Yes, a young girl can wear that sort of thing at a pinch, but you told me that your friend never went out in the evening. It’s a full evening dress, not a thing that she can put on to pay calls.”

What is extraordinary is that of the evening in question, which after all was not so very remote, Mme de Guermantes remembered nothing but what she had been wearing, and had forgotten a certain incident which nevertheless, as we shall see presently, ought to have mattered to her greatly. It seems that among men and women of action (and society people are men and women of action on a minute, a microscopic scale, but action none the less), the mind, overtaxed by the need to attend to what is going to happen in an hour’s time, commits very little to memory. As often as not, for instance, it was not with the object of deliberately misleading and making himself appear innocent of an error of judgment that M. de Norpois, when you reminded him of the prophecies he had uttered with regard to an alliance with Germany of which nothing had ever come, would say: “You must be mistaken, I have no recollection of it whatever, it isn’t like me, for in that sort of conversation I am always most laconic, and I would never have predicted the success of one of those coups d’éclat which are often nothing more than coups de tête and habitually degenerate into coups de force. It is beyond question that in the remote future a Franco-German rapprochement might come into being and would be highly profitable to both countries; nor would France have the worse of the bargain, I dare say; but I have never spoken of it because the time is not yet ripe, and if you wish to know my opinion, in asking our late enemies to join with us in solemn wedlock, I consider that we would be courting a grave setback and would receive some unpleasant shocks.” In saying this M. de Norpois was not being untruthful; he had simply forgotten. We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of the day. These change, and with them our memory undergoes alteration. Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less to an excess of ambition than to a deficiency of memory. As for society people, they remember very little.

Mme de Guermantes assured me that, at the party to which she had gone in a red dress, she did not remember Mme de Chaussepierre’s being present, and that I must be mistaken. And yet, heaven knows, the Chaussepierres had been present enough in the minds of both the Duke and the Duchess since then. For the following reason. M. de Guermantes had been the senior vice-president of the Jockey Club when the president died. Certain members of the club who were not popular in society and whose sole pleasure was to blackball the men who did not invite them to their houses launched a campaign against the Duc de Guermantes who, certain of being elected, and relatively indifferent to the presidency which was a small matter for a man in his social position, paid no attention. It was urged against him that the Duchess was a Dreyfusard (the Dreyfus case was long since over, but twenty years later people would still talk about it, and so far only two years had elapsed) and entertained the Rothschilds, that too much consideration had been shown of late to certain great international potentates like the Duc de Guermantes, who was half German. The campaign found sympathetic ears, clubs being always jealous of men who are in the public eye, and detesting big fortunes. Chaussepierre’s was by no means meagre, but nobody could be offended by it; he spent hardly a sou, the couple lived in a modest apartment, the wife went about dressed in black wool. A passionate music-lover, she did indeed give little afternoon parties to which many more singers were invited than to the Guermantes. But no one talked about these parties, which occurred without any refreshments, often in the absence of the husband, in the obscurity of the Rue de la Chaise. At the Opera, Mme de Chaussepierre passed unnoticed, always among people whose names recalled the most “die-hard” element of the intimate circle of Charles X, but who were retiring and unsocial. On the day of the election, to the general surprise, obscurity triumphed over glitter: Chaussepierre, the second vice-president, was elected president of the Jockey, and the Duc de Guermantes was left sitting—that is to say, in the senior vice-president’s chair. Of course, being president of the Jockey means little or nothing to princes of the highest rank such as the Guermantes. But not to be president when it is your turn, to be passed over in favour of a Chaussepierre, whose wife’s greeting Oriane not only had refused to acknowledge two years earlier but had gone so far as to show offence at being greeted by such an obscure scarecrow, this the Duke did find hard to swallow. He pretended to be above such setbacks, asserting incidentally that it was his long-standing friendship with Swann that was at the root of it. Actually, his anger never cooled.

One curious thing was that nobody had ever before heard the Duc de Guermantes make use of the quite commonplace expression “well and truly;” but ever since the Jockey Club election, whenever anybody referred to the Dreyfus case, out would come “well and truly.” “Dreyfus case, Dreyfus case, it’s easy to say, and it’s a misuse of the term. It’s not a question of religion, it’s well and truly political.” Five years might go by without your hearing him say “well and truly” again, if during that time nobody mentioned the Dreyfus case, but if, at the end of five years, the name Dreyfus cropped up, “well and truly” would at once follow automatically. The Duke could not in any case bear to hear any mention of the case, “which has been responsible,” he would say, “for so many misfortunes,” although he was really conscious of one only: his failure to become president of the Jockey.

And so on the afternoon in question—the afternoon on which I reminded Mme de Guermantes of the red dress she had worn at her cousin’s party—M. de Bréauté was none too well received when, for want of anything better to say, by an association of ideas which remained obscure and which he did not illuminate, he began, twisting his tongue about between his pursed lips: “Talking of the Dreyfus case …” (why the Dreyfus case?—we were talking simply of a red dress, and certainly poor Bréauté, whose only desire was to make himself agreeable, can have had no malicious intention, but the mere name of Dreyfus made the Duc de Guermantes knit his Jupiterian brows) “… I was told of a rather nice remark, damned clever, ‘pon my word, that was made by our friend Cartier” (the reader may care to know that this Cartier, Mme de Villefranche’s brother, had not the slightest connexion with the jeweller of that name), “not that I’m in the least surprised, for he’s got wit enough and to spare.”

“Oh!” broke in Oriane, “he can spare me his wit.