Get ebook downloads in full at ebookmeta.

com

High Performance Python 2nd Edition Micha Gorelick

https://ebookmeta.com/product/high-performance-python-2nd-
edition-micha-gorelick/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWNLOAD NOW

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookmeta.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Python High Performance Programming 1st Edition Gabriele

Lanaro

https://ebookmeta.com/product/python-high-performance-programming-1st-
edition-gabriele-lanaro/

ebookmeta.com

High-Performance Training for Sports, 2nd Edition Joyce

https://ebookmeta.com/product/high-performance-training-for-
sports-2nd-edition-joyce/

ebookmeta.com

High-Performance Web Apps with FastAPI: The Asynchronous

Web Framework Based on Modern Python 1st Edition Malhar
Lathkar
https://ebookmeta.com/product/high-performance-web-apps-with-fastapi-
the-asynchronous-web-framework-based-on-modern-python-1st-edition-
malhar-lathkar/
ebookmeta.com

Manual for Eye Examination and Diagnosis 10th Edition

Leitman Mark W

https://ebookmeta.com/product/manual-for-eye-examination-and-
diagnosis-10th-edition-leitman-mark-w/

ebookmeta.com
McGraw Hill Education TABE Level D 2nd Edition Phyllis
Dutwin

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mcgraw-hill-education-tabe-level-d-2nd-
edition-phyllis-dutwin/

ebookmeta.com

Communication & Human Behavior 7th Edition Brent D Ruben

https://ebookmeta.com/product/communication-human-behavior-7th-
edition-brent-d-ruben/

ebookmeta.com

Assault on the Gothic Line 1944: The Allied Attempted

Breakthrough into Northern Italy Pier Paolo Battistelli

https://ebookmeta.com/product/assault-on-the-gothic-line-1944-the-
allied-attempted-breakthrough-into-northern-italy-pier-paolo-
battistelli/
ebookmeta.com

Global Mental Health Ethics Allen R. Dyer (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/global-mental-health-ethics-allen-r-
dyer-editor/

ebookmeta.com

Religion and State in Iran 1785 1906 The Role of the Ulama
in the Qajar Period Hamid Algar

https://ebookmeta.com/product/religion-and-state-in-
iran-1785-1906-the-role-of-the-ulama-in-the-qajar-period-hamid-algar/

ebookmeta.com
Mr. Hot Boss To Go: A Forbidden Romance 1st Edition S.C.
Adams & S.E. Law

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mr-hot-boss-to-go-a-forbidden-
romance-1st-edition-s-c-adams-s-e-law/

ebookmeta.com
1. Foreword
2. Preface

a. Who This Book Is For

b. Who This Book Is Not For
c. What You’ll Learn
d. Python 3
e. Changes from Python 2.7
f. License
g. How to Make an Attribution
h. Errata and Feedback
i. Conventions Used in This Book
j. Using Code Examples
k. O’Reilly Online Learning
l. How to Contact Us
m. Acknowledgments
3. 1. Understanding Performant Python

a. The Fundamental Computer System

i. Computing Units
ii. Memory Units
iii. Communications Layers
b. Putting the Fundamental Elements Together
 i. Idealized Computing Versus the Python
Virtual Machine

c. So Why Use Python?

d. How to Be a Highly Performant Programmer

i. Good Working Practices

ii. Some Thoughts on Good Notebook
Practice
iii. Getting the Joy Back into Your Work

4. 2. Profiling to Find Bottlenecks

a. Profiling Efficiently
b. Introducing the Julia Set
c. Calculating the Full Julia Set
d. Simple Approaches to Timing—print and a
Decorator
e. Simple Timing Using the Unix time Command
f. Using the cProfile Module
g. Visualizing cProfile Output with SnakeViz
h. Using line_profiler for Line-by-Line
Measurements
i. Using memory_profiler to Diagnose Memory
Usage
j. Introspecting an Existing Process with PySpy
k. Bytecode: Under the Hood
 i. Using the dis Module to Examine
CPython Bytecode
ii. Different Approaches, Different
Complexity

l. Unit Testing During Optimization to Maintain

Correctness

i. No-op @profile Decorator

m. Strategies to Profile Your Code Successfully

n. Wrap-Up

5. 3. Lists and Tuples

a. A More Efficient Search

b. Lists Versus Tuples

i. Lists as Dynamic Arrays

ii. Tuples as Static Arrays

c. Wrap-Up

6. 4. Dictionaries and Sets

a. How Do Dictionaries and Sets Work?

i. Inserting and Retrieving
ii. Deletion
iii. Resizing
iv. Hash Functions and Entropy

b. Dictionaries and Namespaces

c. Wrap-Up
7. 5. Iterators and Generators
a. Iterators for Infinite Series
b. Lazy Generator Evaluation
c. Wrap-Up
8. 6. Matrix and Vector Computation

a. Introduction to the Problem

b. Aren’t Python Lists Good Enough?
i. Problems with Allocating Too Much

c. Memory Fragmentation
i. Understanding perf
ii. Making Decisions with perf’s Output
iii. Enter numpy
d. Applying numpy to the Diffusion Problem
i. Memory Allocations and In-Place
Operations
ii. Selective Optimizations: Finding What
Needs to Be Fixed

e. numexpr: Making In-Place Operations Faster

and Easier
f. A Cautionary Tale: Verify “Optimizations”
(scipy)
g. Lessons from Matrix Optimizations
h. Pandas
 i. Pandas’s Internal Model
ii. Applying a Function to Many Rows of
Data
iii. Building DataFrames and Series from
Partial Results Rather than
Concatenating
iv. There’s More Than One (and Possibly a
Faster) Way to Do a Job
v. Advice for Effective Pandas
Development

i. Wrap-Up
9. 7. Compiling to C

a. What Sort of Speed Gains Are Possible?

