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By Root 1632 0

opportunity for giving pleasure, almost for returning hospitality. He would say to some parent, or to one of his bourgeois friends: “If it would interest your wife or daughter, I may tell you that the Baron de Charlus, Prince d’Agrigente, a scion of the House of Condé, will be attending my lecture. For a young person, to have seen one of the last descendants of our aristocracy who preserves the type will be a memory to cherish. If they care to come, they will recognise him from the fact that he’ll be seated next to my rostrum. Besides, he’ll be the only one, a stout man, with white hair and black moustaches, wearing the military medal.” “Oh, thank you,” the father would say; and although his wife had other things to do, in order not to offend Brichot he would force her to attend the lecture, while the daughter, troubled by the heat and the crowd, nevertheless gazed intently at the descendant of Condé, surprised that he was not wearing a ruff and that he looked just like a man of the present day. He, meanwhile, had no eyes for her, but more than one student, who did not know who he was, would be astonished at his friendly glances and become self-conscious and stiff, and the Baron would depart full of dreams and melancholy.

“Forgive me if I return to the subject,” I said quickly to M. de Charlus, for I could hear Brichot returning, “but could you let me know by wire if you should hear that Mlle Vinteuil or her friend is expected in Paris, letting me know exactly how long they will be staying and without telling anybody that I asked you.”

I had almost ceased to believe that she had been expected, but I wanted thus to be forewarned for the future.

“Yes, I will do that for you. First of all because I owe you a great debt of gratitude. By not accepting what I proposed to you long ago, you rendered me, to your own loss, an immense service: you left me my liberty. It is true that I have abdicated it in another fashion,” he added in a melancholy tone which betrayed a desire to confide in me. “But it’s something that I continue to regard as a major factor, a whole combination of circumstances which you failed to turn to your own account, possibly because fate warned you at that precise minute not to obstruct my path. For always man proposes and God disposes. If, that day when we came away together from Mme de Villeparisis’s, you had accepted, perhaps—who knows?—many things that have since happened would never have occurred.”

In some embarrassment, I turned the conversation by seizing on the name of Mme de Villeparisis, and saying how sad I had been to hear of her death.19 “Ah, yes,” M. de Charlus muttered drily and insolently, taking note of my condolences without appearing to believe in their sincerity for a moment. Seeing that in any case the subject of Mme de Villeparisis was not painful to him, I sought to find out from him, since he was so well qualified in every respect, for what reasons she had been held at arm’s length by the aristocratic world. Not only did he not give me the solution to this little social problem, he did not even appear to be aware of it. I then realised that the position of Mme de Villeparisis, which was in later years to appear great to posterity, and even in the Marquise’s lifetime to the ignorant commonalty, had appeared no less great—at the opposite extremity of society, that which touched Mme de Villeparisis—to the Guermantes family. She was their aunt; they saw first and foremost birth, connexions by marriage, the opportunity of impressing this or that sister-in-law with the importance of their family. They saw it all less from the social than from the family point of view. Now this was more lustrous in the case of Mme de Villeparisis than I had supposed. I had been struck when I heard that the title Villeparisis was falsely assumed. But there are other examples of great ladies who have married beneath them and preserved a leading position in society. M. de Charlus began by informing me that Mme de Villeparisis was a niece of the famous Duchesse de—, the most celebrated member of the higher aristocracy