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By Root 1787 0

the Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in general and, more than anyone, the Princesse de Parme, in her habit of issuing unaccountable decrees behind which one sensed latent principles which impressed one all the more the less one was aware of them. If the new Greek Minister gave a fancy-dress ball, everyone chose a costume and wondered what the Duchess would wear. One thought that she would appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne, another suggested as probable the guise of Princess of Deryabar, a third Psyche. Finally a Courvoisier, having asked her: “What are you going as, Oriane?”, provoked the one response of which nobody had thought: “Why, nothing at all!”, which at once set every tongue wagging, as revealing Oriane’s opinion as to the true social position of the new Greek Minister and the proper attitude to adopt towards him, that is to say the opinion which ought to have been foreseen, namely that a duchess “wasn’t obliged” to attend the fancy-dress ball given by this new minister. “I don’t see that there’s any necessity to go to the Greek Minister’s. I don’t know him; I’m not Greek; why should I go to his house? I have nothing to do with him,” said the Duchess.

“But everybody will be there, they say it’s going to be charming!” cried Mme de Gallardon.

“But it’s just as charming sometimes to sit by one’s own fireside,” replied Mme de Guermantes.

The Courvoisiers could not get over this, but the Guermantes, without copying their cousin, approved: “Naturally, everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all the conventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she’s wrong to want to show that we do go rather too far in grovelling before these foreigners who appear from heaven knows where.”

Naturally, knowing the stream of comment which one or other attitude would not fail to provoke, Mme de Guermantes took as much pleasure in appearing at a party to which her hostess had not dared to count on her coming as in staying at home or spending the evening at the theatre with her husband on the night of a party to which “everybody was going,” or, again, when people imagined that she would eclipse the finest diamonds with some historic diadem, by stealing into the room without a single jewel, and in another style of dress than what had been wrongly supposed to be essential to the occasion. Although she was anti-Dreyfusard (while believing Dreyfus to be innocent, just as she spent her life in the social world while believing only in ideas), she had created an enormous sensation at a party at the Princesse de Ligne’s, first of all by remaining seated when all the ladies had risen to their feet as General Mercier entered the room, and then by getting up and asking for her carriage in a loud voice when a nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby showing that she did not consider that society was meant for talking politics in; and all heads had turned towards her at a Good Friday concert at which, although a Voltairean, she had refused to remain because she thought it indecent to bring Christ on the stage. We know how important, even for the great queens of society, is that moment of the year at which the round of entertainment begins: so much so that the Marquise d’Amoncourt, who, from a need to say something, a psychological quirk, and also from a lack of sensitivity, was always making a fool of herself, had actually replied to somebody who had called to condole with her on the death of her father, M. de Montmorency: “What perhaps makes it still sadder is that it should come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed with cards!” Well, at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, hurrying so as to make sure that she was not already engaged, she declined for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought: she was just setting off on a cruise in the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. The fashionable world was stunned, and, without any thought of following the Duchess’s example, derived nevertheless from