b. JIT Versus AOT Compilers
c. Why Does Type Information Help the Code
Run Faster?
d. Using a C Compiler
e. Reviewing the Julia Set Example
f. Cython

i. Compiling a Pure Python Version

Using Cython
g. pyximport
i. Cython Annotations to Analyze a Block
of Code
ii. Adding Some Type Annotations
h. Cython and numpy

i. Parallelizing the Solution with OpenMP

on One Machine
i. Numba

i. Numba to Compile NumPy for Pandas

j. PyPy
i. Garbage Collection Differences
ii. Running PyPy and Installing Modules
k. A Summary of Speed Improvements
l. When to Use Each Technology

i. Other Upcoming Projects

m. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
i. Dynamic Graphs: PyTorch
ii. Basic GPU Profiling
iii. Performance Considerations of GPUs
iv. When to Use GPUs
n. Foreign Function Interfaces

i. ctypes
ii. cffi
iii. f2py
iv. CPython Module

o. Wrap-Up
10. 8. Asynchronous I/O

a. Introduction to Asynchronous Programming

b. How Does async/await Work?
i. Serial Crawler
ii. Gevent
iii. tornado
iv. aiohttp
c. Shared CPU–I/O Workload

i. Serial
ii. Batched Results
iii. Full Async

d. Wrap-Up
11. 9. The multiprocessing Module

a. An Overview of the multiprocessing Module

b. Estimating Pi Using the Monte Carlo Method
c. Estimating Pi Using Processes and Threads

i. Using Python Objects

ii. Replacing multiprocessing with Joblib
iii. Random Numbers in Parallel Systems
iv. Using numpy

d. Finding Prime Numbers

i. Queues of Work
 e. Verifying Primes Using Interprocess
Communication
i. Serial Solution
ii. Naive Pool Solution
iii. A Less Naive Pool Solution
iv. Using Manager.Value as a Flag
v. Using Redis as a Flag
vi. Using RawValue as a Flag
vii. Using mmap as a Flag
viii. Using mmap as a Flag Redux

f. Sharing numpy Data with multiprocessing

g. Synchronizing File and Variable Access
i. File Locking
ii. Locking a Value
h. Wrap-Up

12. 10. Clusters and Job Queues

a. Benefits of Clustering
b. Drawbacks of Clustering
i. $462 Million Wall Street Loss Through
Poor Cluster Upgrade Strategy
ii. Skype’s 24-Hour Global Outage

c. Common Cluster Designs

d. How to Start a Clustered Solution
 e. Ways to Avoid Pain When Using Clusters
f. Two Clustering Solutions

i. Using IPython Parallel to Support

Research
ii. Parallel Pandas with Dask

g. NSQ for Robust Production Clustering

i. Queues
ii. Pub/sub
iii. Distributed Prime Calculation
h. Other Clustering Tools to Look At
i. Docker

i. Docker’s Performance
ii. Advantages of Docker

j. Wrap-Up

13. 11. Using Less RAM

a. Objects for Primitives Are Expensive

i. The array Module Stores Many

Primitive Objects Cheaply
ii. Using Less RAM in NumPy with
NumExpr

b. Understanding the RAM Used in a Collection

c. Bytes Versus Unicode
d. Efficiently Storing Lots of Text in RAM
 i. Trying These Approaches on 11 Million
Tokens

e. Modeling More Text with Scikit-Learn’s

FeatureHasher
f. Introducing DictVectorizer and FeatureHasher

i. Comparing DictVectorizer and

FeatureHasher on a Real Problem

g. SciPy’s Sparse Matrices

h. Tips for Using Less RAM
i. Probabilistic Data Structures

i. Very Approximate Counting with a 1-

Byte Morris Counter
ii. K-Minimum Values
iii. Bloom Filters
iv. LogLog Counter
v. Real-World Example

14. 12. Lessons from the Field

a. Streamlining Feature Engineering Pipelines

with Feature-engine

i. Feature Engineering for Machine

Learning
ii. The Hard Task of Deploying Feature
Engineering Pipelines
iii. Leveraging the Power of Open Source
Python Libraries
 iv. Feature-engine Smooths Building and
Deployment of Feature Engineering
Pipelines
v. Helping with the Adoption of a New
Open Source Package
vi. Developing, Maintaining, and
Encouraging Contribution to Open
Source Libraries

b. Highly Performant Data Science Teams

i. How Long Will It Take?

ii. Discovery and Planning
iii. Managing Expectations and Delivery

c. Numba
i. A Simple Example
ii. Best Practices and Recommendations
iii. Getting Help

d. Optimizing Versus Thinking

e. Adaptive Lab’s Social Media Analytics (2014)

i. Python at Adaptive Lab

ii. SoMA’s Design
iii. Our Development Methodology
iv. Maintaining SoMA
v. Advice for Fellow Engineers
f. Making Deep Learning Fly with
RadimRehurek.com (2014)

i. The Sweet Spot

ii. Lessons in Optimizing
iii. Conclusion
g. Large-Scale Productionized Machine Learning
at Lyst.com (2014)

i. Cluster Design
ii. Code Evolution in a Fast-Moving Start-
Up
iii. Building the Recommendation Engine
iv. Reporting and Monitoring
v. Some Advice

h. Large-Scale Social Media Analysis at Smesh

(2014)

i. Python’s Role at Smesh

ii. The Platform
iii. High Performance Real-Time String
Matching
iv. Reporting, Monitoring, Debugging, and
Deployment

i. PyPy for Successful Web and Data Processing

Systems (2014)

i. Prerequisites
ii. The Database
 iii. The Web Application
iv. OCR and Translation
v. Task Distribution and Workers
vi. Conclusion

j. Task Queues at Lanyrd.com (2014)

i. Python’s Role at Lanyrd

ii. Making the Task Queue Performant
iii. Reporting, Monitoring, Debugging, and
Deployment
iv. Advice to a Fellow Developer

