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By Root 1920 0

an artist, but was safe because he did not care for society. Cottard was always at the Verdurins’, but Mme Verdurin was a patient, he was moreover protected by his vulgarity, and at his own house he entertained no one outside the Faculty, at banquets over which there floated an aroma of carbolic acid. But in strongly corporate bodies, where moreover the rigidity of their prejudices is but the price that must be paid for the noblest integrity, the most lofty conceptions of morality, which wither in more tolerant, more liberal, ultimately more corrupt atmospheres, a professor in his gown of scarlet satin faced with ermine, like that of a Doge (which is to say a Duke) of Venice shut away in the ducal palace, was as virtuous, as deeply attached to noble principles, but as pitiless towards any alien element as that other admirable but fearsome duke, M. de Saint-Simon. The alien, here, was the worldly doctor, with other manners, other social relations. To make good, the unfortunate of whom we are now speaking, so as not to be accused by his colleagues of looking down on them (who but a man of fashion would think of such an idea!) if he concealed the Duchesse de Guermantes from them, hoped to disarm them by giving mixed dinner-parties in which the medical element was merged in the fashionable. He was unaware that in so doing he signed his own death-warrant, or rather he discovered this when the Council of Ten (a little larger in number) had to fill a vacant chair, and it was invariably the name of another doctor, more normal if more mediocre, that emerged from the fatal urn, and the “Veto” thundered round the ancient Faculty, as solemn, as absurd and as terrible as the “Juro” that spelt the death of Molière. So too with the painter permanently labelled man of fashion, when fashionable people who dabbled in art had succeeded in getting themselves labelled artists; so with the diplomat who had too many reactionary associations.

But these cases were rare. The prototype of the distinguished men who formed the main substance of the Guermantes salon was someone who had voluntarily (or at least they supposed) renounced all else, everything that was incompatible with the wit of the Guermantes, with the courtesy of the Guermantes, with that indefinable charm odious to any “body” that is at all “corporate.”

And the people who were aware that one of the habitués of the Duchess’s drawing-room had once been awarded the gold medal of the Salon, that another, Secretary to the Bar Council, had made a brilliant début in the Chamber, that a third had ably served France as chargé d’affaires, might have been led to regard as “failures” people who had now done nothing for twenty years. But there were few who were thus “in the know,” and the persons concerned would themselves have been the last to remind one, finding these old distinctions valueless, precisely by virtue of the Guermantes wit: for did this not encourage them to denounce on the one hand as a bore and a pedant, on the other as a counter-jumper, a pair of eminent ministers, one a trifle solemn, the other addicted to puns, whose praises the newspapers were constantly singing but in whose company Mme de Guermantes would begin to yawn and show signs of impatience if a hostess had rashly placed either of them next to her at the dinner-table? Since being a statesman of the first rank was in no sense a recommendation in the eyes of the Duchess, those of her friends who had abandoned the “Career” or the “Service,” who had never stood for parliament, felt, as they came day after day to have lunch and talk with their great friend, or when they met her in the houses of royal personages—incidentally held in low esteem by them (or so they said)—that they had chosen the better part, albeit their melancholy air, even in the midst of the gaiety, seemed somehow to impugn the validity of this judgment.

And it must be acknowledged that the refinement of social life, the sparkle of the conversation at the Guermantes’, did have something real about it, however exiguous it may have been. No official title