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“Poor woman!” cried the Princess, “what a delicious creature she was!”

“Yes,” replied the Duchess, “a trifle mad, a trifle headstrong, but she was a thoroughly good woman, a nice, kind-hearted lunatic; the only thing I could never understand was why she never managed to get a set of false teeth that fitted her; they always came loose halfway through a sentence and she was obliged to stop short or she’d have swallowed them.”

“That Rachel was telling me that young Saint-Loup worshipped you, that he was fonder of you than he was of her,” said Prince Von to me, devouring his food like an ogre as he spoke, his face scarlet, his teeth bared by his perpetual grin.

“But in that case she must be jealous of me and hate me,” said I.

“Not at all, she said all sorts of nice things about you. The Prince de Foix’s mistress would perhaps be jealous if he preferred you to her. You don’t understand? Come home with me, and I’ll explain it all to you.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, I’m going on to M. de Charlus at eleven.”

“Why, he sent round to me yesterday to ask me to dine with him this evening, but told me not to come after a quarter to eleven. But if you insist on going to him, at least come with me as far as the Théâtre-Français, you will be in the periphery,” said the Prince, who thought doubtless that this last word meant “proximity” or possibly “centre.”

But the bulging eyes in his coarse though handsome red face frightened me and I declined, saying that a friend was coming to call for me. This reply seemed to me in no way offensive. The Prince, however, apparently formed a different impression of it, for he did not say another word to me.

“I really must go and see the Queen of Naples—it must be a great grief to her,” said, or at least appeared to me to have said, the Princesse de Parme. For her words had come to me only indistinctly through the intervening screen of those addressed to me, albeit in an undertone, by Prince Von, who had doubtless been afraid of being overheard by the Prince de Foix if he spoke louder.

“Oh, dear, no!” replied the Duchess, “I don’t believe she feels any grief at all.”

“None at all! You do always fly to extremes, Oriane,” said M. de Guermantes, resuming his role as the cliff which, by standing up against the wave, forces it to fling even higher its crest of foam.

“Basin knows even better than I that I’m telling the truth,” replied the Duchess, “but he thinks he’s obliged to look severe because you are present, Ma’am, and he’s afraid of my shocking you.”

“Oh, please no, I beg of you,” cried the Princesse de Parme, dreading the slightest alteration on her account of these delicious evenings at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, this forbidden fruit which the Queen of Sweden herself had not yet acquired the right to taste.

“Why, it was to Basin himself, when he said to her with a duly sorrowful expression: ‘But I see the Queen is in mourning. For whom, pray? Is it a great grief to your Majesty?’ that she replied: ‘No, it’s not a deep mourning, it’s a light mourning, a very light mourning, it’s my sister.’ The truth is, she’s delighted about it, as Basin knows perfectly well. She invited us to a party that very evening, and gave me two pearls. I wish she could lose a sister every day! So far from weeping for her sister’s death, she was in fits of laughter over it. She probably says to herself, like Robert, ‘sic transit——’ I forget how it goes on,” she added modestly, knowing how it went on perfectly well.

In saying all this Mme de Guermantes was only indulging her wit, and in the most disingenuous way, for the Queen of Naples, like the Duchesse d’Alençon, who also died in tragic circumstances, had the warmest heart in the world and sincerely mourned her kinsfolk. Mme de Guermantes knew these noble Bavarian sisters, her cousins, too well not to be aware of this. “He is anxious not to go back to Morocco,” said the Princesse de Parme, grasping once more at the name Robert which Mme de Guermantes had held out to her, quite unintentionally, like a lifeline.