lot of other things too. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, because after all she is my niece and I have no absolute proof that she was unfaithful to him, but there were any number of stories. Oh! yes, there were, and I know for a fact there was something between her and an officer at Méséglise. Robert wanted to challenge him. It was because of all this that Robert joined up—the war came to him as a deliverance from the misery of his family life: if you want my opinion, he wasn’t killed, he got himself killed. Do you think she felt any grief? Not a scrap, she even astonished me by the extraordinary cynicism with which she displayed her indifference, and this distressed me very much, because I was really extremely fond of poor Robert. Perhaps this will surprise you, because people have a wrong idea of my character, but even now I still think of him sometimes—I never forget anybody. He never said a word to me, but he saw very clearly that I guessed everything. Do you suppose, if she had loved her husband the least little bit, that she could stoically endure like this to be in the same drawing-room as the woman with whom he was desperately in love for so many years—indeed one may say ‘always,’ for I am quite certain that he never gave her up, even during the war. Why, she would fly at her throat!” exclaimed the Duchess, forgetting that she herself, in arranging for Rachel to be invited and so setting the stage for the drama which she judged to be inevitable if it were true that Gilberte had loved Robert, had perhaps acted cruelly. “No, in my opinion,” the Duchess concluded, “she is a bitch.” Such an expression on the lips of the Duchesse de Guermantes was rendered possible by the downward path which she was following, from the polished society of the Guermantes to that of her new actress friends, and came to her all the more easily because she grafted it on to an eighteenth-century mode of speech which she thought of as broad and racy—and then had she not always believed that to her all things were permitted? But the actual choice of the word was dictated by the hatred which she felt for Gilberte, by an irresistible wish to strike her at least in effigy if she could not attack her with physical blows. And at the same time the Duchess thought that somehow the word justified the whole manner in which she conducted herself towards Gilberte, or rather conducted hostilities against Gilberte, in society and in the family and even where pecuniary interests were concerned such as the succession to Robert’s estate.
This savage attack on Gilberte struck me as quite unwarranted, but sometimes we pronounce a judgment which receives later from facts of which we were ignorant and which we could not have guessed an apparent justification, and Mme de Guermantes’s tirade perhaps belonged to this category. For Gilberte, who had no doubt inherited certain family characteristics from her mother (and I had perhaps unconsciously anticipated some such laxness of principle in her when I had asked her to introduce me to young girls), had now had time to reflect upon my request and, anxious no doubt that the profit should stay in the family, had reached a decision bolder than any that I would have thought possible. “Let me fetch my daughter for you,” she said, “I should so like to introduce her to you. She is over there, talking to young Mortemart and other babes in arms who can be of no possible interest. I am sure that she will be a charming little friend for you.” I asked whether Robert had been pleased to have a daughter. “Oh! yes,” she replied, “he was very proud of her. But naturally,” she went on, with a certain naivety, “I think that nevertheless, his tastes being what they were, he would have preferred a son.” Years later, this daughter, whose name and fortune gave her mother the right to hope that she would crown the whole work of social ascent of Swann and his wife by marrying a royal prince, happening to be entirely without snobbery chose for her husband an obscure man of letters. Thus it came about that the family sank once more, below even the