked and had forced oneself to eschew, a genuine welcome, the warmth of true friendliness, spontaneity. It is in a similar fashion (but by a rehabilitation which in this case is less justified) that the people who are most strongly imbued with an instinctive taste for bad music and for melodies, however commonplace, which have something facile and caressing about them, succeed, by dint of education in symphonic culture, in mortifying that appetite. But once they have arrived at this point, when, dazzled—and rightly so—by the brilliant orchestral colouring of Richard Strauss, they see that musician adopt the most vulgar motifs with a self-indulgence worthy of Auber, what those people originally admired finds suddenly in so high an authority a justification which delights them, and they wallow without qualms and with a twofold gratitude, when they listen to Salomé, in what it would have been impossible for them to admire in Les Diamants de la Couronne.

Authentic or not, Mlle de Guermantes’s apostrophe to the Grand Duke, retailed from house to house, provided an opportunity to relate with what excessive elegance Oriane had been turned out at the dinner-party in question. But if such splendour (and this is precisely what rendered it inaccessible to the Courvoisiers) springs not from wealth but from prodigality, the latter nevertheless lasts longer if it enjoys the constant support of the former, which then allows it to pull out all the stops. Now, given the principles openly paraded not only by Oriane but by Mme de Villeparisis, namely that nobility does not count, that it is ridiculous to bother one’s head about rank, that money doesn’t bring happiness, that intellect, heart, talent are alone of importance, the Courvoisiers were justified in hoping that, as a result of the training she had received from the Marquise, Oriane would marry someone who was not in society, an artist, an ex-convict, a tramp, a free-thinker, that she would enter for good and all into the category of what the Courvoisiers called “black sheep.” They were all the more justified in this hope because, inasmuch as Mme de Villeparisis was at that time going through an awkward crisis from the social point of view (none of the few bright stars whom I was to meet in her drawing-room had as yet reappeared there), she professed an intense horror of the society which thus excluded her. Even when she spoke of her nephew the Prince de Guermantes, whom she did still see, she never ceased mocking him because he was so infatuated with his pedigree. But the moment it became a question of finding a husband for Oriane, it was no longer the principles publicly paraded by aunt and niece that had guided the operation; it was the mysterious “family genie.” As unerringly as if Mme de Villeparisis and Oriane had never spoken of anything but rent-rolls and pedigrees instead of literary merit and depth of character, and as if the Marquise for the space of a few days, had been—as she would ultimately be—dead and in her coffin in the church at Combray, where each member of the family became simply a Guermantes, with a forfeiture of individuality and baptismal names attested on the voluminous black drapery of the pall by the single “G” in purple surmounted by the ducal coronet, it was on the wealthiest and the most nobly born, on the most eligible bachelor of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the eldest son of the Duc de Guermantes, the Prince des Laumes, that the family genie had fixed the choice of the intellectual, the rebellious, the evangelical Mme de Villeparisis. And for a couple of hours, on the day of the wedding, Mme de Villeparisis received in her drawing-room all the noble persons whom she had been in the habit of deriding, whom she even derided with the few bourgeois intimates whom she had invited and on whom the Prince des Laumes promptly left cards, preparatory to “cutting the painter” in the following year. And then, making the Courvoisiers’ cup of bitterness