any rate — the soul is reduced in this sort of materialisation), it is the soul of which we have caught glimpses hitherto in museums alone, the soul of the ancient Greeks, of the ancient Hebrews, torn from a life at once insignificant and transcendental, which seems to be enacting before our eyes this disconcerting pantomime. In the young Greek lady who is leaving the room what we seek in vain to embrace is the figure admired long ago on the side of a vase. I felt that if I had in the light of Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room taken photographs of Bloch, they would have furnished of Israel the same image — so disturbing because it does not appear to emanate from humanity, so deceiving because all the same it is so strangely like humanity — which we find in spirit photographs. There is nothing, to speak more generally, not even the insignificance of the remarks made by the people among whom we spend our lives, that does not give us a sense of the supernatural, in our everyday world where even a man of genius from whom we expect, gathered as though around a turning-table, to learn the secret of the Infinite utters only these words — the same that had just issued from the lips of Bloch: “Take care of my top hat.”
“Oh, Ministers, my dear sir,” Mme. de Villeparisis was saying, addressing herself specially to my friend, and picking up the thread of a conversation which had been broken by my arrival: “nobody ever wanted to see them. I was only a child at the time, but I can remember so well the King begging my grandfather to invite M. Decazes to a rout at which my father was to dance with the Duchesse de Berry. ‘It will give me pleasure, Florimond,’ said the King. My grandfather, who was a little deaf, thought he had said M. de Castries, which seemed a perfectly natural thing to ask. When he understood that it was M. Decazes, he was furious at first, but he gave in, and wrote a note the same evening to M. Decazes, begging him to pay my grandfather the compliment and give him the honour of his presence at the ball which he was giving the following week. For we were polite, sir, in those days, and no hostess would have dreamed of simply sending her card and writing on it ‘Tea’ or ‘Dancing’ or ‘Music.’ But if we understood politeness we were not incapable of impertinence either. M. Decazes accepted, but the day before the ball it was given out that my grandfather felt indisposed and had cancelled his invitations. He had obeyed the King, but he had not had M. Decazes at his ball…. Yes, sir, I remember M. Mole very well, he was a clever man — he shewed that in his reception of M. de Vigny at the Academy — but he was very pompous, and I can see him now coming downstairs to dinner in his own house with his tall hat in his hand.”
“Ah! that is typically suggestive of what must have been a pretty perniciously philistine epoch, for it was no doubt a universal habit to carry one’s hat in one’s hand in one’s own house,” observed Bloch, anxious to make the most of so rare an opportunity of learning from an eyewitness details of the aristocratic life of another day, while the librarian, who was a sort of intermittent secretary to the Marquise, gazed at her tenderly as though he were saying to the rest of us: “There, you see what she’s like, she knows everything, she has met everybody, you can ask her anything you like, she’s quite amazing.”
“Oh, dear, no,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis, drawing nearer to her as she spoke the glass containing the maidenhair which presently she would begin again to paint, “it was a habit M. Mole had; that was all. I never saw my father carry his hat in the house, except of course when the King came, because the King being at home wherever he is the master of the house is only a visitor then in his own drawing-room.”
“Aristotle tells us in the second chapter of…” ventured M. Pierre, the historian of the Fronde, but so timidly that no one paid any attention. Having been suffering for some weeks from a nervous insomnia which resisted every attempt at treatment, he had given up going to bed, and, half-dead with exhaustion, went out only whenever his work made it imperative. Incapable of repeating at all often these expeditions which, simple enough for other people, cost him as much effort as if, to make them, he was obliged to come down from the moon, he was surprised to be brought up so frequently against the fact that other people’s lives were not organised on a constant and permanent basis so as to furnish the maximum utility to the sudden outbursts of his own. He sometimes found the doors shut of a library which he had reached only after setting himself artificially on his feet and in a frock coat like some automaton in a story by Mr. Wells. Fortunately he had found Mme. de Villeparisis at home and was going to be shewn the portrait.
Meanwhile he was cut short by Bloch. “Indeed,” the latter remarked, referring to what Mme. de Villeparisis had said as to the etiquette for royal visits. “Do you know, I never knew that,” as though it were strange that he should not have known it always.
“Talking of that sort of visit, you heard the stupid joke my nephew Basin played on me yesterday morning?” Mme. de Villeparisis asked the librarian. “He told my people, instead of announcing him, to say that it was the Queen of Sweden who had called to see me.”
“What! He made them tell you just like that! I say, he must have a nerve,” exclaimed Bloch with a shout of laughter, while the historian smiled with a stately timidity.
“I was quite surprised, because I had only been back from the country a few days; I had specially arranged, just to be left in peace for a little, that no one was to be told that I was in Paris, and I asked myself how the Queen of Sweden could have heard so soon,” went on Mme. de Villeparisis, leaving her guests amazed to find that a visit from the Queen of Sweden was in itself nothing out of the common to their hostess.
Earlier in the day Mme. de Villeparisis might have been collaborating with the librarian in arranging the illustrations to her Memoirs; now she was, quite unconsciously, trying their effect on an average public typical of that from which she would eventually have to enlist her readers. Hers might be different in many ways from a really fashionable drawing-room in which you would have been struck by the absence of a number of middle dass ladies to whom Mme. de Villeparisis was ‘at home,’ and would have noticed instead such brilliant leaders of fashion as Mme. Leroi had in course of time managed to secure, but this distinction is not perceptible in her Memoirs, from which certain unimportant friendships of the author have disappeared because there is never any occasion to refer to them; while the absence of those who did not come to see her leaves no gap because, in the necessarily restricted space at the author’s disposal, only a few persons can appear, and if these persons are royal personages, historic personalities, then the utmost impression of distinction which any volume of memoirs can convey to the public is achieved. In the opinion of Mme. Leroi, Mme. de Villeparisis’s parties were third-rate; and Mme. de Villeparisis felt the sting of Mme. Leroi’s opinion. But hardly anyone to-day remembers who Mme. Leroi was, her opinions have vanished into thin air, and it is the drawing-room of Mme. de Villeparisis, frequented as it was by the Queen of Sweden, and as it had been by the Due d’Aumale, the Duc de Broglie, Thiers, Montalembert, Mgr. Dupanloup, which will be looked upon as one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century by that posterity which has not changed since the days of Homer and Pindar, and for which the enviable things are exalted birth, royal or quasi-royal, and the friendship of kings, the leaders of the people and other eminent men.
Now of all this Mme. de Villeparisis had her share in the people who still came to her house and in the memories — sometimes slightly ‘touched up’ — by means of which she extended her social activity into the past. And then there was M. de Norpois who, while unable to restore his friend to any substantial position in society, did indeed bring to her house such foreign or French statesmen as might have need of his services and knew that the only effective method of securing them was to pay court to Mme. de Villeparisis. Possibly Mme. Leroi also knew these European celebrities. But, as a well-mannered woman who avoids anything that suggests the bluestocking, she would as little have thought of mentioning the Eastern question to her Prime Ministers as of discussing the nature of love with her novelists and philosophers. “Love?” she had once replied to a pushing lady who had asked her: “What are your views on love?”— “Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.” When she had any of these literary or political lions in her house she contented herself, as