In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [330]
Now, among the characteristics peculiar to the Princesse de Guermantes’s salon, the one most generally cited was an exclusiveness due in part to the Princess’s royal birth but more especially to the almost fossilised rigidity of the Prince’s aristocratic prejudices—which, incidentally, the Duke and Duchess had had no hesitation in deriding in front of me. This exclusiveness made me regard it as even more improbable that I should have been invited by this man who reckoned only in royal personages and dukes and at every dinner-party made a scene because he had not been put in the place to which he would have been entitled under Louis XIV, a place which, thanks to his immense erudition in matters of history and genealogy, he was the only person who knew. For this reason, many society people came down on the side of the Duke and Duchess when discussing the differences that distinguished them from their cousins. “The Duke and Duchess are far more modern, far more intelligent, they aren’t simply interested, like the other couple, in how many quarterings one has, their salon is three hundred years in advance of their cousins’,” were customary remarks, the memory of which made me tremble as I looked at the invitation card, since they made it all the more probable that it had been sent to me by some practical joker.
If the Duke and Duchess had not been still at Cannes, I might have tried to find out from them whether the invitation I had received was genuine. This state of doubt in which I was plunged is not in fact, as I deluded myself for a time by supposing, a sentiment which a man of fashion would not have felt and which consequently a writer, even if he otherwise belonged to the world of society, ought to reproduce in order to be thoroughly “objective’’ and to depict each class differently. I happened indeed, only the other day, in a charming volume of memoirs, to come upon the record of uncertainties analogous to those which the Princesse de Guermantes’s card engendered in me. “Georges and I” (or “Hély and I”—I haven’t the book at hand to verify the reference) “were so longing to be asked to Mme Delessert’s that, having received an invitation from her, we thought it prudent, each of us independently, to make certain that we were not the victims of an April fool hoax.” And the writer is none other than the Comte d’Haussonville (he who married the Duc de Broglie’s daughter), while the other young man who “independently” tries to ascertain whether he is the victim of a hoax is, according to whether he is called Georges or Hély, one or other of the two inseparable friends of M. d’Haussonville, either M. d’Harcourt or the Prince de Chalais.
The day on which the reception at the Princesse de Guermantes’s was to be held, I learned that the Duke and Duchess had returned to Paris the night before, and I made up my mind to go and see them that morning. But, having gone out early, they had not yet returned; I watched first of all from a little room, which had seemed to me to be a good look-out post, for the arrival of their carriage. As a matter of fact I had made a singularly bad choice of observatory, for I could scarcely see into our courtyard, but I caught a glimpse of several others, and this, though of no practical use to me, diverted me for a time. It is not only in Venice that one has these views on to several houses at once which have