in his outward relations with his wife to observe what are called the forms. People who did not know them might easily be taken in. Sometimes in autumn, between racing at Deauville, taking the waters, and returning to Guermantes for the shooting, in the few weeks which people spend in Paris, since the Duchess had a liking for café-concerts, the Duke would go with her to spend the evening at one of these. The audience remarked at once, in one of those little open boxes in which there is just room for two, this Hercules in his “smoking” (for in France we give to everything that is more or less British the one name that it happens not to bear in England), his monocle screwed in his eye, a fat cigar, from which now and then he drew a puff of smoke, in his plump but finely shaped hand, on the ring-finger of which a sapphire glowed, keeping his eyes for the most part on the stage but, when he did let them fall upon the audience in which there was absolutely no one whom he knew, softening them with an air of gentleness, reserve, courtesy and consideration. When a song struck him as amusing and not too indecent, the Duke would turn round with a smile to his wife, would share with her, with a twinkle of good-natured complicity, the innocent merriment which the new song had aroused in him. And the spectators might believe that there was no better husband in the world than he, nor anyone more enviable than the Duchess—that woman outside whom every interest in the Duke’s life lay, that woman whom he did not love, to whom he had never ceased to be unfaithful; and when the Duchess felt tired, they saw M. de Guermantes rise, put on her cloak with his own hands, arranging her necklaces so that they did not get caught in the lining, and clear a path for her to the exit with an assiduous and respectful attention which she received with the coldness of the woman of the world who sees in such behaviour simply conventional good manners, at times even with the slightly ironical bitterness of the disabused spouse who has no illusion left to shatter. But despite these externals (another element of that politeness which has transferred duty from the inner depths to the surface, at a period already remote but which still continues for its survivors) the life of the Duchess was by no means easy. M. de Guermantes only became generous and human again for a new mistress, who would, as it generally happened, take the Duchess’s side; the latter saw the possibility arising for her once again of generosities towards inferiors, charities to the poor, and even for herself, later on, a new and sumptuous motor-car. But from the irritation which was provoked as a rule pretty rapidly in Mme de Guermantes by people whom she found too submissive, the Duke’s mistresses were not exempt. Presently the Duchess grew tired of them. As it happened, at that moment too the Duke’s liaison with Mme d’Arpajon was drawing to an end. Another mistress was in the offing.
No doubt the love which M. de Guermantes had borne each of them in succession would begin one day to make itself felt anew: in the first place this love, in dying, bequeathed them to the household like beautiful marble statues—beautiful to the Duke, become thus in part an artist, because he had loved them and was appreciative now of lines which he would not have appreciated without love—which brought into juxtaposition in the Duchess’s drawing-room their forms that had long been inimical, devoured by jealousies and quarrels, and finally reconciled in the peace of friendship; and then this friendship itself was an effect of the love which had made M. de Guermantes observe in those who had been his mistresses virtues which exist in every human being but are perceptible only to the carnal eye, so much so that the ex-mistress who has become “a good friend” who would do anything in the world for one has become a cliché, like the doctor or father who is not a doctor or a father but a friend. But during a period of transition, the woman whom M. de Guermantes was preparing to abandon bewailed her lot, made scenes, showed