on which she was left by herself all afternoon with a lady-in-waiting and some councillor from a foreign legation. And so whenever (as had been the case with Swann, for instance, at an earlier period) there was anyone who never let a day pass without going to spend an hour or two at the Duchess’s and paid a call once every two years on the Princesse de Parme, the latter felt no great desire, even for the sake of amusing Oriane, to make “advances” to this Swann or whoever he was by inviting him to dinner. In a word, having the Duchess in her house was for the Princess a source of endless perplexity, so haunted was she by the fear that Oriane would find fault with everything. But in return, and for the same reason, when the Princesse de Parme came to dine with Mme de Guermantes she could be certain in advance that everything would be perfect, delightful, and she had only one fear, which was that of being unable to understand, remember, give satisfaction, being unable to assimilate new ideas and people. On this score, my presence aroused her attention and excited her cupidity, just as might a new way of decorating the dinner-table with garlands of fruit, uncertain as she was which of the two—the table decorations or my presence—was the more distinctively one of those charms which were the secret of the success of Oriane’s receptions, and in her uncertainty firmly resolved to try to have them both at her own next dinner-party. What in fact fully justified the enraptured curiosity which the Princesse de Parme brought to the Duchess’s house was that unique, dangerous, exciting element into which the Princess used to plunge with a thrill of anxiety, shock and delight (as at the seaside on one of those days of “heavy seas” of the danger of which the bathing-attendants warn one for the simple reason that none of them can swim), and from which she would emerge feeling braced, happy, rejuvenated—the element known as the wit of the Guermantes. The wit of the Guermantes—a thing as non-existent as the squared circle, according to the Duchess who regarded herself as the sole Guermantes to possess it—was a family reputation like that of the minced pork of Tours or the biscuits of Rheims. However (since an intellectual characteristic does not employ for its propagation the same channels as the colour of hair or complexion) certain intimate friends of the Duchess who were not of her blood were nevertheless endowed with this wit, which on the other hand had failed to inculcate itself into various Guermantes who were all too resistant to wit of any kind. For the most part, the custodians of the Guermantes wit who were not related to the Duchess shared the characteristic feature of having been brilliant men, eminently fitted for a career to which, whether in the arts, diplomacy, parliamentary eloquence or the army, they had preferred the life of society. Possibly this preference could be explained by a certain lack of originality, of initiative, of will power, of health or of luck, or possibly by snobbishness.
With certain of them (though these, it must be admitted, were the exception), if the Guermantes drawing-room had been the stumbling-block in their careers, it had been against their will. Thus a doctor, a painter and a diplomat of great promise had failed to achieve success in the careers for which they were nevertheless more brilliantly endowed than most because their friendship with the Guermantes had resulted in the first two being regarded as men of fashion and the third as a reactionary, and this had prevented all three from winning the recognition of their peers. The mediaeval gown and red cap which are still donned by the electoral colleges of the Faculties are (or were, at least, not so long since) something more than a purely outward survival from a narrow-minded past, from a rigid sectarianism. Under the cap with its golden tassels, like the high priests in the conical mitre of the Jews, the “professors” were still, in the years that preceded the Dreyfus case, fast rooted in rigorously pharisaical ideas. Du Boulbon was at heart