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“But,” explained M. Verdurin, hurt, “we did it on purpose. I attach no importance whatever to titles of nobility,” he went on, with that contemptuous smile which I have seen so many people I have known, unlike my grandmother and my mother, assume when they speak of something they do not possess to those who will thereby, they imagine, be prevented from using it to show their superiority over them. “But you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he’s a marquis, while you’re only a baron . . .”

“Pardon me,” M. de Charlus haughtily replied to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duke of Brabant, Squire of Montargis, Prince of Oléron, of Carency, of Viareggio and of the Dunes. However, it’s not of the slightest importance. Please don’t distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his delicate smile which blossomed at these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were out of your depth.”

Mme Verdurin came across to me to show me Elstir’s flowers. If the act of going out to dinner, to which I had grown so indifferent, by taking the form, which entirely revivified it, of a journey along the coast followed by an ascent in a carriage to a point six hundred feet above the sea, had produced in me a sort of intoxication, this feeling had not been dispelled at La Raspelière. “Just look at this, now,” said the Mistress, showing me some huge and splendid roses by Elstir, whose unctuous scarlet and frothy whiteness stood out, however, with almost too creamy a relief from the flower-stand on which they were arranged. “Do you suppose he would still have the touch to achieve that? Don’t you call that striking? And what marvellous texture! One longs to finger it. I can’t tell you what fun it was to watch him painting them. One could feel that he was interested in trying to get just that effect.” And the Mistress’s gaze rested musingly on this present from the artist which epitomised not merely his great talent but their long friendship which survived only in these mementoes of it that he had bequeathed to her; behind the flowers that long ago he had picked for her, she seemed to see the shapely hand that had painted them, in the course of a morning, in their freshness, so that, they on the table, it leaning against the back of a chair in the dining-room, had been able to meet face to face at the Mistress’s lunch-party, the still-living roses and their almost lifelike portrait. “Almost” only, for Elstir was unable to look at a flower without first transplanting it to that inner garden in which we are obliged always to remain. He had shown in this water-colour the appearance of the roses which he had seen, and which, but for him, no one would ever have known; so that one might say that they were a new variety with which this painter, like a skilful horticulturist, had enriched the rose family. “From the day he left the little nucleus, he was finished. It seems my dinners made him waste his time, that I hindered the development of his genius,” she said in a tone of irony. “As if the society of a woman like myself could fail to be beneficial to an artist!” she exclaimed with a burst of pride.

Close beside us, M. de Cambremer, who was already seated, seeing that M. de Charlus was standing, made as though to rise and offer him his chair. This offer may have arisen, in the Marquis’s mind, from nothing more than a vague wish to be polite. M. de Charlus preferred to attach to it the sense of a duty which the simple squire knew that he owed to a prince, and felt that he could not establish his right to this precedence better than by declining it. And so he exclaimed: “Good gracious me! Please! The idea!” The astutely vehement tone of this protest had in itself something typically “Guermantes” which became even more evident in the imperious, supererogatory and familiar gesture with which he brought both his hands down, as though to force him to remain seated, upon the shoulders of M. de Cambremer who had not risen: “Come, come, my dear fellow,” the Baron insisted,