it, being an educated man. And the Courvoisiers went about repeating that Oriane had called uncle Palamède “Caesar Augustus,” which was, according to them, a good enough description of him. But why all this endless talk about Oriane, they went on. People couldn’t make more fuss about a queen. “After all, what is Oriane? I don’t say the Guermantes aren’t an old family, but the Courvoisiers are inferior to them in nothing, neither in illustriousness, nor in antiquity, nor in alliances. We mustn’t forget that on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, when the King of England asked François I who was the noblest of the lords there present, ‘Sire,’ said the King of France, ‘Courvoisier.’ ” But even if all the Courvoisiers had stayed in the room to hear them, Oriane’s witticisms would have fallen on deaf ears, since the incidents that usually gave rise to them would have been regarded by them from a totally different point of view. If, for instance, a Courvoisier found herself running short of chairs in the middle of a reception she was giving, or if she used the wrong name in greeting a guest whose face she did not remember, or if one of her servants said something stupid, the Courvoisier lady, extremely annoyed, flushed, quivering with agitation, would deplore so unfortunate an occurrence. And when she had a visitor in the room, and Oriane was expected, she would ask in an anxious and imperious tone: “Do you know her?”, fearing that if the visitor did not know her his presence might make a bad impression on Oriane. But Mme de Guermantes on the contrary drew from such incidents opportunities for stories which made the Guermantes laugh until the tears streamed down their cheeks, so that one was obliged to envy the lady for having run short of chairs, for having herself made or allowed her servant to make a gaffe, for having had at a party someone whom nobody knew, as one is obliged to be thankful that great writers have been kept at a distance by men and betrayed by women when their humiliations and their sufferings have been if not the direct stimulus of their genius at any rate the subject matter of their works.
The Courvoisiers were equally incapable of rising to the spirit of innovation which the Duchesse de Guermantes introduced into the life of society and which, by adapting it with an unerring instinct to the necessities of the moment, made it into something artistic, where the purely rational application of cut and dried rules would have produced results as unfortunate as would greet a man who, anxious to succeed in love or in politics, reproduced to the letter in his own life the exploits of Bussy d’Amboise. If the Courvoisiers gave a family dinner or a dinner to meet some prince, the addition of a recognised wit, of some friend of their son, seemed to them an anomaly capable of producing the direst consequences. A Courvoisier lady whose father had been a minister under the Empire, having to give an afternoon party in honour of the Princesse Mathilde, deduced with a geometrical logic that she could invite no one but Bonapartists—of whom she knew practically none. All the smart women of her acquaintance, all the amusing men, were ruthlessly barred because, with their Legitimist views or connexions, they might, according to Courvoisier logic, have given offence to the Imperial Highness. The latter, who in her own house entertained the flower of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was somewhat surprised when she found at Mme de Courvoisier’s only a notorious old sponger whose husband had been a prefect under the Empire, the widow of the Director of Posts, and sundry others known for their loyalty to Napoleon III, for their stupidity and for their dullness. The Princesse Mathilde nevertheless in no way constrained the sweet and generous outpouring of her sovereign grace over these calamitous ugly ducklings, whom the Duchesse de Guermantes, for her part, took good care not to invite when it was her turn to entertain the Princess, but substituted for them, without any a priori reasoning about Bonapartism, the most brilliant coruscation of