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By Root 981 0

de Forcheville did not fail to draw his wrathful attention. And so Mme de Guermantes was very unhappy. It is true that M. de Charlus, with whom I had once discussed the subject, maintained that the original transgressions had not been on his brother’s side and that beneath the legendary purity of the Duchess there in fact lay skilfully concealed an incalculable number of love-affairs. But I had never heard any gossip to this effect. In the eyes of almost all the world Mme de Guermantes was a woman of a very different kind, and the idea that she had always been irreproachable went unchallenged. Which of these two ideas accorded with the truth I was unable to determine, the truth being almost always something that to three people out of four is unknown. I well recalled certain blue and wandering glances, which I had intercepted as they shot from the eyes of the Duchesse de Guermantes down the nave at Combray, but I could not really say that either of the two ideas was disproved by these glances, since both the one and the other could give them meanings which, though different, were equally acceptable. In my foolishness, child as I then was, I had for a moment taken them to be glances of love directed at myself. Later I had realised that they were merely the gracious looks that a sovereign lady, like the one in the stained-glass windows of the church, bestows upon her vassals. Was I now to suppose that my first idea had been correct and that, if in the sequel the Duchess had never spoken to me of love, this was because she had been more afraid to compromise herself with a friend of her nephew and her aunt than with an unknown boy encountered by chance in the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray?

Perhaps the Duchess had been pleased for a moment to feel that her past had more substance because it had been shared by me, but certain questions which I put to her on the provincialism of M. de Bréauté, whom at the time I had scarcely distinguished from M. de Sagan or M. de Guermantes, caused her to resume the normal point of view of a society woman, the point of view, that is to say, of a woman who affects to despise society. While we were talking, she took me on a tour of the house. In one or two smaller sitting-rooms we came upon special friends of our hostess who had preferred to get away from the crowd in order to listen to the music. One of these was a little room with Empire furniture, where a few men in black evening clothes were sitting about on sofas, listening, while beside a tall mirror supported by a figure of Minerva a chaise longue, set at right angles to the wall but with a curved and cradle-like interior which contrasted with the straight lines all round it, disclosed the figure of a young woman lying at full length. The relaxation of her pose, from which she did not even stir when the Duchess entered the room, was set off by the marvellous brilliance of her Empire dress, of a flame-red silk before which even the reddest of fuchsias would have paled and upon whose nacreous texture emblems and flowers seemed to have been imprinted in some distant past, for their patterns were sunk beneath its surface. To acknowledge the presence of the Duchess she made a slight bow with her beautiful, dark head. Although it was broad daylight, she had asked for the curtains to be drawn as an aid to the silence and concentration which the music required and, to prevent people from stumbling over the furniture, an urn had been lit upon a tripod and from it came a faint, iridescent glimmer. I inquired of the Duchess who the young woman was, and she told me that her name was Mme de Saint-Euverte. This led me to inquire further how she was related to the Mme de Saint-Euverte whom I had known. Mme de Guermantes said that she was the wife of one of old Mme de Saint-Euverte’s great-nephews and appeared to think it possible that her maiden name had been La Rochefoucauld, but denied that she had ever herself known any Saint-Euvertes. I recalled to her the evening party (known to me, it is true, only from hearsay) at which, when she was still