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By Root 1925 0

appreciating it, to bring out the full savour of its psychological originality and the brilliance of its epigrammatic malice. Of course these new opinions contained as a rule no more truth than the old, often less; but this very element of arbitrariness and unexpectedness conferred on them an intellectual quality which made them exciting to communicate. However, the patient on whom the Duchess was exercising her psychological skill was generally an intimate friend as to whom the people to whom she longed to hand on her discovery were entirely unaware that he was not still at the apex of her favour; thus Mme de Guermantes’s reputation for being an incomparable friend, sentimental, tender and devoted, made it difficult for her to launch the attack herself; she could at the most intervene later on, as though under constraint, by taking up a cue in order to appease, to contradict in appearance but actually to support a partner who had taken it on himself to provoke her; this was precisely the role in which M. de Guermantes excelled.

As for social activities, Mme de Guermantes enjoyed yet another arbitrarily theatrical pleasure in expressing thereon some of those unexpected judgments which whipped the Princesse de Parme into a state of perpetual and delicious surprise. In the case of this particular pleasure of the Duchess’s, it was not so much with the help of literary criticism as from the example of political life and the reports of parliamentary debates that I tried to understand in what it might consist. The successive and contradictory edicts by which Mme de Guermantes continually reversed the scale of values among the people of her world no longer sufficing to distract her, she sought also in the manner in which she ordered her own social behaviour, in which she accounted for her own most trifling decisions on points of fashion, to savour those artificial emotions, to fulfil those factitious obligations, which stir the feelings of parliaments and impress themselves on the minds of politicians. We know that when a minister explains to the Chamber that he believed himself to be acting rightly in following a line of conduct which does indeed appear quite straightforward to the commonsense person who reads the report of the sitting in his newspaper next morning, this commonsense reader nevertheless feels suddenly stirred and begins to doubt whether he has been right in approving the minister’s conduct when he sees that the latter’s speech was listened to in an uproar and punctuated with expressions of condemnation such as: “It’s most serious!” pronounced by a Deputy whose name and titles are so long, and followed in the report by reactions so emphatic, that in the whole interruption the words “It’s most serious!” occupy less room than a hemistich in an alexandrine. For instance in the days when M. de Guermantes, Prince des Laumes, sat in the Chamber, one used to read now and then in the Paris newspapers, although it was intended primarily for the Méséglise constituency, to show the electors there that they had not given their votes to an inactive or voiceless representative:

MONSIEUR DE GUERMANTES—BOUILLON, PRINCE DES LAUMES: “This is serious!” (“Hear, hear!” from the centre and some of the benches on the right, loud exclamations from the extreme left.)

The commonsense reader still retains a glimmer of loyalty to the sage minister, but his heart is convulsed with a fresh palpitation by the first words of the speaker who rises to reply:

“The astonishment, it is not too much to say the stupor” (keen sensation on the right side of the House) “that I have felt at the words of one who is still, I presume, a member of the Government . . .” (thunderous applause; several Deputies then rush towards the ministerial bench. The Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs, without rising from his seat, gives an affirmative nod.)

This “thunderous applause” carries away the last shred of resistance in the mind of the commonsense reader: he regards as an insult to the Chamber, monstrous in fact, a way of proceeding which in itself