15. Index
High Performance Python
SECOND EDITION

Practical Performant Programming for

Humans

Micha Gorelick and Ian Ozsvald

Other documents randomly have
different content
 “Really, you have the fingers of a fairy,” went on (to the Marquise)
the historian who, having his back turned, to me at that moment,
had not noticed Bloch’s clumsiness.
But Bloch took this for a sneer at himself, and to cover his shame
in insolence retorted: “It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not
wet.”
Mme. de Villeparisis rang the bell and a footman came to wipe the
carpet and pick up the fragments of glass. She invited the two young
men to her theatricals, and also Mme. de Guermantes, with the
injunction:
“Remember to tell Gisèle and Berthe” (the Duchesses d’Auberjon
and de Portefin) “to be here a little before two to help me,” as she
might have told the hired waiters to come early to arrange the
tables.
She treated her princely relatives, as she treated M. de Norpois,
without any of the little courtesies which she shewed to the
historian, Cottard, Bloch and myself, and they seemed to have no
interest for her beyond the possibility of serving them up as food for
our social curiosity. This was because she knew that she need not
put herself out to entertain people for whom she was not a more or
less brilliant woman but the touchy old sister—who needed and
received tactful handling—of their father or uncle. There would have
been no object in her trying to shine before them, she could never
have deceived them as to the strength and weakness of her position,
for they knew (none so well) her whole history and respected the
illustrious race from which she sprang. But, above all, they had
ceased to be anything more for her than a dead stock which would
not bear fruit again, they would not let her know their new friends,
or share their pleasures. She could obtain from them only their
occasional presence, or the possibility of speaking of them, at her
five o’clock tea-parties as, later on, in her Memoirs, of which these
parties were only a sort of rehearsal, a preliminary reading aloud of
the manuscript before a selected audience. And the society which all
these noble kinsmen and kinswomen served to interest, to dazzle, to
enthral, the society of the Cottards, of the Blochs, of the dramatists
who were in the public eye at the moment, of the historians of the
Fronde and such matters; it was in this society that there existed for
Mme. de Villeparisis—failing that section of the fashionable world
which did not call upon her—the movement, the novelty, all the
entertainment of life, it was from people like these that she was able
to derive social benefits (which made it well worth her while to let
them meet, now and then, though without ever coming to know her,
the Duchesse de Guermantes), dinners with remarkable men whose
work had interested her, a light opera or a pantomime staged
complete by its author in her drawing-room, boxes for interesting
shows. Bloch got up to go. He had said aloud that the incident of the
broken flower-glass was of no importance, but what he said to
himself was different, more different still what he thought: “If people
can’t train their servants to put flowers where they won’t be knocked
over and wet their guests and probably cut their hands, it’s much
better not to go in for such luxuries,” he muttered angrily. He was
one of those susceptible, highly strung persons who cannot bear to
think of themselves as having made a blunder which, though they
do not admit even to themselves that they have made it, is enough
to spoil their whole day. In a black rage, he was just making up his
mind never to go into society again. He had reached the point at
which some distraction was imperative. Fortunately in another
minute Mme. de Villeparisis was to press him to stay. Either because
she was aware of the general feeling among her friends, and had
noticed the tide of anti-semitism that was beginning to rise, or
simply from carelessness, she had not introduced him to any of the
people in the room. He, however, being little used to society, felt
bound before leaving the room to take leave of them all, to shew his
manners, but without any friendliness; he lowered his head several
times, buried his bearded chin in his collar, scrutinised each of the
party in turn through his glasses with a cold, dissatisfied glare. But
Mme. de Villeparisis stopped him; she had still to discuss with him
the little play which was to be performed in her house, and also she
did not wish him to leave before he had had the pleasure of meeting
M. de Norpois (whose failure to appear puzzled her), although as an
inducement to Bloch this introduction was quite superfluous, he
having already decided to persuade the two actresses whose names
he had mentioned to her to come and sing for nothing in the
Marquise’s drawing-room, to enhance their own reputations, at one
of those parties to which all that was best and noblest in Europe
thronged. He had even offered her, in addition, a tragic actress “with
pure eyes, fair as Hera,” who would recite lyrical prose with a sense
of plastic beauty. But on hearing this lady’s name Mme. de
Villeparisis had declined, for it was that of Saint-Loup’s mistress.
“I have better news,” she murmured in my ear, “I really believe
he’s quite cooled off now, and that before very long they’ll be parted
—in spite of an officer who has played an abominable part in the
whole business,” she added. For Robert’s family were beginning to
look with a deadly hatred on M. de Borodino, who had given him
leave, at the hairdresser’s instance, to go to Bruges, and accused
him of giving countenance to an infamous intrigue. “It’s really too
bad of him,” said Mme. de Villeparisis with that virtuous accent
common to all the Guermantes, even the most depraved. “Too, too
bad,” she repeated, giving the word a trio of ’t’s. One felt that she
had no doubt of the Prince’s being present at all their orgies. But, as
kindness of heart was the old lady’s dominant quality, her expression
of frowning severity towards the horrible captain, whose name she
articulated with an ironical emphasis: “The Prince de Borodino!”—
speaking as a woman for whom the Empire simply did not count,
melted into a gentle smile at myself with a mechanical twitch of the
eyelid indicating a vague understanding between us.
“I have a great admiration for de Saint-Loup-en-Bray,” said Bloch,
“dirty dog as he is, because he’s so extremely well-bred. I have a
great admiration, not for him but for well-bred people, they’re so
rare,” he went on, without thinking, since he was himself so
extremely ill-bred, what offence his words were giving. “I will give
you an example which I consider most striking of his perfect
