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“Very slightly,” replied the Duchess, who was an intimate friend of the officer in question. The Princess explained what it was that Saint-Loup wanted.

“Oh dear, well, yes, if I see him . . . It’s possible that I may run into him,” the Duchess replied, so as not to appear to be refusing, her relations with General de Monserfeuil seeming to have grown rapidly more intermittent since it had become a question of her asking him for something. This uncertainty did not, however, satisfy the Duke, who interrupted his wife.

“You know perfectly well you won’t be seeing him, Oriane, and besides you’ve already asked him for two things which he hasn’t done. My wife has a passion for doing people good turns,” he went on, getting more and more furious in order to force the Princess to withdraw her request without making her doubt his wife’s good nature and so that Mme de Parme should throw the blame on his own essentially crotchety character. “Robert could get anything he wanted out of Monserfeuil. Only, as he happens not to know what he wants, he gets us to ask for it because he knows there’s no better way of making the whole thing fall through. Oriane has asked too many favours of Monserfeuil. A request from her now would be a reason for him to refuse.”

“Oh, in that case, it would be better if the Duchess did nothing,” said Mme de Parme.

“Obviously,” the Duke concluded.

“That poor General, he’s been defeated again at the elections,” said the Princess, to change the subject.

“Oh, it’s nothing serious, it’s only the seventh time,” said the Duke, who, having been obliged himself to retire from politics, quite enjoyed hearing of other people’s failures at the polls. “He has consoled himself by giving his wife another baby.”

“What! Is that poor Mme de Monserfeuil pregnant again?” cried the Princess.

“Why, of course,” replied the Duchess, “it’s the one ward where the poor General has never failed.”

In the period that followed I was continually to be invited, however small the party, to these repasts at which I had at one time imagined the guests as seated like the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. They did assemble there indeed, like the early Christians, not to partake merely of a material nourishment, which was incidentally exquisite, but in a sort of social Eucharist; so that in the course of a few dinner-parties I assimilated the acquaintance of all the friends of my hosts, friends to whom they presented me with a tinge of benevolent patronage so marked (as a person for whom they had always had a sort of parental affection) that there was not one among them who would not have felt himself to be somehow failing the Duke and Duchess if he had given a ball without including my name on his list, and at the same time, while I sipped one of those Yquems which lay concealed in the Guermantes cellars, I tasted ortolans dressed according to a variety of recipes judiciously elaborated and modified by the Duke himself. However, for one who had already sat down more than once at the mystic board, the consumption of these latter was not indispensable. Old friends of M. and Mme de Guermantes came in to see them after dinner, “with the tooth-picks” as Mme Swann would have said, without being expected, and took in winter a cup of limeblossom tea in the lighted warmth of the great drawing-room, in summer a glass of orangeade in the darkness of the little rectangular strip of garden outside. No one could remember having ever received from the Guermantes, on these evenings in the garden, anything else but orangeade. It had a sort of ritual meaning. To have added other refreshments would have seemed to be falsifying the tradition, just as a big at-home in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ceases to be an at-home if there is a play also, or music. You must be assumed to have come simply—even if there were five hundred of you—to pay a call on, let us say, the Princesse de Guermantes. People marvelled at my influence because I managed to procure the addition to this orangeade of a jug containing the juice of