stories of the kind that M. de Norpois used to tell my father; they supplied no food for my favourite train of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I dwelt in my skin, my well-brushed hair, my starched shirt-front, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life. “Oh, I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mme. de Guermantes, who felt that the German Prince was wanting in tact, “I find King Edward charming, so simple, and much cleverer than people think. And the Queen is, even now, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in the world.” “But, Madame la Duchesse,” said the Prince, who was losing his temper and did not see that he was giving offence, “You must admit that if the Prince of Wales had been an ordinary person there isn’t a club that wouldn’t have blackballed him, and nobody would have been willing to shake hands with him. The Queen is charming, exceedingly sweet and limited. But after all there is something shocking about a royal couple who 301are literally kept by their subjects, who get the big Jewish financiers to foot all the bills they ought to pay themselves, and create them Baronets in return. It’s like the Prince of Bulgaria….” “He’s our cousin,” put in the Duchess. “He’s a clever fellow.” “He’s mine, too, but we don’t think him a good fellow on that account. No, it is us you ought to make friends with, it’s the Emperor’s dearest wish, but he insists on its coming from the heart. He says: ‘What I want to see is a hand clasped in mine, not waving a hat in the air.’ With that, you would be invincible. It would be more practical than the Anglo-French friendship M. de Norpois preaches.” “You know him, of course,” the Duchess said, turning to me, so as not to leave me out of the conversation. Remembering that M. de Norpois had said that I had once looked as though I wanted to kiss his hand, thinking that he had no doubt repeated this story to Mme. de Guermantes, and in any event could have spoken of me to her only with malice, since in spite of his friendship with my father he had not hesitated to make me appear so ridiculous, I did not do what a man of the world would have done. He would have said that he detested M. de Norpois, and had let him see it; he would have said this so as to give himself the appearance of being the deliberate cause of the Ambassador’s slanders, which would then have been no more than lying and calculated reprisals. I said, on the other hand, that, to my great regret, I was afraid that M. de Norpois did not like me. “You are quite mistaken,” replied the Duchess, “he likes you very much indeed. You can ask Basin, for if people give me the reputation of only saying nice things, he certainly doesn’t. He will tell you that we have never heard Norpois speak about 302anyone so kindly as he spoke to us of you. And only the other day he was wanting to give you a fine post at the Ministry. As he knew that you were not very strong and couldn’t accept it, he had the delicacy not to speak of his kind thought to your father, for whom he has an unbounded admiration.” M. de Norpois was quite the last person whom I should have expected to do me any practical service. The truth was that, his being a mocking and indeed somewhat malicious spirit, those people who had let themselves be taken in as I had by his outward appearance of a Saint Louis delivering justice beneath an oak-tree, by the sounds, easily modulated to pity, that emerged from his somewhat too tuneful lips, believed in a deliberate betrayal when they learned of a slander uttered at their expense by a man who had always seemed to put his whole heart into his speech. These slanders were frequent enough with him. But that did not prevent him from feeling attractions, from praising the people he liked and taking pleasure in shewing that he could be of use to them. “Not that I’m in the least surprised at his appreciating you,” said Mme. de Guermantes, “he’s an intelligent man. And I can quite understand,” she added, for the benefit of the rest of the party, making allusion to a purpose of marriage of which I had heard nothing, “that my aunt, who has long ceased to amuse him as an old mistress, may not seem of very much use to him as a young wife. Especially as I understand that even as a mistress she has ceased for years now to serve any practical purpose, she is more wrapped up in her devotions than anything else. Boaz-Norpois can say, in the words of Victor Hugo:
303Voilà longtemps que celle avec qui j’ai dormi,
O Seigneur, a quitté ma couche pour la vôtre!

Really, my poor aunt is like the artists of the advanced guard who have stood out all their lives against the Academy, and in the end start a little academy of their own, or the unfrocked priests who get up a little private religion. They should either keep their frocks, or not stick to their profession. And who knows,” went on the Duchess with a meditative air, “it may be in preparation for her widowhood, there’s nothing sadder than the weeds one’s not entitled to wear.” “Ah! If Mme. de Villeparisis were to become Mme. de Norpois, I really believe our cousin Gilbert would take to his bed,” said General de Monserfeuil. “The Prince de Guermantes is a charming man, but he is, really, very much taken up with questions of birth and manners,” said the Princesse de Parme. “I went down to spend a few days with them in the country, when the Princess, unfortunately, was ill in bed. I was accompanied by Petite.” (This was a nickname that was given to Mme. d’Hunolstein because she was enormously stout.) “The Prince came to meet me at the foot of the steps, and pretended not to see Petite. We went up to the first floor, to the door into the reception rooms, and then, stepping back to make way for me, he said: ‘Oh, how d’ye do, Mme. d’Hunolsteins?’ (he always calls her that now, since her separation) pretending to have caught sight of Petite for the first time, so as to shew her that he had not come down to receive her at the foot of the steps.” “That doesn’t surprise me in the least. I don’t need to tell you,” said the Duke, who regarded himself as extremely modern, more contemptuous than anyone in the world of mere birth, and 304in fact a Republican, “that I have not many ideas in common with my cousin. Ma’am can imagine that we are just about as much agreed on most subjects as day and night. But I must say that if my aunt were to marry Norpois, for once I should be of Gilbert’s opinion. To be the daughter of Florimond de Guise, and then to make a marriage like that would be enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh; what more can I say?” These last words, which the Duke uttered as a rule in the middle of a sentence, were here quite superfluous. But he felt a perpetual need to be saying them which made him postpone them to the end of a speech if he had found no place for them elsewhere. They were for him, among other things, almost a question of prosody. “Remember, though,” he added, “that the Norpois are gallant gentlemen with a good place, of a good stock.”

“Listen to me, Basin, it’s really not worth your while to poke fun at Gilbert if you’re going to speak the same language as he does,” said Mme. de Guermantes, for whom the “goodness” of a family, no less than that of a wine, consisted in its age. But, less frank than her cousin and more subtle than her husband, she made a point of never in her conversation playing false to the Guermantes spirit, and despised rank in her speech while ready to honour it by her actions. “But aren’t you some sort of cousins?” asked General de Monserfeuil. “I seem to remember that Norpois married a La Rochefoucauld.” “Not in that way at all, she belonged to the branch of the Ducs de La Rochefoucauld, my grandmother came from the Ducs de Doudeauville. She was own grandmother to Edouard Coco, the wisest man in the family,” replied the Duke, whose views of wisdom were 305somewhat superficial, “and the two branches haven’t intermarried since Louix XIV’s time; the connexion would be rather distant.” “I say, that’s interesting; I never knew that,” said the General. “However,” went on M. de Guermantes, “his mother, I believe, was the sister of the Duc de Montmorency, and had originally been married to a La Tour d’Auvergne. But as those Montmorencys are barely Montmorencys, while those La Tour d’Auvergnes are not La Tour d’Auvergnes at all, I cannot see that it gives him any very great position. He says—and this should be more to the point—that he’s descended from Saintrailles, and