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These exclusions of the Baron’s were not always based on the resentments of a crackpot or the subtleties of an artist, but on the wiles of an actor. When he brought off, at the expense of somebody or something, an entirely successful tirade, he was anxious to let it be heard by the largest possible audience, but took care not to admit to the second performance the audience of the first who could have borne witness that the piece had not changed. He reconstituted his audience precisely because he did not alter his programme, and, when he had scored a success in conversation, would willingly have organised a tour and given performances in the provinces. Whatever the various motives for these exclusions, they did not merely annoy Mme Verdurin, who felt her authority as a hostess impaired; they also did her great damage socially, and for two reasons. The first was that M. de Charlus, even more touchy than Jupien, used to quarrel for no apparent reason with the people who were most suited to be his friends. Naturally, one of the first punishments that he could inflict upon them was that of not allowing them to be invited to a reception which he was organising at the Verdurins’. Now these pariahs were often people who ruled the roost, as the saying is, but who in M. de Charlus’s eyes had ceased to rule it from the day on which he had quarrelled with them. For his imagination, in addition to manufacturing faults in people in order to quarrel with them, was no less ingenious in stripping them of all importance as soon as they ceased to be his friends. If, for instance, the guilty person came of an extremely old family whose dukedom, however, dates only from the nineteenth century—the Montesquious for instance—from that moment all that counted for M. de Charlus was the seniority of the dukedom, the family becoming nothing. “They’re not even dukes,” he would exclaim. “It’s the title of the Abbé de Montesquiou which passed most irregularly to a collateral, less than eighty years ago. The present duke, if duke he can be called, is the third. You may talk to me if you like of people like the Uzès, the La Trémoïlles, the Luynes, who are tenth or fourteenth dukes, or my brother who is twelfth Duc de Guermantes and seventeenth Prince de Condom. Even if the Montesquious are descended from an old family, what would that prove, supposing that it were proved? They have descended so far that they’ve reached the fourteenth storey below stairs.” Had he on the contrary quarrelled with a gentleman who possessed an ancient dukedom, who boasted the most magnificent connexions, was related to ruling princes, but to whose line this distinction had come quite suddenly without any great length of pedigree, a Luynes for instance, the case was altered, pedigree alone counted. “I ask you—Monsieur Alberti, who does not emerge from the mire until Louis XIII! Why should we be impressed because court favour allowed them to pick up dukedoms to which they had no right?” What was more, with M. de Charlus the fall followed close upon the high favour because of that tendency peculiar to the Guermantes family to expect from conversation, from friendship, something that these are incapable of giving, as well as the symptomatic fear of becoming the object of slander. And the fall was all the greater the higher the favour had been. Now nobody had ever found such favour with the Baron as he had ostentatiously shown to Comtesse Mole. By what sign of indifference did she prove one fine day that she had been unworthy of it? The Countess herself always declared that she had never been able to discover. The fact remains that the mere sound of her name aroused in the Baron the most violent rage, provoked the most eloquent but the most terrible philippics. Mme Verdurin, to whom Mme Mole had been extremely amiable and who, as we shall see, was founding great hopes upon her, had rejoiced in anticipation at the thought that the Countess would meet in her house all the noblest names, as the Mistress said, “of France and of Navarre”: she at once proposed inviting “Madame