breeding. I met him once with a young gentleman just as he was
about to spring into his wheelèd chariot, after he himself had
buckled their splendid harness on a pair of steeds, whose mangers
were heaped with oats and barley, who had no need of the flashing
whip to urge them on. He introduced us, but I did not catch the
gentleman’s name; one never does catch people’s names when one’s
introduced to them,” he explained with a laugh, this being one of his
father’s witticisms. “De Saint-Loup-en-Bray was perfectly calm, made
no fuss about the young gentleman, seemed absolutely at his ease.
Well, I found out, by pure chance, a day or two later, that the young
gentleman was the son of Sir Rufus Israels!”
The end of this story sounded less shocking than its preface, for it
remained quite incomprehensible to everyone in the room. The fact
was that Sir Rufus Israels, who seemed to Bloch and his father an
almost royal personage before whom Saint-Loup ought to tremble,
was in the eyes of the Guermantes world a foreign upstart, tolerated
in society, on whose friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of
priding himself, far from it.
“I learned this,” Bloch informed us, “from the person who holds Sir
Rufus’s power of attorney; he is a friend of my father, and quite an
extraordinary man. Oh, an absolutely wonderful individual,” he
assured us with that affirmative energy, that note of enthusiasm
which one puts only into those convictions that did not originate with
oneself.
“Tell me,” Bloch went on, lowering his voice, to myself, “how much
do you suppose Saint-Loup has? Not that it matters to me in the
least, you quite understand, don’t you. I’m interested from the
Balzacian point of view. You don’t happen to know what it’s in,
French stocks, foreign stocks, or land or what?”
I could give him no information whatsoever. Suddenly raising his
voice, Bloch asked if he might open the windows, and without
waiting for an answer, went across the room to do so. Mme. de
Villeparisis protested that he must not, that she had a cold. “Of
course, if it’s bad for you!” Bloch was downcast. “But you can’t say
it’s not hot in here.” And breaking into a laugh he put into the gaze
with which he swept the room an appeal for support against Mme.
de Villeparisis. He received none, from these well-bred people. His
blazing eyes, having failed to seduce any of the guests from their
allegiance, faded with resignation to their normal gravity of
expression; he acknowledged his defeat with: “What’s the
temperature? Seventy-two, at least, I should say. I’m not surprised.
I’m simply dripping. And I have not, like the sage Antenor, son of the
river Alpheus, the power to plunge myself in the paternal wave to
stanch my sweat before laying my body in a bath of polished marble
and anointing my limbs with fragrant oils.” And with that need which
people feel to outline for the use of others medical theories the
application of which would be beneficial to their own health: “Well, if
you believe it’s good for you! I must say, I think you’re quite wrong.
It’s exactly what gives you your cold.”
Bloch was overjoyed at the idea of meeting M. de Norpois. He
would like, he told us, to get him to talk about the Dreyfus case.
“There’s a mentality at work there which I don’t altogether
understand, and it would be quite sensational to get an interview
out of this eminent diplomat,” he said in a tone of sarcasm, so as not
to appear to be rating himself below the Ambassador.
Mme. de Villeparisis was sorry that he had said this so loud, but
minded less when she saw that the librarian, whose strong
Nationalist views kept her, so to speak, on leash, was too far off to
have overheard. She was more shocked to hear Bloch, led on by that
demon of ill-breeding which made him permanently blind to the
consequences of what he said, inquiring, with a laugh at the
paternal pleasantry: “Haven’t I read a learned treatise by him in
which he sets forth a string of irrefutable arguments to prove that
the Japanese war was bound to end in a Russian victory and a
Japanese defeat? He’s fairly paralytic now, isn’t he? I’m sure he’s the
old boy I’ve seen taking aim at his chair before sliding across the
room to it, as if he was on wheels.”
“Oh, dear, no! Not in the least like that! Just wait a minute,” the
Marquise went on, “I don’t know what he can be doing.”
She rang the bell and, when the servant had appeared, as she
made no secret, and indeed liked to advertise the fact that her old
friend spent the greater part of his time in her house: “Go and tell
M. de Norpois to come in,” she ordered him, “he is sorting some
papers in my library; he said he would be twenty minutes, and I’ve
been waiting now for an hour and three-quarters. He will tell you
about the Dreyfus case, anything you want to know,” she said gruffly
to Bloch. “He doesn’t approve much of the way things are going.”
 For M. de Norpois was not on good terms with the Government of
the day, and Mme. de Villeparisis, although he had never taken the
liberty of bringing any actual Ministers to her house (she still
preserved all the unapproachable dignity of a great lady, and
remained outside and above the political relations which he was
obliged to cultivate), was kept well informed by him of everything
that went on. Then, too, the politicians of the day would never have
dared to ask M. de Norpois to introduce them to Mme. de
Villeparisis. But several of them had gone down to see him at her
house in the country when they needed his advice or help at critical
conjunctures. One knew the address. One went to the house. One
did not see its mistress. But at dinner that evening she would say:
“I hear they’ve been down here bothering you. I trust things are
going better.”
“You are not in a hurry?” she now asked Bloch.
“No, not at all. I wanted to go because I am not very well; in fact
there is some talk of my taking a cure at Vichy for my biliary ducts,”
he explained, articulating the last words with a fiendish irony.
“Why, that’s where my nephew Châtellerault’s got to go, you must
fix it up together. Is he still in the room? He’s a nice boy, you know,”
said Mme. de Villeparisis, and may quite well have meant what she
said, feeling that two people whom she knew had no reason not to
be friends with each other.
“Oh, I dare say he wouldn’t care about that—I don’t really know
him—at least I barely know him. He is sitting over there,” stammered
Bloch in an ecstasy of confusion.
The butler could not have delivered his mistress’s message
properly, for M. de Norpois, to make believe that he had just come in
from the street, and had not yet seen his hostess, had picked up the
first hat that he had found in the hall, and came forward to kiss
