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By Root 1632 0

with the sister, whose husband I know quite well. I think I shall say nothing at all about it to Oriane, if Your Highness has no objection. We’ll save her a great deal of strain and agitation. And I assure you that it will be no loss to Mme de Souvré. She goes everywhere, moves in the most brilliant circles. We scarcely entertain at all, really, just a few little friendly dinners. Mme de Souvré would be bored to death.” The Princesse de Parme, innocently convinced that the Duc de Guermantes would not transmit her request to the Duchess, and dismayed by her failure to procure the invitation that Mme de Souvré sought, was all the more flattered to think that she herself was one of the regular frequenters of so exclusive a household. No doubt this satisfaction had its drawbacks also. Thus whenever the Princesse de Parme invited Mme de Guermantes to her own parties she had to rack her brains to be sure that there was no one else on her list whose presence might offend the Duchess and make her refuse to come again.

On her habitual evenings, after dinner, to which she always invited a few people (very early, for she clung to old customs), the Princesse de Parme’s drawing-room was thrown open to her regular guests and, generally speaking, to the whole of the higher aristocracy, French and foreign. The order of her receptions was as follows: on issuing from the dining-room the Princess sat down on a settee in front of a large round table and chatted with two of the most important ladies who had dined with her, or else cast her eyes over a magazine, or sometimes played cards (or pretended to play, following a German court custom), either a game of patience or selecting as her real or pretended partner some prominent personage. By nine o’clock the double doors of the big drawing-room were in constant action, opening and shutting and opening again to admit the visitors who had dined hurriedly at home (or if they had dined “out,” skipped coffee, promising to return later, having intended only “to go in at one door and out at the other”) in order to conform with the Princess’s time-table. She, meanwhile, attentive to her game or conversation, made a show of not seeing the new arrivals, and it was not until they were actually within reach of her that she rose graciously from her seat, with a benevolent smile for the women. The latter thereupon sank before the standing Princess in a curtsey which was tantamount to a genuflexion, in such a way as to bring their lips down to the level of the beautiful hand which hung very low, and to kiss it. But at that moment the Princess, just as if she had been surprised each time by a protocol with which nevertheless she was perfectly familiar, raised the kneeling lady as though by main force, but with incomparable grace and sweetness, and kissed her on both cheeks. A grace and sweetness that were conditional, you may say, upon the meekness with which the arriving guest bent her knee. Very likely; and it would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispensed when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything that has only a fiduciary value. But this disappearance of social distinctions in a reconstructed society is by no means a foregone conclusion, and we are at times too ready to believe that present circumstances are the only ones in which a state of things can survive. People of first-rate intelligence believed that a republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances, and that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation of Church and State. After all, the survival of etiquette in an egalitarian society would be no more miraculous than the practical success of the railways or the use of the aeroplane