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By Root 1425 0

first place, I had heard it said, and I fully expected, that in the unhappy affair which is splitting the country in two your views were diametrically opposed to mine. Now, it would have been extremely painful to me to hear you express these views in my presence. I was so sensitive on the matter that when the Princess, two years ago, heard her brother-in-law, the Grand Duke of Hesse, say that Dreyfus was innocent, she was not content with promptly challenging the assertion but refrained from repeating it to me in order not to upset me. At about the same time, the Crown Prince of Sweden came to Paris and, having probably heard someone say that the Empress Eugénie was a Dreyfusist, confused her with the Princess (a strange confusion, you will admit, between a woman of the rank of my wife and a Spaniard, a good deal less well-born than people make out, and married to a mere Bonaparte) and said to her: Princess, I am doubly glad to meet you, for I know that you hold the same view as myself of the Dreyfus case, which does not surprise me since Your Highness is Bavarian. Which drew down upon the Prince the answer: Sir, I am no longer anything but a French Princess, and I share the views of all my fellow-countrymen. Well, my dear Swann, about eighteen months ago, a conversation I had with General de Beauserfeuil made me suspect that, not an error, but grave illegalities, had been committed in the conduct of the trial.’ ”

We were interrupted (Swann did not want his story to be overheard) by the voice of M. de Charlus who (without, as it happened, paying us the slightest attention) came past escorting Mme de Surgis and stopped in the hope of detaining her for a moment longer, either on account of her sons or from that reluctance common to all the Guermantes to bring anything to an end, which kept them plunged in a sort of anxious inertia. Swann informed me in this connexion, a little later, of something that, for me, stripped the name Surgis-le-Duc of all the poetry that I had found in it. The Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc boasted a far higher social position, far grander connexions by marriage, than her cousin the Comte de Surgis, who had no money and lived on his estate in the country. But the suffix to her title, “le Duc,” had not at all the origin which I attributed to it, and which had made me associate it in my imagination with Bourg-l’Abbé, Bois-le-Roi, etc. All that had happened was that a Comte de Surgis had married, under the Restoration, the daughter of an immensely rich industrial magnate, M. Leduc, or Le Duc, himself the son of a chemical manufacturer, the richest man of his day and a peer of France. King Charles X had created for the son born of this marriage the marquisate of Surgis-le-Duc, a marquisate of Surgis existing already in the family. The addition of the bourgeois surname had not prevented this branch from allying itself, on the strength of its enormous fortune, with the first families of the realm. And the present Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc, being extremely well-born, could have enjoyed a very high position in society. A demon of perversity had driven her, scorning the position ready-made for her, to flee from the conjugal roof and live a life of open scandal. Whereupon the society she had scorned at twenty, when it was at her feet, had cruelly spurned her at thirty, when, after ten years, nobody except a few faithful friends greeted her any longer, and she had had to set to work to reconquer laboriously, inch by inch, what she had possessed as a birthright (a round trip that isn’t uncommon).

As for the great nobles, her kinsmen, whom she had disowned in the past, and who in their turn had disowned her, she found an excuse for the joy that she would feel in gathering them again to her bosom in the memories of childhood that she would be able to recall with them. And in saying this, with the object of disguising her snobbery, she was perhaps being less untruthful than she supposed. “Basin is all my girlhood!” she said on the day on which he came back to her. And indeed it was partly true. But she had miscalculated