I can’t tell you how much your friend Cartier has always bored me, and I’ve never been able to understand the boundless charm that Charles de La Trémoïlle and his wife seem to find in the creature, for I meet him there every time I go to their house.”

“My dear Dutt-yess,” replied Bréauté, who had difficulty in pronouncing ch, “I think you’re a bit hard on Cartier. It’s true that he has perhaps made himself rather excessively at home at the La Trémoïlles’, but after all he does provide Tyarles with a sort of—what shall I say? I say?—a sort of fidus Achates, and that has become a very rare bird indeed in these days. Anyhow, what he’s supposed to have said is that if M. Zola had gone out of his way to stand his trial and to be convicted, it was in order to enjoy the only sensation he had never yet tried, that of being in prison.”

“And so he ran away before they could arrest him,” Oriane broke in. “Your story doesn’t hold water. Besides, even if it was plausible, I find the remark absolutely idiotic. If that’s what you call witty!”

“Good grate-ious, my dear Oriane,” replied Bréauté who, finding himself contradicted, was beginning to lose confidence, “it’s not my remark, I’m telling you it as it was told to me, take it for what it’s worth. Anyhow, it earned M. Cartier a proper dressing-down from that excellent fellow La Trémoïlle who, quite rightly, doesn’t like people to discuss what one might call, so to speak, current events in his drawing-room, and was all the more annoyed because Mme Alphonse Rothschild was present. Cartier was given a positive roasting by La Trémoïlle.”

“Of course,” said the Duke, in the worst of tempers, “the Alphonse Rothschilds, even if they have the tact never to speak of that abominable affair, are Dreyfusards at heart, like all the Jews. Indeed that is an argument ad hominem” (the Duke was a trifle vague in his use of the expression ad hominem) “which is not sufficiently exploited to prove the dishonesty of the Jews. If a Frenchman robs or murders somebody, I don’t consider myself bound, because he’s a Frenchman like myself, to find him innocent. But the Jews will never admit that one of their co-citizens is a traitor, although they know it perfectly well, and never think of the terrible repercussions” (the Duke was thinking, naturally, of that accursed election of Chaussepierre) “which the crime of one of their people can bring even to … Come, Oriane, you’re not going to pretend that it isn’t damning to the Jews that they all support a traitor. You’re not going to tell me that it isn’t because they’re Jews.”

“I’m afraid I am,” retorted Oriane (feeling, together with a trace of irritation, a certain desire to hold her own against Jupiter Tonans and also to put “intelligence” above the Dreyfus case). “Perhaps it’s just because they are Jews and know themselves that they realise that a person can be a Jew and not necessarily a traitor and anti-French, as M. Drumont seems to maintain. Certainly, if he’d been a Christian, the Jews wouldn’t have taken any interest in him, but they did so because they knew quite well that if he hadn’t been a Jew people wouldn’t have been so ready to think him a traitor a priori, as my nephew Robert would say.”

“Women never understand a thing about politics,” exclaimed the Duke, fastening his gaze upon the Duchess. “That shocking crime is not simply a Jewish cause, but well and truly an affair of vast national importance which may bring the most appalling consequences for France, which ought to have driven out all the Jews, whereas I’m sorry to say that the sanctions taken up to the present have been directed (in an ignoble fashion, which should be overruled) not against them but against the most eminent of their adversaries, against men of the highest rank who have been cast aside to the ruin of our unhappy country.”

I felt that the conversation had taken a wrong turning and reverted hurriedly to the topic of clothes.

“Do you remember, Madame,” I said, “the first time that you were friendly to me …”

“The first time that I was friendly to him,” she repeated, turning with a smile to M. de Bréauté, the tip of whose nose grew more pointed, and his smile more tender out of politeness to Mme de Guermantes, while his voice, like a knife on the grindstone, emitted a few vague and rusty sounds.

“… You were wearing a yellow dress with big black flowers.”

“But, my dear boy, that’s the same thing, those are evening dresses.”

“And your hat with the cornflowers that I liked so much! Still, those are all things of the past. I should like to order for the girl I mentioned to you a fur coat like the one you had on yesterday morning. Would it be possible for me to see it?”

“Of course; Hannibal has to be going in a moment. You shall come to my room and my maid will show you everything. Only, my dear boy, though I shall be delighted to lend you anything you like, I must warn you that if you have things from Callot’s or Doucet’s or Paquin’s copied by some small dressmaker, the result is never the same.”

“But I never dreamed of going to a small dressmaker. I know quite well it wouldn’t be the same thing, but I should be interested to hear you explain why.”

“You know quite well I can never explain anything, I’m a perfect fool, I talk like a peasant. It’s a question of handiwork, of style; as far as furs go, I can at least give you a line to my furrier, so that he shan’t rob you. But you realise that even then it will cost you eight or nine thousand francs.”

“And that indoor gown that you were wearing the other evening, with such a curious smell, dark, fluffy, speckled, streaked with gold like a butterfly’s wing?”

“Ah! that’s one of Fortuny’s. Your young lady can quite well wear that in the house. I have heaps of them; you shall see them presently, in fact I can give you one or two if you like. But I should like you to see one that my cousin Talleyrand has. I must write to her for the loan of it.”

“But you had such charming shoes as well.