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“Ah! my dear Sir, I, as you know, live in the world of the abstract; all this interests me only from a transcendental point of view,” he replied with the querulous touchiness peculiar to men of his kind, and the affectation of grandiloquence that characterised his conversation. “To me, you understand, it’s only general principles that are of any interest. I speak to you of this as I might of the law of gravity.” But these moments of irritable retraction in which the Baron sought to conceal his true life lasted but a short time compared with the hours of continual progression in which he allowed it to betray itself, flaunted it with an irritating complacency, the need to confide being stronger in him than the fear of disclosure. “What I meant to say,” he went on, “is that for one bad reputation that is unjustified there are hundreds of good ones which are no less so. Obviously, the number of those who don’t deserve their reputations varies according to whether you rely on what is said by their own kind or by others. And it is true that if the malevolence of the latter is limited by the extreme difficulty they would find in believing that a vice as horrible to them as robbery or murder can be practised by people whom they know to be sensitive and kind, the malevolence of the former is stimulated to excess by the desire to regard as—how shall I put it?—accessible, men who attract them, on the strength of information given them by people who have been led astray by a similar desire, in fact by the very aloofness with which they are generally regarded. I’ve heard a man who was somewhat ill thought of on account of these tastes say that he supposed that a certain society figure shared them. And his sole reason for believing it was that this society figure had been polite to him! All the more reason for optimism,” said the Baron artlessly, “in the computation of the number. But the true reason for the enormous disparity between the number calculated by the layman and the number calculated by the initiated arises from the mystery with which the latter surround their actions, in order to conceal them from the rest, who, lacking any means of knowing, would be literally stupefied if they were to learn merely a quarter of the truth.”

“So in our day things are as they were among the Greeks,” said Brichot.

“What do you mean, among the Greeks? Do you suppose that it hasn’t been going on ever since? Take the reign of Louis XIV. You have Monsieur, young Vermandois, Molière, Prince Louis of Baden, Brunswick, Charolais, Boufflers, the Great Condé, the Duc de Brissac.”

“Stop a moment. I knew about Monsieur, I knew about Brissac from Saint-Simon, Vendôme of course, and many others as well. But that old pest Saint-Simon often refers to the Great Condé and Prince Louis of Baden and never mentions it.”

“It seems rather deplorable, I must say, that I should have to teach a Professor of the Sorbonne his history. But, my dear fellow, you’re as ignorant as a carp.”

“You are harsh, Baron, but just. But wait a moment, now this will please you: I’ve just remembered a song of the period composed in macaronic verse about a storm in which the Great Condé was caught as he was going down the Rhone in the company of his friend the Marquis de La Moussaye. Condé says:

Carus Amicus Mussaeus,

Ah! Deus bonus, quod tempus! Landerirette,

Imbre sumus perituri.

And La Moussaye reassures him with:

Securae sunt nostrae vitae,

Sumus enim Sodomitae,

Igne tantum perituri,

Landeriri.”20

“I take back what I said,” said Charlus in a shrill and mannered tone, “you are a well of learning. You’ll write it down for me, won’t you? I must preserve it in my family archives, since my great-great-great-grandmother was a sister of M. le Prince.”

“Yes, but, Baron, with regard to Prince Louis of Baden I can think of nothing. However, I suppose that generally speaking the art of war …”

“What nonsense! In that period alone you have Vendôme, Villars, Prince Eugene, the Prince de Conti, and if I were to tell