To return to those artificial and moving decisions such as are made by politicians, Mme. de Guermantes was no less disconcerting to the Guermantes, the Courvoisiers, the Faubourg in general and, more than anyone, the Princesse de Parme by her habit of issuing unaccountable decrees behind which one could feel to be latent principles which impressed one all the more, the less one expected them. If the new Greek Minister gave a fancy dress ball, everyone chose a costume and asked everyone else what the Duchess would wear. One thought that she would appear as the Duchesse de Bourgogne, another suggested as probable the guise of Princess of Dujabar, a third Psyche. Finally, a Courvoisier having asked her: “What are you going to wear, Oriane?” provoked the one response of which nobody had thought: “Why, nothing at all!” which at once set every tongue wagging, as revealing Oriane’s opinion as to the true social position of the new Greek Minister and the proper attitude to adopt towards him, that is to say the opinion which ought to have been foreseen, namely that a duchess “was not expected” to attend the fancy dress ball given by this new Minister. “I do not see that there is any necessity to go to the Greek Minister’s; I do not know him; I am not a Greek; why should I go to these people’s house, I have nothing to do with them?” said the Duchess. “But everybody will be there, they say it’s going to be charming!” cried Mme. de Gallardon. “Still, it’s just as charming sometimes to sit by one’s own fireside,” replied Mme. de Guermantes. The Courvoisiers 233could not get over this, but the Guermantes, without copying it, approved of their cousin’s attitude. “Naturally, everybody isn’t in a position like Oriane to break with all the conventions. But if you look at it in one way you can’t say she was actually wrong in wishing to shew that we are going rather far in flinging ourselves at the feet of all these foreigners who appear from heaven knows where.” Naturally, knowing the stream of comment which one or other attitude would not fail to provoke, Mme. de Guermantes took as much pleasure in appearing at a party to which her hostess had not dared to count on her coming as in staying at home or spending the evening at the play with her husband on the night of a party to which “everybody was going”, or, again, when people imagined that she would eclipse the finest diamonds with some historic diadem, by stealing into the room without a single jewel, and in another style of dress than what had been, wrongly, supposed to be essential to the occasion. Albeit she was anti-Dreyfusard (while retaining her belief in the innocence of Dreyfus, just as she spent her life in the social world believing only in abstract ideas) she had created an enormous sensation at a party at the Princesse de Ligne’s, first of all by remaining seated after all the ladies had risen to their feet as General Mercier entered the room, and then by getting up and in a loud voice asking for her carriage when a Nationalist orator had begun to address the gathering, thereby shewing that she did not consider that society was meant for talking politics; all heads were turned towards her at a Good Friday concert at which, although a Voltairean, she had not remained because she thought it indecent to bring Christ upon the stage. We know how important, even 234for the great queens of society, is that moment of the year at which the round of entertainment begins: so much so that the Marquise d’Amoncourt, who, from a need to say something, a form of mania, and also from want of perception, was always making a fool of herself, had actually replied to somebody who had called to condole with her on the death of her father, M. de Montmorency: “What makes it sadder still is that it should come at a time when one’s mirror is simply stuffed with cards!” Very well, at this point in the social year, when people invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dinner, making every effort to see that she was not already engaged, she declined, for the one reason of which nobody in society would ever have thought; she was just starting on a cruise among the Norwegian fjords, which were so interesting. People in society were stupefied, and, without any thought of following the Duchess’s example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it. That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called “the season”. The idea that anyone could voluntarily renounce a hundred dinners or luncheons, twice as many afternoon teas, three times as many evening parties, the most brilliant Mondays at the Opera and Tuesdays at the Français to visit the Norwegian fjords seemed to the Courvoisiers no more explicable than the idea of Twenty Thousand Leagues 235under the Sea, but conveyed to them a similar impression of independence and charm. So that not a day passed on which somebody might not be heard to ask, not merely: “You’ve heard Oriane’s latest joke?” but “You know Oriane’s latest?” and on “Oriane’s latest” as on “Oriane’s latest joke” would follow the comment: “How typical of Oriane!” “Isn’t that pure Oriane?” Oriane’s latest might be, for instance, that, having to write on behalf of a patriotic society to Cardinal X—, Bishop of Mâcon (whom M. de Guermantes when he spoke of him invariably called “Monsieur de Mascon,” thinking this to be “old French”), when everyone was trying to imagine what form the letter would take, and had no difficulty as to the opening words, the choice lying between “Eminence,” and “Monseigneur,” but was puzzled as to the rest, Oriane’s letter, to the general astonishment, began: “Monsieur le Cardinal,” following an old academic form, or: “My Cousin,” this term being in use among the Princes of the Church, the Guermantes and Crowned Heads, who prayed to God to take each and all of them into “His fit and holy keeping”. To start people on the topic of an “Oriane’s latest” it was sufficient that at a performance at which all Paris was present and a most charming play was being given, when they looked for Mme. de Guermantes in the boxes of the Princesse de Parme, the Princesse de Guermantes, countless other ladies who had invited her, they discovered her sitting by herself, in black, with a tiny hat on her head, in a stall in which she had arrived before the curtain rose. “You hear better, when it’s a play that’s worth listening to,” she explained, to the scandal of the Courvoisiers and the admiring bewilderment of the Guermantes 236and the Princesse de Parme, who suddenly discovered that the “fashion” of hearing the beginning of a play was more up to date, was a proof of greater originality and intelligence (which need not astonish them, coming from Oriane) than that of arriving for the last act after a big dinner-party and “going on” somewhere first. Such were the various kinds of surprise for which the Princesse de Parme knew that she ought to be prepared if she put a literary or social question to Mme. de Guermantes, one result of which was that during these dinner-parties at Oriane’s her Royal Highness never ventured upon the slightest topic save with the uneasy and enraptured prudence of the bather emerging from between two breakers.
Among the elements which, absent from the three or four other more or less equivalent drawing-rooms that set the fashion for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, differentiated from them that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, just as Leibniz allows that each monad, while reflecting the entire universe, adds to it something of its own, one of the least attractive was regularly furnished by one or two extremely good-looking women who had no title to be there apart from their beauty, and the use that M. de Guermantes had made of them, and whose presence revealed at once, as does in other drawing-rooms that of certain otherwise unaccountable pictures, that in this household the husband was an ardent appreciator of feminine graces. They were all more or less alike, for the Duke had a taste for large women, at once statuesque and loose-limbed, of a type half-way between the Venus of Milo and the Samothracian Victory; often fair, rarely dark, sometimes auburn, like the most recent, who was at 237this dinner, that Vicomtesse d’Arpajon whom he had loved so well that for a long time he had obliged her to send him as many as ten telegrams daily (which slightly annoyed the Duchess), corresponded with her by carrier pigeon when he was at Guermantes, and from whom moreover he had long been so incapable
