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By Root 1377 0

the reverses that darkened the closing days of him who is tritely styled the Sun King. The Republic committed a grave error, to my mind, in spurning the overtures of the Hohenzollern, or responding to them only in driblets. He is very well aware of it himself and says, with that gift of expression that is his: ‘What I want is a handclasp, not a raised hat.’ As a man, he is vile; he abandoned, betrayed, repudiated his best friends, in circumstances in which his silence was as deplorable as theirs was noble,” continued M. de Charlus, who was irresistibly drawn by his own tendencies to the Eulenburg affair,16 and remembered what one of the most highly placed of the accused had said to him: “How the Emperor must have relied upon our delicacy to have dared to allow such a trial! But he was not mistaken in trusting to our discretion. We would have gone to the scaffold with our lips sealed.” “All that, however, has nothing to do with what I was trying to explain, which is that, in Germany, mediatised princes like ourselves are Durchlaucht, and in France our rank of Highness was publicly recognised. Saint-Simon claims that we acquired it improperly, in which he is entirely mistaken. The reason that he gives, namely that Louis XIV forbade us to style him the Most Christian King and ordered us to call him simply the King, proves merely that we held our title from him, and not that we did not have the rank of prince. Otherwise, it would have had to be withheld from the Duc de Lorraine and God knows how many others. Besides, several of our titles come from the House of Lorraine through Thérèse d’Espinoy, my great-grandmother, who was the daughter of the Squire de Commercy.”

Observing that Morel was listening, M. de Charlus proceeded to develop the reasons for his claim. “I have pointed out to my brother that it is not in the third part of the Gotha, but in the second, not to say the first, that the account of our family ought to be included,” he said, without stopping to think that Morel did not know what the “Gotha” was. “But that is his affair, he is the head of our house, and so long as he raises no objection and allows the matter to pass, I can only shut my eyes.”

“I found M. Brichot most interesting,” I said to Mme Verdurin as she joined me, and I slipped Mme de Cambremer’s letter into my pocket.

“He has a cultured mind and is an excellent man,” she replied coldly. “Of course what he lacks is originality and taste, and he has a fearsome memory. They used to say of the ‘forebears’ of the people we have here this evening, the émigrés, that they had forgotten nothing. But they had at least the excuse,” she said, borrowing one of Swann’s epigrams, “that they had learned nothing. Whereas Brichot knows everything, and hurls chunks of dictionary at our heads during dinner. I’m sure there’s nothing you don’t know now about the names of all the towns and villages.”

While Mme Verdurin was speaking, it occurred to me that I had intended to ask her something, but I could not remember what it was.

“I’m sure you are talking about Brichot,” said Ski. “Eh, Chantepie, and Freycinet, he didn’t spare you anything. I was watching you, little Mistress.”

“Oh yes, I saw you, I nearly burst.”

I could not say today what Mme Verdurin was wearing that evening. Perhaps even at the time I was no more able to, for I do not have an observant mind. But feeling that her dress was not unambitious, I said to her something polite and even admiring. She was like almost all women, who imagine that a compliment that is paid to them is a literal statement of the truth, a judgment impartially, irresistibly pronounced as though it referred to a work of art that has no connexion with a person. And so it was with an earnestness which made me blush for my own hypocrisy that she replied with the proud and artless question that is habitual in such circumstances: “Do you like it?”

“You’re talking about Chantepie, I’m sure,” said M. Verdurin as he came towards us.

I had been alone, as I thought of my strip of green lustre and of a scent of wood, in failing to notice