In Search of Lost Time

discreetly announced that he was to be one of the party. As it happened, Mme. Féré had never met him. Mme. de Cambremer, on learning this, felt a keen satisfaction, and the smile of the chemist who is about to bring into contact for the first time two particularly important bodies hovered over her face. The door opened, and Mme. de Cambremer almost fainted when she saw Morel enter the room alone. Like a private secretary charged with apologies for his Minister, like a morganatic wife who expresses the Prince’s regret that he is unwell (so Mme. de Clinchamp used to apologise for the Duc d’Aumale), Morel said in the airiest of tones: “The Baron can’t come. He is not feeling very well, at least I think that is why, I haven’t seen him this week,” he added, these last words completing the despair of Mme. de Cambremer, who had told M. and Mme. Féré that Morel saw M. de Charlus at every hour of the day. The Cambremers pretended that the Baron’s absence gave an additional attraction to their party, and without letting Morel hear them, said to their other guests: “We can do very well without him, can’t we, it will be all the better.” But they were furious, suspected a plot hatched by Mme. Verdurin, and, tit for tat, when she invited them again to la Raspelière, M. de Cambremer, unable to resist the pleasure of seeing his house again and of mingling with the little group, came, but came alone, saying that the Marquise was so sorry, but her doctor had ordered her to stay in her room. The Cambremers hoped by this partial attendance at once to teach M. de Charlus a lesson, and to show the Verdurins that they were not obliged to treat them with more than a limited politeness, as Princesses of the Blood used in the old days to “show out” Duchesses, but only to the middle of the second saloon. After a few weeks, they were scarcely on speaking terms. M. de Cambremer explained this to me as follows: “I must tell you that with M. de Charlus it was rather difficult. He is an extreme Dreyfusard.⁠ ⁠…” “Oh, no!” “Yes.⁠ ⁠… Anyhow his cousin the Prince de Guermantes is, they’ve come in for a lot of abuse over that. I have some relatives who are very particular about that sort of thing. I can’t afford to mix with those people, I should quarrel with the whole of my family.” “Since the Prince de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard, that will make it all the easier,” said Mme. de Cambremer, “for Saint-Loup, who is said to be going to marry his niece, is one too. Indeed, that is perhaps why he is marrying her.” “Come now, my dear, you mustn’t say that Saint-Loup, who is a great friend of ours, is a Dreyfusard. One ought not to make such allegations lightly,” said M. de Cambremer. “You would make him highly popular in the army!” “He was once, but he isn’t any longer,” I explained to M. de Cambremer. “As for his marrying Mlle. de Guermantes-Brassac, is there any truth in that?” “People are talking of nothing else, but you should be in a position to know.” “But I repeat that he told me himself, he was a Dreyfusard,” said Mme. de Cambremer. “Not that there isn’t every excuse for him, the Guermantes are half German.” “The Guermantes in the Rue de Varenne, you can say, are entirely German,” said Cancan. “But Saint-Loup is a different matter altogether; he may have any amount of German blood, his father insisted upon maintaining his title as a great nobleman of France, he rejoined the service in 1871 and was killed in the war in the most gallant fashion. I may take rather a strong line about these matters, but it doesn’t do to exaggerate either one way or the other. In medio⁠ ⁠… virtus, ah, I forget the exact words. It’s a remark Doctor Cottard made. Now, there’s a man who can always say the appropriate thing. You ought to have a small Larousse in the house.” To avoid having to give an opinion as to the Latin quotation, and to get away from the subject of Saint-Loup, as to whom her husband seemed to think that she was wanting in tact, Mme. de Cambremer fell back upon the Mistress whose quarrel with them was even more in need of an explanation. “We were delighted to let la Raspelière to Mme. Verdurin,” said the Marquise. “The only trouble is, she appears to imagine that with the house, and everything else that she has managed to tack on to it, the use of the meadow, the old hangings, all sorts of things which weren’t in the lease at all, she should also be entitled to make friends with us. The two things are entirely distinct. Our mistake lay in our not having done everything quite simply through a lawyer or an agency. At Féterne it doesn’t matter, but I can just imagine the face my aunt de Ch’nouville would make if she saw old mother Verdurin come marching in, on one of my days, with her hair streaming. As for M. de Charlus, of course, he knows some quite nice people, but he knows some very nasty people too.” I asked for details. Driven into a corner, Mme. de Cambremer finally admitted: “People say that it was he who maintained a certain Monsieur Moreau, Morille, Morue, I don’t remember. Nothing to do, of course, with Morel, the violinist,” she added, blushing. “When I realised that Mme. Verdurin imagined that because she was our tenant in the Manche, she would have the right to come and call upon me in Paris, I saw that it was time to cut the cable.”

Notwithstanding this quarrel with the Mistress, the Cambremers were on quite good terms with the faithful, and would readily get into our carriage when they were travelling by the train. Just before we reached Douville, Albertine,