• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 870 0

that she was an idiot, and if she sometimes derived an egotistical pleasure from seeing him, I had observed her on the other hand to be incapable of taking the slightest trouble, of making even the smallest use of her credit in order to render him a service or even to spare him an unpleasantness. Her unkindness in refusing to give Robert a recommendation to General de Saint-Joseph, at the time when he wanted to avoid returning to Morocco, proved surely that the devoted help which she had given him on the occasion of his marriage was no more than a sort of atonement which cost her almost nothing. So I was very astonished to hear—she was unwell at the moment when Robert was killed—that in order to spare her the shock which the news would cause her her family had thought it necessary to conceal from her for several days, under the most fallacious pretexts, the newspapers which would have informed her of his death. And my surprise increased when I heard that, after they had at last been obliged to tell her the truth, the Duchess wept for a whole day, fell sick and for a long time—more than a week, which was a long time for her—was inconsolable. When I heard of her grief, I was touched. It enabled society to say, and it enables me to vouch for the truth of the statement, that a great friendship existed between them. But then when I recall all the little malicious utterances, all the ill-natured refusals to help each other which this friendship had not excluded, I cannot help reflecting that in society a great friendship does not amount to much.

However, a little later, in circumstances which, if they touched my heart less, were historically more important, Mme de Guermantes showed herself, to my mind, in a yet more favourable light. This woman who as a girl, as the reader may remember, had behaved with such audacious impertinence towards the imperial family of Russia, and who after her marriage had addressed them always with a freedom which sometimes caused her to be charged with lack of tact, was perhaps alone, after the Russian Revolution, in giving proofs of a limitless devotion to the Grand Duchesses and the Grand Dukes. Only the year before the war she had not a little annoyed the Grand Duchess Vladimir by persistently referring to Countess Hohenfelsen, the morganatic wife of the Grand Duke Paul, as “the Grand Duchess Paul.” Nevertheless, no sooner had the Russian Revolution broken out than our ambassador in St Petersburg, M. Paléologue (“Paléo” in diplomatic society, which like society at large has its supposedly witty abbreviations), was plagued with telegrams from the Duchesse de Guermantes asking for news of the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. And for a long time the only marks of sympathy and respect which this Princess received came to her regularly and exclusively from Mme de Guermantes.

To various individuals Saint-Loup caused not so much by his death as by what he had done in the preceding weeks a distress greater than that which afflicted the Duchess. What happened was that, only the day after the evening on which I had seen him, and two days after the Baron had said to Morel, “I will have my revenge,” the inquiries which Saint-Loup had made about the whereabouts of Morel were successful; they succeeded, that is to say, in bringing to the notice of the general under whose command Morel should have been the fact that he was a deserter, whereupon the general had him searched for and arrested and, to apologise to Saint-Loup for the punishment which he was obliged to inflict upon someone in whom he took an interest, wrote to inform him how the matter stood. Morel did not doubt that his arrest had been brought about by the rancour of M. de Charlus. He remembered the words “I will have my revenge,” thought that this was the threatened revenge, and asked to be allowed to make some disclosures. “It is quite true,” he declared, “that I am a deserter. But if I have been led astray, is it altogether my fault?” He then told apropos of M. de Charlus and M. d’Argencourt, with whom also he had quarrelled, stories in which he