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Swann hesitated for a moment in front of the picture, which obviously he thought atrocious.

“A bad joke!” he replied with a smile at the Duke who could not restrain an impulse of rage. When this had subsided: “Be good fellows, both of you, wait a moment for Oriane, I must go and put on my swallow-tails and then I’ll be back. I shall send word to the missus that you’re both waiting for her.”

I chatted for a minute or two with Swann about the Dreyfus case and asked him how it was that all the Guermantes were anti-Dreyfusards. “In the first place because at heart all these people are anti-semites,” replied Swann, who nevertheless knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who holds a strong opinion, preferred to explain the fact that other people did not share it by imputing to them preconceptions and prejudices against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is being tormented, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers.

“Yes, it’s true I’ve been told that the Prince de Guermantes is anti-semitic.”

“Oh, that fellow! I don’t even bother to consider him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle to be burned to the ground because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds.”

“Are you going to be there this evening, by any chance?”

“Yes,” Swann replied, “although I don’t really feel up to it. But he sent me a wire to tell me that he has something to say to me. I feel that I shall soon be too unwell to go there or to receive him at my house, it will be too agitating, so I prefer to get it over at once.”

“But the Duc de Guermantes is not anti-semitic?”

“You can see quite well that he is, since he’s an anti-Dreyfusard,” replied Swann, without noticing that he was begging the question. “All the same I’m sorry to have disappointed the fellow—His Grace I should say!—by not admiring his Mignard or whatever he calls it.”

“But at any rate,” I went on, reverting to the Dreyfus case, “the Duchess, now, is intelligent.”

“Yes, she is charming. To my mind, however, she was even more charming when she was still known as the Princesse des Laumes. Her mind has become somehow more angular—it was all much softer in the juvenile great lady. But after all, young or old, men or women, when all’s said and done these people belong to a different race, one can’t have a thousand years of feudalism in one’s blood with impunity. Naturally they imagine that it counts for nothing in their opinions.”

“All the same, Robert de Saint-Loup is a Dreyfusard.”

“Ah! So much the better, especially as his mother is extremely anti. I had heard that he was, but I wasn’t certain of it. That gives me a great deal of pleasure. It doesn’t surprise me, he’s highly intelligent. It’s a great thing, that is.”

Swann’s Dreyfusism had brought out in him an extraordinary naïvety and imparted to his way of looking at things an impulsiveness, an inconsistency more noticeable even than had been the similar effects of his marriage to Odette; this new “declassing” would have been better described as a “reclassing” and was entirely to his credit, since it made him return to the paths which his forebears had trodden and from which he had been deflected by his aristocratic associations. But precisely at the moment when, with all his clear-sightedness, and thanks to the principles he had inherited from his ancestors, he was in a position to perceive a truth that was still hidden from people of fashion, Swann showed himself nevertheless quite comically blind. He subjected all his admirations and all his contempts to