“You haven’t thought of giving the Institute an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “You could make a considerable success of a subject like that,” (which was to say, “you would give me a colossal advertisement,”) he added, smiling at the Ambassador pusillanimously, but with a warmth of feeling which made him raise his eyelids and expose a double horizon of eye. I seemed to have seen this look before, and yet I had met the historian for the first time this afternoon. Suddenly I remembered having seen the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed to be able to cure choking fits of the kind from which I suffered by some absurd inhalation of the essential oils of plants. When, in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a most sensational paper for the Academy of Medicine!” He had not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with the same air of interrogation, timid, anxious, appealing, which it had just puzzled me to see on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological like physical laws have a more or less general application. And the requisite conditions are the same; an identical expression lights the eyes of different human animals, as a single sunrise lights different places, a long way apart, which have no connection with one another. I did not hear the Ambassador’s reply, for the whole party, with a good deal of noise, had again gathered round Mme. de Villeparisis to watch her at work.
“You know who we’re talking about, Basin?” the Duchess asked her husband.
“I can make a pretty good guess,” said the Duke.
“Ah! As an actress she’s not, I’m afraid, in what one would call the great tradition.”
“You can’t imagine,” went on Mme. de Guermantes to M. d’Argencourt, “anything more ridiculous.”
“In fact, it was drolatic,” put in M. de Guermantes, whose odd vocabulary enabled people in society to declare that he was no fool and literary people, at the same time, to regard him as a complete imbecile.
“What I fail to understand,” resumed the Duchess, “is how in the world Robert ever came to fall in love with her. Oh, of course I know one mustn’t discuss that sort of thing,” she added, with the charming pout of a philosopher and sentimentalist whose last illusion had long been shattered. “I know that anybody may fall in love with anybody else. And,” she went on, for, though she might still laugh at modern literature, it, either by its dissemination through the popular press or else in the course of conversation, had begun to percolate into her mind, “that is the really nice thing about love, because it’s what makes it so ‘mysterious.’ ”
“Mysterious! Oh, I must confess, cousin, that’s a bit beyond me,” said the Comte d’Argencourt.
“Oh dear, yes, it’s a very mysterious thing, love,” declared the Duchess, with the sweet smile of a good-natured woman of the world, but also with the rooted conviction with which a Wagnerian assures a bored gentleman from the Club that there is something more than just noise in the Walküre. “After all, one never does know what makes one person fall in love with another; it may not be at all what we think,” she added with a smile, repudiating at once by this interpretation the idea she had just suggested. “After all, one never knows anything, does one?” she concluded with an air of weary scepticism. “Besides, one understands, doesn’t one; one simply can’t explain other people’s choices in love.”
But having laid down this principle she proceeded at once to abandon it and to criticise Saint-Loup’s choice.
“All the, same,