Mme. de Villeparisis’s hand with great ceremony, asking after her
health with all the interest that people shew after a long separation.
He was not aware that the Marquise had already destroyed any
semblance of reality in this charade, which she cut short by taking
M. de Norpois and Bloch into an adjoining room. Bloch, who had
observed all the courtesy that was being shewn to a person whom
he had not yet discovered to be M. de Norpois, had said to me,
trying to seem at his ease: “Who is that old idiot?” Perhaps, too, all
this bowing and scraping by M. de Norpois had really shocked the
better element in Bloch’s nature, the freer and more straightforward
manners of a younger generation, and he was partly sincere in
condemning it as absurd. However that might be, it ceased to
appear absurd, and indeed delighted him the moment it was himself,
Bloch, to whom the salutations were addressed.
“Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” said Mme. de Villeparisis, “I should like
you to know this gentleman. Monsieur Bloch, Monsieur le Marquis de
Norpois.” She made a point, despite her casual usage of M. de
Norpois, of addressing him always as “Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” as a
social convention as well as from an exaggerated respect for his
Ambassadorial rank, a respect which the Marquis had inculcated in
her, and also with an instinctive application to him of the special
manner, less familiar and more ceremonious, in relation to one
particular man which, in the house of a distinguished woman, in
contrast to the liberties that she takes with her other guests, marks
that man out instantly as her lover.
M. de Norpois drowned his azure gaze in his white beard, bent his
tall body deep down as though he were bowing before all the
famous and (to him) imposing connotations of the name Bloch, and
murmured: “I am delighted ....” whereat his young listener, moved,
but feeling that the illustrious diplomat was going too far, hastened
to correct him, saying: “Not at all! On the contrary, it is I who am
delighted.” But this ceremony, which M. de Norpois, in his friendship
for Mme. de Villeparisis, repeated for the benefit of every fresh
person that his old friend introduced to him, did not seem to her
adequate to the deserts of Bloch, to whom she said:
“Just ask him anything you want to know; take him into the other
room if it’s more convenient; he will be delighted to talk to you. I
think you wished to speak to him about the Dreyfus case,” she went
on, no more considering whether this would suit M. de Norpois than
she would have thought of asking leave of the Duchesse de
Montmorency’s portrait before having it lighted up for the historian,
or of the tea before pouring it into a cup.
 “You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf, but
he will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck very
well, and Cavour. That is so, isn’t it;” she raised her voice, “you knew
Bismarck well?”
“Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me
with a knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the
opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt
obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my
own which he had inadvertently taken. “You shewed me a somewhat
laboured little thing in which you went in for a good deal of hair-
splitting. I gave you my opinion quite frankly; what you had written
was literally not worth the trouble of putting it on paper. Are you
thinking of letting us have anything else? You were greatly smitten
with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re not to say anything
against Bergotte,” put in the Duchess. “I don’t dispute his talent as a
painter; no one would, Duchess. He understands all about etching, if
not brush-work on a large scale like M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to
me that in these days we have a tendency to confuse the arts, and
forget that the novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify
his readers than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or
tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing your father on Sunday at our
good friend A. J.’s,” he went on, turning again to myself.
I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme. de
Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself
asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme.
Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It
seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples
of his work, particularly that admirable Bunch of Radishes which I
remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again;
what a masterpiece that is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent
person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I
should have named this Bunch of Radishes. “A masterpiece?” cried
M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no
pretence of being even a picture, it is merely a sketch.” (He was
right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece’,
what have you got to say about Hébert’s Virgin or Dagnan-
Bouveret?”
“I heard you refusing to let him bring Robert’s woman,” said Mme.
de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador
aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much, she’s a perfect horror, as you
know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely
ugly.”
“Do you mean to say, you know her, Duchess?” asked M.
d’Argencourt.
“Yes, didn’t you know that she performed in my house before the
whole of Paris, not that that’s anything for me to be proud of,”
explained Mme. de Guermantes with a laugh, glad nevertheless,
since the actress was under discussion, to let it be known that she
herself had had the first fruits of her foolishness. “Hallo, I suppose I
ought to be going now,” she added, without moving.
She had just seen her husband enter the room, and these words
were an allusion to the absurdity of their appearing to be paying a
call together, like a newly married couple, rather than to the often
strained relations that existed between her and the enormous fellow
she had married, who, despite his increasing years, still led the life
of a gay bachelor. Ranging over the considerable party that was
gathered round the tea-table the genial, cynical gaze—dazzled a
little by the brightness of the setting sun—of the little round pupils
lodged in the exact centre of his eyes, like the “bulls” which the
excellent marksman that he was could always hit with such perfect
aim and precision, the Duke came forward with a bewildered
cautious slowness as though, alarmed by so brilliant a gathering, he
was afraid of treading on ladies’ skirts and interrupting
conversations. A permanent smile—suggesting a “Good King of
