replied Swann, who, all the same, knew very well from experience that certain of them were not, but, like everyone who supports any cause with ardour, preferred, to explain the fact that other people did not share his opinion, to suppose in them a preconceived reason, a prejudice against which there was nothing to be done, rather than reasons which might permit of discussion. Besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is goaded on, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers. “Yes, the Prince de Guermantes,” I said, “it is true, I’ve heard that he was anti-semitic.” “Oh, that fellow! I wasn’t even thinking about him. He carries it to such a point that when he was in the army and had a frightful toothache he preferred to grin and bear it rather than go to the only dentist in the district, who happened to be a Jew, and later on he allowed a wing of his castle which had caught fire to be burned to the ground, because he would have had to send for extinguishers to the place next door, which belongs to the Rothschilds.” “Are you going to be there this evening, by any chance?” “Yes,” Swann replied, “although I am far too tired. But he sent me a wire to tell me that he has something to say to me. I feel that I shall be too unwell in the next few days to go there or to see him at home; it would upset me, so I prefer to get it over at once.” “But the Duc de Guermantes is not anti-semitic?” “You can see quite well that he is, since he’s an anti-Dreyfusard,” replied Swann, without 375noticing the logical fallacy. “That doesn’t prevent my being very sorry that I disappointed the man—what am I saying? The Duke, I mean—by not admiring his Mignard or whatever he calls it.” “But at any rate,” I went on, reverting to the Dreyfus case, “the Duchess, she, now, is intelligent.” “Yes, she is charming. To my mind, however, she was even more charming when she was still known as the Princesse des Laumes. Her mind has become somehow more angular, it was all much softer in the juvenile great lady, but after all, young or old, men or women, what can you expect, all these people belong to a different race, one can’t have a thousand years of feudalism in one’s blood with impunity. Naturally they imagine that it counts for nothing in their opinions.” “All the same, Robert de Saint-Loup is a Dreyfusard.” “Ah! So much the better, all the more as you know that his mother is extremely ‘anti’. I had heard that he was, but I wasn’t certain of it. That gives me a great deal of pleasure. It doesn’t surprise me, he’s highly intelligent. It’s a great thing, that is.”

Dreyfusism had brought to Swann an extraordinary simplicity of mind, and had imparted to his way of looking at things an impulsiveness, an inconsistency more noticeable even than had been the similar effects of his marriage to Odette; this new loss of caste would have been better described as a recasting, and was entirely to his credit, since it made him return to the ways in which his forebears had trodden and from which he had turned aside to mix with the aristocracy. But Swann, just at the very moment when with such lucidity it had been granted to him, thanks to the gifts he had inherited from his race, to perceive a truth that was still hidden 376from people of fashion, shewed himself nevertheless quite comically blind. He subjected afresh all his admirations and all his contempts to the test of a new criterion, Dreyfusism. That the anti-Dreyfusism of Mme. Bontemps should have made him think her a fool was no more astonishing than that, when he was first married, he should have thought her intelligent. It was not very serious either that the new wave reached also his political judgments and made him lose all memory of having treated as a man with a price, a British spy (this latter was an absurdity of the Guermantes set), Clemenceau, whom he declared now to have always stood up for conscience, to be a man of iron, like Cornély. “No, no, I never told you anything of the sort. You’re thinking of some one else.” But, sweeping past his political judgments, the wave overthrew in Swann his literary judgments also, and even affected his way of pronouncing them. Barrès had lost all his talent, and even the books of his early days were feeble, one could hardly read them again. “You try, you’ll find you can’t struggle to the end. What a difference from Clemenceau! Personally, I am not anti-clerical, but when you compare them together you must see that Barrès is invertebrate. He’s a very great fellow, is old Clemenceau. How he knows the language!” However, the anti-Dreyfusards were in no position to criticise these follies. They explained that one was a Dreyfusard by one’s being of Jewish origin. If a practising Catholic like Saniette stood out also for a fresh trial, that was because he was buttonholed by Mme. Verdurin, who behaved like a wild Radical. She was out above all things against the “frocks”. Saniette was more fool than knave, and had no idea of the harm 377that the Mistress was doing him. If you pointed out that Brichot was equally a friend of Mme. Verdurin and was a member of the Patrie Française, that was because he was more intelligent. “You see him occasionally?” I asked Swann, referring to Saint-Loup. “No, never. He wrote to me the other day hoping that I would ask the Duc de Mouchy and various other people to vote for him at the Jockey, where for that matter he got through like a letter through the post.” “In spite of the Case!” “The question was never raised. However I must tell you that since all this business began I never set foot in the place.”

M. de Guermantes returned, and was presently joined by his wife, all ready now for the evening, tall and proud in a gown of red satin the skirt of which was bordered with spangles. She had in her hair a long ostrich feather dyed purple, and over her shoulders a tulle scarf of the same red as her dress. “How nice it is to have one’s hat lined with leather,” said the Duchess, whom nothing escaped. “However, with you, Charles, everything is always charming, whether it’s what you wear or what you say, what you read or what you do.” Swann meanwhile, without apparently listening, was considering the Duchess as he would have studied the canvas of a master, and then sought her gaze, making with his lips the grimace which implies: “The devil!” Mme. de Guermantes rippled with laughter. “So my clothes please you? I’m delighted. But I must say that they don’t please me much,” she went on with a sulking air. “Good Lord, what a bore it is to have to dress up and go out when one would ever so much rather stay at home!” “What magnificent rubies!” “Ah! my dear Charles, at 378least one can see that you know what you’re talking about, you’re not like that brute Monserfeuil who asked me if they were real. I must say that I’ve never seen anything quite like them. They were a present from the Grand Duchess. They’re a little too large for my liking, a little too like claret glasses filled to the brim, but I’ve put them on because we shall be seeing the Grand Duchess this evening at Marie-Gilbert’s,” added Mme. de Guermantes, never suspecting that this assertion destroyed the force of those previously made by the Duke. “What’s on at the Princess’s?” inquired Swann. “Practically nothing,” the Duke hastened to reply, the question having made him think that Swann was not invited. “What’s that, Basin? When all the highways and hedgerows have been scoured? It will be a deathly crush. What will be pretty, though,” she went on, looking wistfully at Swann, “if the storm I can feel in the air now doesn’t break, will be those marvellous gardens. You know them, of course. I was there a month ago, at the time when the lilacs were in flower, you can’t have any idea how lovely they were. And then the fountain, really, it’s Versailles in Paris.” “What sort of person is the Princess?” I asked. “Why, you know quite well, you’ve seen her here, she’s as beautiful as the day, also rather an idiot. Very nice, in spite of all her Germanic high-and-mightiness, full of good nature and stupid mistakes.” Swann was too subtle not to perceive that the Duchess, in this speech, was trying to shew the “Guermantes wit”, and at no great cost to herself, for she was only serving up in a less perfect form an old saying of her own. Nevertheless, to prove to the Duchess that he appreciated her intention to be, and as though she had really succeeded in being 379funny, he smiled with a slightly forced air, causing me by this particular form of insincerity the same feeling of awkwardness that used to disturb me long ago when I heard my parents discussing with M. Vinteuil the corruption of certain sections of society (when they knew very well that a corruption far greater sat enthroned at Montjouvain), Legrandin colouring his