In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [275]
It must at the same time be recognised that this subtlety of the politician which served to explain to me the Guermantes circle, and other groups in society later on, is no more than the perversion of a certain nicety of interpretation often described by the expression “reading between the lines.” If in representative assemblies there is absurdity owing to the perversion of this quality, there is equally stupidity, through the lack of it, in the public who take everything literally, who do not suspect a dismissal when a high dignitary is relieved of his office “at his own request,” and say: “He cannot have been dismissed, since it was he who asked to go,” or a defeat when, in the face of the Japanese advance, the Russians by a strategic manoeuvre fall back on stronger positions, prepared in advance, or a refusal when, a province having demanded its independence from the German Emperor, he grants it religious autonomy. It is possible, moreover (to revert to these sittings of the Chamber), that when they open the Deputies themselves are like the commonsense person who will read the published report. Learning that certain workers on strike have sent their delegates to confer with a minister, they may ask themselves naïvely: “There now, I wonder what they can have been saying; let’s hope it’s all settled,” at the moment when the minister himself rises to address the House in a solemn silence which has already brought artificial emotions into play. The minister’s first words: “There is no necessity for me to inform the Chamber that I have too high a sense of what is the duty of the Government to have received a deputation of which the authority entrusted to me could take no cognisance,” produce a dramatic effect, for this was the one hypothesis which the commonsense of the Deputies had failed to foresee. But precisely because of its dramatic effect it is greeted with such applause that it is only after several minutes have passed that the minister can succeed in making himself heard, and on returning to his bench he will receive the congratulations of his colleagues. They are as deeply moved as on the day when the same minister failed to invite to a big official reception the chairman of the municipal council who supported the Opposition, and they declare that on this occasion as on the other he has acted with true statesmanship.
M. de Guermantes at this period of his life had, to the great scandal of the Courvoisiers, frequently been among the crowd of Deputies who came forward to congratulate the minister. I later heard it said that even at a time when he was playing a fairly important role in the Chamber and was being thought of in connexion with ministerial office or an embassy, he was, when a friend came to ask a favour of him, infinitely more simple, behaved politically a great deal less like a person of importance, than anyone else who did not happen to be Duc de Guermantes. For if he said that nobility was of no account, that he regarded his colleagues as equals, he did not believe it for a moment. He sought, and pretended to value, but really despised political position, and as he remained in his own eyes M. de Guermantes it did not envelop his person in that starchiness of high office which makes others unapproachable. And in this way his pride protected against every assault not only his manners, which were of an ostentatious familiarity, but also such true simplicity as he might actually possess.
To return to those artificial and dramatic decisions of hers, so like those of politicians, Mme de Guermantes was no less disconcerting to