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By Root 1959 0

de Mole.” “Goodness gracious me! I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world,” M. de Charlus had replied, “and if you, Madame, feel a desire to converse with Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme,11 I’m only too delighted, but let it be on an evening when I am not present. I could see as soon as you opened your mouth that we don’t speak the same language, since I was talking of aristocratic names and you come up with the most obscure names of lawyers, of crooked little commoners, evil-minded tittle-tattles, and of little ladies who imagine themselves patronesses of the arts because they echo an octave lower the manners of my Guermantes sister-in-law, like a jay trying to imitate a peacock. I must add that it would be positively indecent to admit to a celebration which I am pleased to give at Mme Verdurin’s a person whom I have with good reason excluded from my society, a goose of a woman devoid of birth, loyalty or wit who is foolish enough to suppose that she is capable of playing the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes, a combination which is in itself idiotic, since the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Princesse de Guermantes are poles apart. It is as though a person should pretend to be at once Reichenberg and Sarah Bernhardt. In any case, even if it were not wholly incompatible, it would be extremely ridiculous. Even though I myself may smile at times at the exaggerations of the one and regret the limitations of the other, that is my right. But that little middle-class toad trying to inflate herself to the magnitude of two great ladies who at least always exhibit the incomparable distinction of blood, it’s enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh. The Mole! That is a name which must not be uttered in my hearing, or I shall be obliged to withdraw,” he concluded with a smile, in the tone of a doctor who, having the good of his patient at heart in spite of the patient himself, lets it be understood that he will not tolerate the collaboration of a homoeopath.

In addition to this, certain persons whom M. de Charlus regarded as negligible might indeed be so for him but not for Mme Verdurin. M. de Charlus, from the height of his exalted birth, could afford to dispense with the most elegant people, the assemblage of whom would have made Mme Verdurin’s drawing-room one of the first in Paris. But Mme Verdurin was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the bus, not to mention the enormous setback that the social error of the Dreyfus case had inflicted upon her—though it had not been an unmixed bane. “I forget whether I’ve told you,” I might ask the reader, as one might ask a friend with regard to whom one has forgotten, after so many conversations, whether one has remembered or had a chance to tell him something, “how disapproving the Duchesse de Guermantes had been of certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the Affair, excluded fashionable women from their drawing-rooms and admitted others who were not fashionable, because they were in favour of a retrial or against it, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies as being lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social formalities above the national interest?” Whether I have done so or not, the attitude of the Duchesse de Guermantes at that time can easily be imagined, and indeed if we look at it in the light of subsequent history may appear, from the social point of view, perfectly correct. M. de Cambremer regarded the Dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the Intelligence Service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the French people, to pave the way for invasion. Literature being, apart from a few of La Fontaine’s fables, a closed book to the Marquis, he left it to his wife to show that the cruelly probing literature of the day had, by creating a spirit of disrespect, brought about a parallel upheaval. “M. Reinach and M. Hervieu are in league,” she would say. Nobody will accuse the Dreyfus case of having premeditated