Yvetot”—slightly pompous, a half-open hand floating like a shark’s
fin by his side, which he allowed to be vaguely clasped by his old
friends and by the strangers who were introduced to him, enabled
him, without his having to make a single movement, or to interrupt
his genial, lazy, royal progress, to reward the assiduity of them all by
simply murmuring: “How do, my boy; how do, my dear friend;
charmed, Monsieur Bloch; how do, Argencourt;” and, on coming to
myself, who was the most highly favoured, when he had been told
my name: “How do, my young neighbour, how’s your father? What a
splendid fellow he is!” He made no great demonstration except to
Mme. de Villeparisis, who gave him good-day with a nod of her
head, drawing one hand from a pocket of her little apron.
Being formidably rich in a world where everyone was steadily
growing poorer, and having secured the permanent attachment to
his person of the idea of this enormous fortune, he displayed all the
vanity of the great nobleman reinforced by that of the man of
means, the refinement and breeding of the former just managing to
control the latter’s self-sufficiency. One could understand, moreover,
that his success with women, which made his wife so unhappy, was
not due merely to his name and fortune, for he was still extremely
good looking, and his profile retained the purity, the firmness of
outline of a Greek god’s.
“Do you mean to tell me she performed in your house?” M.
d’Argencourt asked the Duchess.
“Well, don’t you see, she came to recite, with a bunch of lilies in
her hand, and more lilies on her dwess.” Mme. de Guermantes
shared her aunt’s affectation of pronouncing certain words in an
exceedingly rustic fashion, but never rolled her ‘r’s like Mme. de
Villeparisis.
Before M. de Norpois, under constraint from his hostess, had
taken Bloch into the little recess where they could talk more freely, I
went up to the old diplomat for a moment and put in a word about
my father’s Academic chair. He tried first of all to postpone the
conversation to another day. I pointed out that I was going to
Balbec. “What? Going again to Balbec? Why, you’re a regular globe-
trotter.” He listened to what I had to say. At the name of Leroy-
Beaulieu, he looked at me suspiciously. I conjectured that he had
perhaps said something disparaging to M. Leroy-Beaulieu about my
father and was afraid of the economist’s having repeated it to him.
All at once he seemed animated by a positive affection for my father.
And after one of those opening hesitations out of which suddenly a
word explodes as though in spite of the speaker, whose irresistible
conviction prevails over his half-hearted efforts at silence: “No, no,”
he said to me with emotion, “your father must not stand. In his own
interest he must not; it is not fair to himself; he owes a certain
respect to his own really great merits, which would be compromised
by such an adventure. He is too big a man for that. If he should be
elected, he will have everything to lose and nothing to gain. He is
not an orator, thank heaven. And that is the one thing that counts
with my dear colleagues, even if you only talk platitudes. Your father
has an important goal in life; he should march straight ahead
towards it, and not allow himself to turn aside to beat bushes, even
the bushes (more thorny for that matter than flowery) of the grove
of Academe. Besides, he would not get many votes. The Academy
likes to keep a postulant waiting for some time before taking him to
its bosom. For the present, there is nothing to be done. Later on, I
don’t say. But he must wait until the Society itself comes in quest of
him. It makes a practice, not a very fortunate practice, a fetish
rather, of the farà da sè of our friends across the Alps. Leroy-
Beaulieu spoke to me about all this in a way I did not at all like. I
pointed out to him, a little sharply perhaps, that a man accustomed
as he is to dealing with colonial imports and metals could not be
expected to understand the part played by the imponderables, as
Bismarck used to say. But, whatever happens, your father must on
no account put himself forward as a candidate. Principis obsta. His
friends would find themselves placed in a delicate position if he
suddenly called upon them for their votes. Indeed,” he broke forth,
with an air of candour, fixing his blue eyes on my face, “I am going
to say a thing that you will be surprised to hear coming from me,
who am so fond of your father. Well, simply because I am fond of
him (we are known as the inseparables—Arcades ambo), simply
because I know the immense service that he can still render to his
country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the
helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I
should not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to
understand that I should not.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the
stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my
vote now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois
repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other
reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe
to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct
converse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say:
“Ah! If it only rested with me!” than for the satisfaction of making
the election which he himself has managed to secure seem more
difficult, a greater distinction. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in
the best interests of you all, I should prefer to see your father
triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words which I
assumed to have been dictated if not by jealousy, at any rate by an
utter lack of any willingness to oblige, and which later on I was to
recall when the course of events had given them a different
meaning.
“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 connexion 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, don’t you know, it is amazing to me that a man can
find any attraction in a person who’s simply silly.”
Bloch, hearing Saint-Loup’s name mentioned and gathering that
he was in Paris, promptly made a remark about him so outrageous
that everybody was shocked. He was beginning to nourish hatreds,
and one felt that he would stop at nothing to gratify them. Once he
had established the principle that he himself was of great moral
worth and that the sort of people who frequented La Boulie (an
athletic club which he supposed to be highly fashionable) deserved
penal servitude, every blow he could get in against them seemed to
him praiseworthy. He went so far once as to speak of a lawsuit
which he was anxious to bring against one of his La Boulie friends.
In the course of the trial he proposed to give certain evidence which
