cap, with the long spiral ringlets falling from it on either side, which was worn by Mme. de Rémusat, Mme. de Broglie, Mme. de Saint-Aulaire, all those distinguished women who in their fascinating letters quote with so much learning and so aptly passages from Sophocles, Schiller and the Imitation, but in whom the earliest poetry of the Romantics induced the alarm and exhaustion inseparable for my grandmother 253from the latest verses of Stéphane Mallarmé. “Mme. d’Arpajon is very fond of poetry,” said the Princesse de Parme to her hostess, impressed by the ardent tone in which the speech had been delivered. “No; she knows absolutely nothing about it,” replied Mme. de Guermantes in an undertone, taking advantage of the fact that Mme. d’Arpajon, who was dealing with an objection raised by General de Beautreillis, was too much intent upon what she herself was saying to hear what was being murmured by the Duchess. “She has become literary since she’s been forsaken. I can tell your Highness that it is I who have to bear the whole burden of it because it is to me that she comes in floods of tears whenever Basin hasn’t been to see her, which is practically every day. And yet it isn’t my fault, after all, if she bores him, and I can’t force him to go to her, although I would rather he were a little more faithful to her, because then I shouldn’t see quite so much of her myself. But she drives him crazy, and there’s nothing extraordinary in that. She isn’t a bad sort, but she’s boring to a degree you can’t imagine. And all this because Basin took it into his head for a year or so to play me false with her. And to have in addition a footman who has fallen in love with a little street-walker and goes about with a long face if I don’t request the young person to leave her profitable pavement for half an hour and come to tea with me! Oh! Life really is too tedious!” the Duchess languorously concluded. Mme. d’Arpajon bored M. de Guermantes principally because he had recently fallen in love with another, whom I discovered to be the Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc. At this moment the footman who had been deprived of his holiday was waiting at table. And it struck me that, still disconsolate, he 254was doing it with a good deal of difficulty, for I noticed that, in handing the dish to M. de Châtellerault, he performed his task so awkwardly that the Duke’s elbow came in contact several times with his own. The young Duke was not in the least annoyed with the blushing footman, but looked up at him rather with a smile in his clear blue eyes. This good humour seemed to me on the guest’s part to betoken a kindness of heart. But the persistence of his smile led me to think that, aware of the servant’s discomfiture, what he felt was perhaps really a malicious joy. “But, my dear, you know you’re not revealing any new discovery when you tell us about Victor Hugo,” went on the Duchess, this time addressing Mme. d’Arpajon whom she had just seen turn away from the General with a troubled air. “You mustn’t expect to launch that young genius. Everybody knows that he has talent. What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the Légende des Siècles, I forget all their names. But in the Feuilles d’Automne, the Chants du Crépuscule, there’s a great deal that’s the work of a poet, a true poet! Even in the Contemplations”, went on the Duchess, whom none of her listeners dared to contradict, and with good reason, “there are still some quite pretty things. But I confess that I prefer not to venture farther than the Crépuscule! And then in the finer poems of Victor Hugo, and there really are some, one frequently comes across an idea, even a profound idea.” And with the right shade of sentiment, bringing out the sorrowful thought with the full strength of her intonation, planting it somewhere beyond the sound of her voice, and fixing straight in front of her a charming, dreamy gaze, the Duchess said slowly: “Take this:
255La douleur est un fruit, Dieu ne le fait pas croître
Sur la branche trop faible encor pour le porter.

or, better still:
Les morts durent bien peu.
Hélas, dans le cercueil ils tombent en poussière
Moins vite qu’en nos cœurs!”

And, while a smile of disillusionment contracted with a graceful undulation her sorrowing lips, the Duchess fastened on Mme. d’Arpajon the dreaming gaze of her charming, clear blue eyes. I was beginning to know them, as well as her voice, with its heavy drawl, its harsh savour. In those eyes and in that voice, I recognised much of the life of nature round Combray. Certainly, in the affectation with which that voice brought into prominence at times a rudeness of the soil there was more than one element: the wholly provincial origin of one branch of the Guermantes family, which had for long remained more localised, more hardy, wilder, more provoking than the rest; and also the usage of really distinguished people, and of witty people who know that distinction does not consist in mincing speech, and the usage of nobles who fraternise more readily with their peasants than with the middle classes; peculiarities all of which the regal position of Mme. de Guermantes enabled her to display more easily, to bring out with every sail spread. It appears that the same voice existed also in certain of her sisters whom she detested, and who, less intelligent than herself and almost plebeianly married, if one may coin this adverb to speak of unions with obscure noblemen, entrenched on their provincial estates, or, in Paris, in a Faubourg Saint-Germain of no brilliance, possessed this voice also but had bridled 256it, corrected it, softened it so far as lay in their power, just as it is very rarely that any of us presumes on his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to copying the most approved models. But Oriane was so much more intelligent, so much richer, above all, so much more in fashion than her sisters, she had so effectively, when Princesse des Laumes, behaved just as she pleased in the company of the Prince of Wales, that she had realised that this discordant voice was an attraction, and had made of it, in the social order, with the courage of originality rewarded by success, what in the theatrical order a Réjane, a Jeanne Granier (which implies no comparison, naturally, between the respective merits and talents of those two actresses) had made of theirs, something admirable and distinctive which possibly certain Réjane and Granier sisters, whom no one has ever known, strove to conceal as a defect.

To all these reasons for displaying her local originality, the favourite writers of Mme. de Guermantes—Mérimée, Meilhac and Halévy—had brought in addition, with the respect for what was natural, a feeling for the prosaic by which she attained to poetry and a spirit purely of society which called up distant landscapes before my eyes. Besides, the Duchess was fully capable, adding to these influences an artistic research of her own, of having chosen for the majority of her words the pronunciation that seemed to her most “Ile-de-France”, most “Champenoise”, since, if not quite to the same extent as her sister-in-law Marsantes, she rarely used anything but the pure vocabulary that might have been employed by an old French writer. And when one was tired of the composite patchwork of modern speech, it was, albeit one was 257aware that she expressed far fewer ideas, a thorough relaxation to listen to the talk of Mme. de Guermantes—almost the same feeling, if one was alone with her and she restrained and clarified still further her flow of words, as one has on hearing an old song. Then, as I looked at, as I listened to Mme. de Guermantes, I could see, a prisoner in the perpetual and quiet afternoon of her eyes, a sky of the Ile-de-France or of Champagne spread itself, grey-blue, oblique, with the same angle of inclination as in the eyes of Saint-Loup.

Thus, by these several formations, Mme. de Guermantes expressed at once the most ancient aristocratic France, then, from a far later source, the manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie might have enjoyed and found fault with Victor Hugo under the July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen taste for the literature that sprang from Mérimée and Meilhac. The first of these formations attracted me more than the second, did more to console me for the disappointments of my pilgrimage to and arrival in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so different from what I had imagined it to be; but even the second I preferred to the last. For, so long as Mme. de Guermantes was being, almost spontaneously, a Guermantes and nothing more; her Pailleronism, her taste for the younger Dumas were reflected and deliberate. As this taste was the opposite of my own, she was productive, to my mind, of literature when she talked to me of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and never seemed to me so stupidly Faubourg Saint-Germain as when she was talking literature.

Moved by this last quotation, Mme. d’Arpajon exclaimed: “‘Ces reliques du cœur ont aussi leur poussière!’—Sir, you must write that down for me on my 258fan,” she said to M. de Guermantes. “Poor woman, I feel sorry for her!” said the Princesse de Parme to Mme. de Guermantes. “No, really, Ma’am, you must