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By Root 1840 0

was worth more than the personal charm of certain of Mme de Guermantes’s favourites whom the most powerful ministers would have been unable to attract to their houses. If in this drawing-room so many intellectual ambitions and even noble efforts had been for ever buried, still at least from their dust the rarest flowering of civilised society had sprung to life. Certainly men of wit, such as Swann for instance, regarded themselves as superior to men of merit, whom they despised, but that was because what the Duchess valued above everything else was not intelligence but—a superior form of intelligence, according to her, rarer, more exquisite, raising it up to a verbal variety of talent—wit. And long ago at the Verdurins’, when Swann denounced Brichot and Elstir, one as a pedant and the other as an oaf, despite all the learning of the one and the genius of the other, it was the infiltration of the Guermantes spirit that had led him to classify them thus. Never would he have dared to introduce either of them to the Duchess, conscious instinctively of the air with which she would have listened to Brichot’s perorations and Elstir’s “balderdash,” the Guermantes spirit consigning pretentious and prolix speech, whether in a serious or a farcical vein, to the category of the most intolerable imbecility.

As for the Guermantes of the true flesh and blood, if the Guermantes spirit had not infected them as completely as we see occur in, for example, those literary coteries in which everyone has the same way of pronouncing, enunciating and consequently thinking, it was certainly not because originality is stronger in social circles and inhibits imitation therein. But imitation requires not only the absence of any unconquerable originality but also a relative fineness of ear which enables one first of all to discern what one is afterwards to imitate. And there were several Guermantes in whom this musical sense was as entirely lacking as in the Courvoisiers.

To take as an instance what is called, in another sense of the word imitation, “giving imitations” (or among the Guermantes was called “taking off”), for all that Mme de Guermantes could bring these off to perfection, the Courvoisiers were as incapable of appreciating it as if they had been a tribe of rabbits instead of men and women, because they had never managed to observe the particular defect or accent that the Duchess was endeavouring to mimic. When she “imitated” the Duc de Limoges, the Courvoisiers would protest: “Oh, no, he doesn’t really speak like that. I dined with him again at Bebeth’s last night; he talked to me all evening and he didn’t speak like that at all!” whereas any Guermantes who was at all cultivated would exclaim: “Goodness, how droll Oriane is! The amazing thing is that when she’s mimicking him she looks exactly like him! I feel I’m listening to him. Oriane, do give us a little more Limoges!” Now these Guermantes (without even including those absolutely remarkable members of the clan who, when the Duchess imitated the Duc de Limoges, would say admiringly: “Oh, you really have got him,” or “You do hit him off!”) might be devoid of wit according to Mme de Guermantes (in this respect she was right), but by dint of hearing and repeating her sayings they had come to imitate more or less her way of expressing herself, of criticising people, of what Swann, like the Duchess herself, would have called her way of “phrasing” things, so that they presented in their conversation something which to the Courvoisiers appeared appallingly similar to Oriane’s wit and was treated by them collectively as the Guermantes wit. As these Guermantes were to her not merely kinsfolk but admirers, Oriane (who kept the rest of the family rigorously at arm’s-length and now avenged by her disdain the spitefulness they had shown her in her girlhood) went to call on them now and then, generally in the company of the Duke, when she drove out with him in the summer months. These visits were an event. The Princesse d’Epinay’s heart would begin to beat more rapidly, as she entertained in her