would be entirely untrue, though the defendant would be unable to
impugn his veracity. In this way Bloch (who, incidentally, never put
his plan into action) counted on baffling and infuriating his
antagonist. What harm could there be in that, since he whom he
sought to injure was a man who thought only of doing the “right
thing”, a La Boulie man, and against people like that any weapon
was justified, especially in the hands of a Saint, such as Bloch
himself.
“I say, though, what about Swann?” objected M. d’Argencourt,
who having at last succeeded in understanding the point of his
cousin’s speech, was impressed by her accuracy of observation, and
was racking his brains for instances of men who had fallen in love
with women in whom he himself had seen no attraction.
“Oh, but Swann’s case was quite different,” the Duchess protested.
“It was a great surprise, I admit, because she’s just a well-meaning
idiot, but she was never silly, and she was at one time good looking.”
“Oh, oh!” muttered Mme. de Villeparisis.
“You never thought so? Surely, she had some charming points,
very fine eyes, good hair, she used to dress, and does still dress
wonderfully. Nowadays, I quite agree, she’s horrible, but she has
been a lovely woman in her time. Not that that made me any less
sorry when Charles married her, because it was so unnecessary.” The
Duchess had not intended to say anything out of the common, but
as M. d’Argencourt began to laugh she repeated these last words—
either because she thought them amusing or because she thought it
nice of him to laugh—and looked up at him with a coaxing smile, to
add the enchantment of her femininity to that of her wit. She went
on: “Yes, really, it wasn’t worth the trouble, was it; still, after all, she
did have some charm and I can quite understand anybody’s falling in
love with her, but if you saw Robert’s girl, I assure you, you’ld simply
die of laughter. Oh, I know somebody’s going to quote Augier at me:
‘What matters the bottle so long as one gets drunk?’ Well, Robert
may have got drunk, all right, but he certainly hasn’t shewn much
taste in his choice of a bottle! First of all, would you believe that she
actually expected me to fit up a staircase right in the middle of my
drawing-room. Oh, a mere nothing—what?—and she announced that
she was going to lie flat on her stomach on the steps. And then, if
you’d heard the things she recited, I only remember one scene, but
I’m sure nobody could imagine anything like it: it was called the
Seven Princesses.”
“Seven Princesses! Dear, dear, what a snob she must be!” cried M.
d’Argencourt. “But, wait a minute, why, I know the whole play. The
author sent a copy to the King, who couldn’t understand a word of it
and called on me to explain it to him.”
“It isn’t by any chance, from the Sar Peladan?” asked the historian
of the Fronde, meaning to make a subtle and topical allusion, but in
so low a tone that his question passed unnoticed.
“So you know the Seven Princesses, do you?” replied the Duchess.
“I congratulate you! I only know one, but she’s quite enough; I have
no wish to make the acquaintance of the other six. If they are all like
the one I’ve seen!”
“What a goose!” I thought to myself. Irritated by the coldness of
her greeting, I found a sort of bitter satisfaction in this proof of her
complete inability to understand Maeterlinck. “To think that’s the
woman I walk miles every morning to see. Really, I’m too kind. Well,
it’s my turn now not to want to see her.” Thus I reasoned with
myself; but my words ran counter to my thoughts; they were purely
conversational words such as we say to ourselves at those moments
when, too much excited to remain quietly alone, we feel the need,
for want of another listener, to talk to ourselves, without meaning
what we say, as we talk to a stranger.
“I can’t tell you what it was like,” the Duchess went on; “you
simply couldn’t help laughing. Not that anyone tried; rather the
other way, I’m sorry to say, for the young person was not at all
pleased and Robert has never really forgiven me. Though I can’t say
I’m sorry, actually, because if it had been a success the lady would
perhaps have come again, and I don’t quite see Marie-Aynard
approving of that.”
This was the name given in the family to Robert’s mother, Mme.
de Marsantes, the widow of Aynard de Saint-Loup, to distinguish her
from her cousin, the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, also a Marie,
to whose Christian name her nephews and cousins and brothers-in-
law added, to avoid confusion, either that of her husband or another
of her own, making her Marie-Gilbert or Marie-Hedwige.
“To begin with, there was a sort of rehearsal the night before,
which was a wonderful affair!” went on Mme. de Guermantes in
ironical pursuit of her theme. “Just imagine, she uttered a sentence,
no, not so much, not a quarter of a sentence, and then she stopped;
she didn’t open her mouth—I’m not exaggerating—for a good five
minutes.”
“Oh, I say,” cried M. d’Argencourt.
“With the utmost politeness I took the liberty of hinting to her that
this might seem a little unusual. And she said—I give you her actual
words—‘One ought always to repeat a thing as though one were just
composing it oneself.’ When you think of it, that really is
monumental.”
“But I understood she wasn’t at all bad at reciting poetry,” said
one of the two young men.
“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme. de
Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell that. It
was quite enough to see her come in with her lilies. I knew at once
that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!”
Everybody laughed.
“I hope, my dear aunt, you aren’t angry with me, over my little
joke the other day about the Queen of Sweden. I’ve come to ask
your forgiveness.”
“Oh, no, I’m not at all angry, I even give you leave to eat at my
table, if you’re hungry.—Come along, M. Valmère, you’re the
daughter of the house,” Mme. de Villeparisis went on to the librarian,
repeating a time-honoured pleasantry.
M. de Guermantes sat upright in the armchair in which he had
come to anchor, his hat on the carpet by his side, and examined with
a satisfied smile the plate of little cakes that was being held out to
him.
“Why, certainly, now that I am beginning to feel at home in this
distinguished company, I will take a sponge-cake; they look
excellent.”
“This gentleman makes you an admirable daughter,” commented
M. d’Argencourt, whom the spirit of imitation prompted to keep
Mme. de Villeparisis’s little joke in circulation.
The librarian handed the plate of cakes to the historian of the
Fronde.
“You perform your functions admirably,” said the latter, startled
into speech, and hoping also to win the sympathy of the crowd. At
