had been very rich and the bearer of a great name she was much sought in marriage, and this had given her great self-assurance. “The Marquise d’Arpajon is dead too,” she said, “she died nearly a year ago.” “A year ago!” exclaimed Mme de Cambremer, “that can’t be right, I was at a musical evening in her house less than a year ago.” Bloch was as incapable as any young man about town of making a useful contribution to the subject under discussion, for all these deaths of elderly people were at too great a distance, from the young men because of the enormous difference in age and from a man like Bloch, because of his recent arrival in an unfamiliar society, by way of an oblique approach, at a moment when it was already declining into a twilight which was for him illumined by no memories of its past. And even for people of the same age and the same social background death had lost its strange significance. Hardly a day passed without their having to send to inquire for news of friends and relations in articulo mortis, some of whom, they would be told, had recovered while others had “succumbed,” until a point was reached where they no longer very clearly remembered whether this or that person who was no longer seen anywhere had “pulled through” his pneumonia or had expired. In these regions of advanced age death was everywhere at work and had at the same time become more indefinite. At this crossroads of two generations and two societies, so ill placed, for different reasons, for distinguishing death that they almost confused it with life, the former of these two conditions had been turned into a social incident, an attribute to be predicated of somebody to a greater or lesser degree, without the tone of voice in which it was mentioned in any way indicating that for the person in question this “incident” was the end of everything. I heard people say: “But you forget that so and so is dead,” exactly as they might have said “he has had a decoration” or “he has been elected to the Academy” or—and these last two happenings had much the same effect as death, since they too prevented a man from going to parties—“he is spending the winter on the Riviera” or “his doctor has sent him to the mountains.” Perhaps, where a man was well known, what he left behind him at his death helped others to remember that his existence had come to an end. But in the case of ordinary society people of an advanced age it was easy to make a mistake as to whether or no they were dead, not only because one knew little about their past or had forgotten it but because they were in no way whatever linked to the future. And the difficulty that was universally experienced in these cases in choosing from among the alternatives of illness, absence, retirement to the country and death the one that happened to be correct, sanctioned and confirmed not merely the indifference of the survivors but the insignificance of the departed.
“But if she is still alive, why is it that one never sees her anywhere now, nor her husband either?” asked a spinster who liked to make what she supposed was witty conversation. “For the obvious reason,” replied her mother, who in spite of her years never missed a party herself, “that they are old; when you get to that age you stay at home.” Before you got to the cemetery, it seemed, there was a whole closed city of the old, where the lamps always glimmered in the fog. Mme de Saint-Euverte cut short the debate by saying that the Comtesse d’Arpajon had died in the previous year after a long illness and that more recently the Marquise d’Arpajon had also died, very rapidly, “in some quite unremarkable way,” a death which, in virtue of this latter characteristic, resembled the lives of all these people (its unremarkableness explained too why it had passed unnoticed and excused those who had been in doubt). When she heard that Mme d’Arpajon really had died, the spinster cast an anxious glance at her mother, for she feared that the news of the death of one of her “contemporaries” might “be a blow” to her—indeed she already imagined people talking