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By Root 1867 0

between the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory; often fair, rarely dark, sometimes auburn, like the most recent, who was at this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Arpajon whom he had loved so well that for a long time he had obliged her to send him as many as ten telegrams daily (which slightly irritated the Duchess) and corresponded with her by carrier pigeon when he was at Guermantes, and from whom moreover he had long been so incapable of tearing himself away that, one winter which he had had to spend at Parma, he travelled back regularly every week to Paris, spending two days in the train, in order to see her.

As a rule these handsome supernumeraries had been his mistresses but were no longer (as was Mme d’Arpajon’s case) or were on the point of ceasing to be. It may well have been that the glamour which the Duchess enjoyed in their eyes and the hope of being invited to her house, though they themselves came from thoroughly aristocratic backgrounds, if of the second rank, had prompted them, even more than the good looks and generosity of the Duke, to yield to his desires. Not that the Duchess would have placed any insuperable obstacle in the way of their crossing her threshold: she was aware that in more than one of them she had found an ally thanks to whom she had obtained countless things which she wanted but which M. de Guermantes pitilessly denied his wife so long as he was not in love with someone else. And so the reason why they were not received by the Duchess until their liaison was already far advanced lay principally in the fact that the Duke, each time he embarked on a love affair, had imagined no more than a brief fling, as a reward for which he considered an invitation from his wife excessive. And yet he found himself offering this as the price for far less, for a first kiss in fact, because he had met with unexpected resistance or, on the contrary, because there had been no resistance. In love it often happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, make us generous beyond the limits of what hope and self-interest had foreseen. But then the realisation of this offer was hindered by conflicting circumstances. In the first place, all the women who had responded to M. de Guermantes’s love, and sometimes even when they had not yet given themselves to him, he had one after another kept cut off from the world. He no longer allowed them to see anyone, spent almost all his time in their company, looked after the education of their children, to whom now and again, if one was to judge by certain striking resemblances later on, he had occasion to present a little brother or sister. And then if, at the start of the liaison, the prospect of an introduction to Mme de Guermantes, which had never been envisaged by the Duke, had played a part in the mistress’s mind, the liaison in itself had altered the lady’s point of view; the Duke was no longer for her merely the husband of the smartest woman in Paris, but a man with whom the new mistress was in love, a man moreover who had given her the means and the inclination for a more luxurious style of living and had transposed the relative importance in her mind of questions of social and of material advantage; while now and then a composite jealousy of Mme de Guermantes, into which all these factors entered, animated the Duke’s mistresses. But this case was the rarest of all; besides, when the day appointed for the introduction at length arrived (at a point when as a rule it had more or less become a matter of indifference to the Duke, whose actions, like everyone else’s, were more often dictated by previous actions than by the original motive which had ceased to exist), it frequently happened that it was Mme de Guermantes who had sought the acquaintance of the mistress in whom she hoped, and so greatly needed, to find a valuable ally against her dread husband. This is not to say that, except at rare moments, in their own house, when, if the Duchess talked too much, he let fall a few words or, more dreadful still, preserved a silence which petrified her, M. de Guermantes failed