woods in autumn and a whole mysterious tract of country. But this must have been an affectation on their part, as when the classic poets give us no warning of the profound purpose which they had, all the same, in writing, an affectation which I myself also strove to imitate, saying in the most natural tone: “The Duchesse de Guermantes,” as though it were a name that was just like other names. And then everybody assured me that she was a highly intelligent woman, a clever talker, that she was one of a little group of most interesting people: words which became accomplices of my dream. For when they spoke of an intelligent group, of clever talk, it was not at all the sort of intelligence that I knew that I imagined, not even that of the greatest minds, it was not at all with men like Bergotte that I peopled this group. No, by intelligence I understood an ineffable faculty gilded by the sun, impregnated with a sylvan coolness. Indeed, had she made the most intelligent remarks (in the sense in which I understood the word when it was used of a philosopher or critic), Mme. de Guermantes would perhaps have disappointed even more keenly my expectation of so special a faculty than if, in the course of a trivial conversation, she had confined herself to discussing kitchen recipes or the furnishing of a country house, to mentioning the names of neighbours and relatives of her own, which would have given me a picture of her life.
“I thought I should find Basin here, he was meaning to come and see you to-day,” said Mme. de Guermantes to her aunt.
“I haven’t set eyes on your husband for some days,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis in a somewhat nettled tone. “In fact, I haven’t seen him.’ well, I have seen him once, perhaps — since that charming joke he played on me of making my servants announce him as the Queen of Sweden.”
Mme. de Guermantes formed a smile by contracting the corners of her mouth as though she were biting her veil,
“We met her at dinner last night at Blanche Leroi’s. You wouldn’t know her now, she’s positively enormous; I’m sure she must have something the matter with her.”
“I was just telling these gentlemen that you said she looked like a frog,”
Mme. de Guermantes uttered a sort of raucous sound intended to signify that she acknowledged the compliment.
“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of the ox. Or rather, it isn’t quite that, because all her swelling is concentrated in front of her waist, she’s more like a frog in an interesting condition.”
“Ah, that is quite clever,” said Mme. de Villeparisis, secretly proud that her guests should be witnessing this display of her niece’s wit.
“It is purely arbitrary, though,” answered Mme. de Guermantes, ironically detaching this selected epithet, as Swann would have done, “for I must admit I never saw a frog in the family way. Anyhow, the frog in question, who, by the way, is not asking for a king, for I never saw her so skittish as she’s been since her husband died, is coming to dine with us one day next week. I promised I’d let you know in good time.”
Mme. de Villeparisis gave vent to a confused growl, from which emerged: “I know she was dining with the Mecklenburgs the night before last. Hannibal de Bréauté was there. He came and told me about it, and was quite amusing, I must say.”
“There was a man there who’s a great deal wittier than Babal,” said Mme. de Guermantes who, in view of her close friendship wi*h M. de Bréàuté-Consalvi, felt that she must advertise their intimacy by the use of this abbreviation. “I mean M. Bergotte.”
I had never imagined that Bergotte could be regarded as witty; in fact, I thought of him always as mingling with the intellectual section of humanity, that is to say infinitely remote from that mysterious realm of which I had caught a glimpse through the purple hangings of a theatre box, behind which, making the Duchess smile, M. de Bréauté was holding with her, in the language of the gods, that unimaginable thing, a conversation between people of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I was stupefied to see the balance upset, and Bergotte rise above M. de Bréauté. But above all I was dismayed to think that I had avoided Bergotte on the evening of Phèdre, that I had not gone up and spoken to him, when I heard Mme. de Guermantes say to Mme. de Villeparisis:
“He is the only person I have any wish to know,” went on the Duchess, in whom one could always, as at the turn of a mental tide, see the flow of curiosity with regard to well-known intellectuals sweep over the ebb of her aristocratic snobbishness. “It would be such a pleasure.”
The presence of Bergotte by my side, which it would have been so easy for we to secure but which I had thought liable to give Mme. de Guermantes a bad impression of myself, would no doubt, on the contrary, have had the result that she would have signalled to me to join her in her box, and would have invited me to bring the eminent writer, one day, to luncheon.
“I gather that he didn’t behave very well, he was presented to M. de Cobourg, and never uttered a word to him,” said Mme. de Guermantes, dwelling on this odd characteristic as she might have recounted that a Chinaman had blown his nose on a sheet of paper. “He never once said ‘Monseigneur’ to him,” she added, with an air of amusement at this detail, as important to her mind as the refusal of a Protestant, during an audience with the Pope, to go on his knees before his Holiness.
Interested by these idiosyncrasies of Bergotte, she did not, however, appear to consider them reprehensible, and seemed rather to find a certain merit in them, though she would have been put to it to say of what sort. Despite this unusual mode of appreciating Bergotte’s originality, it was a fact which I was later oh not to regard as wholly negligible that Mme. de Guermantes, greatly to the surprise of many of her friends, did consider Bergotte more witty than M. de Bréauté. Thus it is that such judgments, subversive, isolated, and yet after all just, are delivered in the world of fashion by those rare minds that are superior to the rest. And they sketch then the first rough outlines of the hierarchy of values as the next generation will establish it, instead of abiding eternally by the old standards.
The Comte d’Argencourt, Chargé d’Affaires at the Belgian Legation and a remote connexion of Mme. de Villeparisis, came limping in, followed presently by two young men, the Baron de Guermantes and H. H. the Due de Châtellerault, whom Mme. de Guermantes greeted with: “How d’ye do, young Châtellerault,” in a careless tone and without moving from her tuffet, for she was a great friend of the young Duke’s mother, which had given him a deep and lifelong respect for her. Tall, slender, with golden hair and sunny complexions, thoroughly of the Guermantes type, these two young men looked like a condensation of the light of the spring evening which was flooding the spacious room. Following a custom which was the fashion at that time they laid their silk hats on the floor, by their feet. The historian of the Fronde thought that they were embarrassed, like a peasant coming into the mayor’s office and not knowing what to do with his hat. Feeling that he ought in charity to come to the rescue of the awkwardness and timidity which he ascribed to them:
“No, no,” he said, “don’t leave them on the floor, they’ll be trodden on.”
A glance from the Baron de Guermantes, tilting the plane of his pupils, shot suddenly from them a wave of pure and piercing azure which froze the well-meaning historian.
“What is that person’s name?” I was asked by the Baron, who had just been introduced to me by Mme. de Villeparisis.
“M. Pierre,” I whispered.
“Pierre what?”
“Pierre: it’s his name, he’s a historian, a most distinguished man.”
“Really? You don’t say so.”
“No, it’s a new fashion with these young men to put their hats on the floor,” Mme. de Villeparisis explained. “I’m like you, I can never get used to it. Still, it’s better than my nephew Robert, who always leaves his in the hall. I tell him when I see him come in that he looks just like a clock-maker, and I ask him if he’s come to wind the clocks.”
“You were speaking just now, Madame la Marquise, of M. Mole’s hat; we shall soon be able, like Aristotle, to compile a chapter on hats,” said the historian of the Fronde, somewhat reassured by Mme. de Villeparisis’s intervention, but in so faint a voice that no one but myself overheard him.
“She really is astonishing, the little Duchess,” said M. d’Argencourt, pointing to Mme. de Guermantes who was talking to G —— . “Whenever there’s a famous man in the room you’re sure to find him sitting with her. Evidently that must be the lion of the party over there. It can’t always be M. de Borelli, of course, or M. Schlumberger or M. d’Avenel. But then it’s bound to be M. Pierre Loti or M. Edmond Rostand. Yesterday evening at the Doudeauvilles’, where by the way she was looking