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During this time the Comtesse d’Arpajon, who, before dinner, had told me that her aunt would have been so happy to show me round her house in Normandy, was saying to me over the Prince d’Agrigente’s head that where she would most like to entertain me was in the Côte d’Or, because there, at Pont-le-Duc, she would be at home.

“The archives of the château would interest you. There are some absolutely fascinating correspondences between all the most prominent people of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I’ve spent many wonderful hours there, living in the past,” she declared, and I remembered that M. de Guermantes had told me that she was extremely well up in literature.

“She owns all M. de Bornier’s manuscripts,” went on the Princess, speaking of Mme d’Heudicourt, and anxious to make the most of the good reasons she might have for befriending that lady.

“She must have dreamed it, I don’t believe she ever even knew him,” said the Duchess.

“What is especially interesting is that these correspondences are with people of different countries,” went on the Comtesse d’Arpajon who, allied to the principal ducal and even reigning families of Europe, was always glad to remind people of the fact.

“Surely, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, meaningly, “you can’t have forgotten that dinner-party where you had M. de Bornier sitting next to you!” “But, Basin,” the Duchess interrupted him, “if you mean to inform me that I knew M. de Bornier, why of course I did, he even called upon me several times, but I could never bring myself to invite him to the house because I should always have been obliged to have it disinfected afterwards with formol. As for the dinner you mean, I remember it only too well, but it was certainly not at Zénaïde’s, who never set eyes on Bornier in her life and would probably think if you spoke to her of La Fille de Roland that you meant a Bonaparte princess who is said to be engaged to the son of the King of Greece;25 no, it was at the Austrian Embassy. Dear Hoyos imagined he was giving me a great treat by planting that pestiferous academician on the chair next to mine. I quite thought I had a squadron of mounted police sitting beside me. I was obliged to stop my nose as best I could all through dinner; I didn’t dare breathe until the gruyère came round.”

M. de Guermantes, having achieved his secret objective, made a furtive examination of his guests’ faces to judge the effect of the Duchess’s pleasantry.

“As a matter of fact I find that old correspondences have a peculiar charm,” the lady who was well up in literature and had such fascinating letters in her château went on, in spite of the intervening head of the Prince d’Agrigente. “Have you noticed how often a writer’s letters are superior to the rest of his work? What’s the name of that author who wrote Salammbô?”

I should have liked not to have to reply in order not to prolong this conversation, but I felt it would be disobliging to the Prince d’Agrigente, who had pretended to know perfectly well who Salammbô was by and out of pure politeness to be leaving it to me to say, but who was now in a painful quandary.

“Flaubert,” I ended up by saying, but the vigorous signs of assent that came from the Prince’s head smothered the sound of my reply, so that my interlocutress was not exactly sure whether I had said Paul Bert or Fulbert, names which she did not find entirely satisfactory.

“In any case,” she went on, “how intriguing his correspondence is, and how superior to his books! It explains him, in fact, because one sees from everything he says about the difficulty he has in writing a book that he wasn’t a real writer, a gifted man.”

“Talking of correspondence, I must say I find Gambetta’s admirable,” said the Duchesse de Guermantes, to show that she was not afraid to be found taking an interest in a proletarian and a radical. M. de Bréauté, who fully appreciated the brilliance of this feat of daring, gazed round him with an eye at once tipsy and affectionate, after which he wiped his monocle.

“Gad, it’s infernally dull, that