her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one had ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called “the season.” The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many receptions, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opéra and Tuesdays at the Comédie-Française to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, but conveyed to them a similar impression of independence and charm. So that not a day passed on which somebody might not be heard to ask, not merely: “You’ve heard Oriane’s latest joke?” but “You know Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest” as on “Oriane’s latest joke” would follow the comment: “How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure Oriane?” Oriane’s latest might be, for instance, that, having to write on behalf of a patriotic society to Cardinal X——, Bishop of Mâcon (whom M. de Guermantes when he spoke of him invariably called “Monsieur de Mascon,” thinking this to be “old French”), when everyone was trying to imagine what form the letter would take, and had no difficulty as to the opening words, the choice lying between “Eminence” and “Monseigneur,” but was puzzled as to the rest, Oriane’s letter, to the general astonishment, began: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” following an old academic form, or: “My cousin,” this term being in use among the Princes of the Church, the Guermantes and crowned heads, who prayed to God to take each and all of them into “His fit and holy keeping.” To start people on the topic of an “Oriane’s latest” it was sufficient that at a performance at which all Paris was present and a most charming play was being given, when they looked for Mme de Guermantes in the boxes of the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Guermantes, countless other ladies who had invited her, they discovered her sitting by herself, in black, with a tiny hat on her head, in a stall in which she had arrived before the curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening to,” she explained, to the scandal of the Courvoisiers and the admiring bewilderment of the Guermantes and the Princesse de Parme, who suddenly discovered that the “fashion” of hearing the beginning of a play was more up to date, was a proof of greater originality and intelligence (which need not astonish them, coming from Oriane) than arriving for the last act after a big dinner-party and having put in an appearance at a reception. Such were the various kinds of surprise for which the Princesse de Parme knew that she ought to be prepared if she put a literary or social question to Mme de Guermantes, and because of which, during these dinner-parties at Oriane’s, Her Royal Highness never ventured upon the slightest topic save with the uneasy and enraptured prudence of the bather emerging from between two breakers.
Among the elements which, absent from the three or four other more or less equivalent salons that set the fashion for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, differentiated that of the Duchesse de Guermantes from them, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while reflecting the entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one of the least attractive was habitually furnished by one or two extremely good-looking women who had no other right to be there but their beauty and the use that M. de Guermantes had made of them, and whose presence revealed at once, as does in other drawing-rooms that of certain otherwise unaccountable pictures, that in this household the husband was an ardent appreciator of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for the Duke had a taste for tall women, at once statuesque and airy, of a type half-way