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By Root 1457 0

were removed, and then there would be nothing like it in France. But even as it stands, it’s quite one of the best things. Bréauté will tell you that it was a mistake to put lamps round it, to try and make people forget that it was he who was responsible for that absurd idea. But on the whole he didn’t manage to spoil it too much. It’s far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one. Not that we hadn’t a vague suspicion all along that Bréauté wasn’t quite a match for Hubert Robert.”

I drifted back into the stream of guests who were going into the house. “Have you seen my delicious cousin Oriane lately?” asked the Princess who had now deserted her post by the door and with whom I was making my way back to the rooms. “She’s coming tonight. I saw her this afternoon,” my hostess added, “and she promised she would. Incidentally, I gather you’ll be dining with us both to meet the Queen of Italy at the embassy on Thursday. There’ll be every imaginable royalty—it will be most alarming.” They could not in any way alarm the Princesse de Guermantes, whose rooms swarmed with them and who would say “my little Coburgs” as she might have said “my little dogs.” And so she said: “It will be most alarming,” out of sheer silliness, a characteristic which, in society people, overrides even their vanity. With regard to her own genealogy, she knew less than a history graduate. As regards the people of her circle, she liked to show that she knew the nicknames with which they had been labelled. Having asked me whether I was dining the following week with the Marquise de la Pommelière, who was often called “la Pomme,” the Princess, having elicited a negative reply, remained silent for some moments. Then, without any other motive than a deliberate display of involuntary erudition, banality, and conformity to the prevailing spirit, she added: “She’s quite an agreeable woman, la Pomme!”

While the Princess was talking to me, it so happened that the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes made their entrance. But I was unable to go at once to meet them, for I was waylaid by the Turkish Ambassadress, who, pointing to our hostess whom I had just left, exclaimed as she seized me by the arm: “Ah! What a delightful woman the Princess is! What a superior person! I feel sure that, if I were a man,” she went on, with a trace of oriental servility and sensuality, “I would give my life for that heavenly creature.” I replied that I did indeed find her charming, but that I knew her cousin the Duchess better. “But there is no comparison,” said the Ambassadress. “Oriane is a charming society woman who gets her wit from Mémé and Babal, whereas Marie-Gilbert is somebody.”

I never much like to be told like this, without a chance to reply, what I ought to think about people whom I know. And there was no reason why the Turkish Ambassadress should be in any way better qualified than myself to judge the merits of the Duchesse de Guermantes. On the other hand (and this also explained my irritation with the Ambassadress), the defects of a mere acquaintance, and even of a friend, are to us real poisons, against which we are fortunately immunised. But, without applying any standard of scientific comparison and talking of anaphylaxis, we may say that, at the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but sporadically recurrent. As a rule, we suffer little from these poisons so long as people are “natural.” By saying “Babal” and “Mémé” to indicate people with whom she was not acquainted, the Turkish Ambassadress suspended the effects of the immunisation which normally made me find her tolerable. She irritated me, and this was all the more unfair inasmuch as she did not speak like this to make me think that she was an intimate friend of “Mémé,” but owing to a too rapid education which made her name these noble lords in accordance with what she believed to be the custom of the country. She had crowded her course into a few months instead of working her way up gradually.

But on thinking it over, I found another reason