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By Root 972 0

to go and see Mme de Saint-Eu verte she acted in the name not of intelligence but of snobbery, finding the Marquise stupid only because, not having yet attained her goal, she allowed her snobbery to appear on the surface. But the intimacy with Rachel might also signify that the intelligence of the Duchess was no more than commonplace, but had remained unsatisfied and at a late hour, when she was tired of society, had driven her, totally ignorant as she was of the veritable realities of the intellectual life, to seek for intellectual fulfilment with a touch of that spirit of fantasy which can cause perfectly respectable ladies, thinking to themselves: “How amusing it will be!,” to end an evening with a prank which is in fact deadly dull: you go off and wake up some acquaintance and then, when you are in his room, you don’t know what to say, so, after standing awkwardly by his bed for a few moments in your evening clothes and realising how late it is, there is nothing left to do but go home to bed yourself.

One must add that the antipathy which the changeable Duchess had recently come to feel for Gilberte may have caused her to take a certain pleasure in receiving Rachel, a course of conduct which enabled her also to proclaim aloud one of the favourite Guermantes maxims, to wit, that the family was too numerous for its members to have to espouse one another’s quarrels (or even, some might have said, to take notice of one another’s bereavements), an independence, a spirit of “I can’t see that I am obliged” which had been reinforced by the policy that it had been necessary to adopt with regard to M. de Charlus, who, had you followed him, would have involved you in hostilities with all your acquaintances.

As for Rachel, if the truth was that she had taken very great pains to form this friendship with the Duchesse de Guermantes (pains which the Duchess had failed to detect beneath a mask of simulated disdain and deliberate incivility, which had put her on her mettle and given her an exalted idea of an actress so little susceptible to snobbery), this was no doubt in a general fashion an effect of the fascination which after a certain time the world of high society exercises upon even the most hardened bohemians, a fascination paralleled by that which the same bohemians themselves exercise upon people in society, flux and reflux which correspond to—in the political order—the reciprocal curiosity, the desire to form a mutual alliance, of two nations which have recently been at war with each other. But Rachel’s desire had possibly a more particular cause. It was in Mme de Guermantes’s house, it was at the hands of Mme de Guermantes herself, that she had in the past suffered the most terrible humiliation of her life. This snub Rachel had with the passage of time neither forgotten nor forgiven, but the singular prestige which the event had conferred upon the Duchess in her eyes could never be effaced.

The conversation from which I was anxious to divert Gilberte’s attention was, in any case, presently interrupted, for the mistress of the house came in search of the actress to tell her that the moment for her recital had arrived. She left the Duchess and a little later appeared upon the platform.

Meanwhile at the other end of Paris there was taking place a spectacle of a very different kind. Mme Berma, as I have said, had invited a number of people to a tea-party in honour of her daughter and her son-in-law. But the guests were in no hurry to arrive. Having learnt that Rachel was to recite poetry at the Princesse de Guermantes’s (which utterly scandalised Berma, who from her own lofty position as a great artist looked down on Rachel as still no more than a kept woman who, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses which she wore on the stage, was allowed to appear in the plays in which she herself, Berma, took the leading roles—and scandalised her all the more because a rumour had run round Paris that, though the invitations were in the name of the Princesse de Guermantes, it was in effect Rachel who was acting as hostess in the Princess