the same time he cast a covert glance of connivance at those who
had anticipated him.
“Tell me, my dear aunt,” M. de Guermantes inquired of Mme. de
Villeparisis, “who was that rather good-looking man who was going
out just now as I came in? I must know him, because he gave me a
sweeping bow, but I couldn’t place him at all; you know I never can
remember names, it’s such a nuisance,” he added, in a tone of
satisfaction.
“M. Legrandin.”
“Oh, but Oriane has a cousin whose mother, if I’m not mistaken,
was a Grandin. Yes, I remember quite well, she was a Grandin de
l’Epervier.”
 “No,” replied Mme. de Villeparisis, “no relation at all. These are
plain Grandins. Grandins of nothing at all. But they’ld be only too
glad to be Grandins of anything you chose to name. This one has a
sister called Mme. de Cambremer.”
“Why, Basin, you know quite well who’ my aunt means,” cried the
Duchess indignantly. “He’s the brother of that great graminivorous
creature you had the weird idea of sending to call on me the other
day. She stayed a solid hour; I thought I should go mad. But I began
by thinking it was she who was mad when I saw a person I didn’t
know come browsing into the room looking exactly like a cow.”
“Listen, Oriane; she asked me what afternoon you were at home;
I couldn’t very well be rude to her; and besides, you do exaggerate
so, she’s not in the least like a cow,” he added in a plaintive tone,
though not without a quick smiling glance at the audience.
He knew that his wife’s lively wit needed the stimulus of
contradiction, the contradiction of common sense which protests
that one cannot (for instance) mistake a woman seriously for a cow;
by this process Mme. de Guermantes, enlarging upon her original
idea, had been inspired to produce many of her most brilliant
sayings. And the Duke in his innocent fashion helped her, without
seeming to do so, to bring off her effects like, in a railway carriage,
the unacknowledged partner of the three-card player.
“I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like a dozen,”
exclaimed Mme. de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know what
to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my drawing-
room in a hat and heard them ask me how I was. I had half a mind
to say: ‘Please, herd of cattle, you must be making a mistake, you
can’t possibly know me, because you’re a herd of cattle,’ but after
racking my brains over her I came to the conclusion that your
Cambremer woman must be the Infanta Dorothea, who had said she
was coming to see me one day, and is rather bovine also, so that I
was just on the point of saying: ‘Your Royal Highness’ and using the
third person to a herd of cattle. The cut of her dewlap reminded me
rather, too, of the Queen of Sweden. But this massed attack had
been prepared for by long range artillery fire, according to all the
rules of war. For I don’t know how long before, I was bombarded
with her cards; I used to find them lying about all over the house,
on all the tables and chairs, like prospectuses. I couldn’t think what
they were supposed to be advertising. You saw nothing in the house
but ‘Marquis et Marquise de Cambremer’ with some address or other
which I’ve forgotten; you may be quite sure nothing will ever take
me there.”
“But it’s a great distinction to look like a Queen,” said the historian
of the Fronde.
“Gad, sir, Kings and Queens, in these days, don’t amount to
much,” said M. de Guermantes, partly because he liked to be
thought broad-minded and modern, and also so as to not to seem to
attach any importance to his own royal friendships, which he valued
highly.
Bloch and M. de Norpois had returned from the other room and
came towards us.
“Well, sir,” asked Mme. de Villeparisis, “have you been talking to
him about the Dreyfus case?”
M. de Norpois raised his eyes to the ceiling, but with a smile, as
though calling on heaven to witness the monstrosity of the caprices
to which his Dulcinea compelled him to submit. Nevertheless he
spoke to Bloch with great affability of the terrible, perhaps fatal
period through which France was passing. As this presumably meant
that M. de Norpois (to whom Bloch had confessed his belief in the
innocence of Dreyfus) was an ardent anti-Dreyfusard, the
Ambassador’s geniality, his air of tacit admission that his listener was
in the right, of never doubting that they were both of the same
opinion, of being prepared to join forces with him to overthrow the
Government, flattered Bloch’s vanity and aroused his curiosity. What
were the important points which M. de Norpois never specified but
on which he seemed implicitly to affirm that he was in agreement
with Bloch; what opinion, then, did he hold of the case, that could
bring them together? Bloch was all the more astonished at the
mysterious unanimity which seemed to exist between him and M. de
Norpois, in that it was not confined to politics, Mme. de Villeparisis
having spoken at some length to M. de Norpois of Bloch’s literary
work.
 “You are not of your age,” the former Ambassador told him, “and I
congratulate you upon that. You are not of this age in which
disinterested work no longer exists, in which writers offer the public
nothing but obscenities or ineptitudes. Efforts such as yours ought to
be encouraged, and would be, if we had a Government.”
Bloch was flattered by this picture of himself swimming alone amid
a universal shipwreck. But here again he would have been glad of
details, would have liked to know what were the ineptitudes to
which M. de Norpois referred. Bloch had the feeling that he was
working along the same lines as plenty of others; he had never
supposed himself to be so exceptional. He returned to the Dreyfus
case, but did not succeed in elucidating M. de Norpois’s own views.
He tried to induce him to speak of the officers whose names were
appearing constantly in the newspapers at that time; they aroused
more curiosity than the politicians who were involved also, because
they were not, like the politicians, well known already, but, wearing
a special garb, emerging from the obscurity of a different kind of life
and a religiously guarded silence, simply stood up and spoke and
disappeared again, like Lohengrin landing from a skiff drawn by a
swan. Bloch had been able, thanks to a Nationalist lawyer of his
acquaintance, to secure admission to several hearings of the Zola
trial. He would arrive there in the morning and stay until the court
rose, with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee, as though
for the final examination for a degree, and this change of routine
stimulating a nervous excitement which the coffee and the emotional
interest of the trial worked up to a climax, he would come out so
enamoured of everything that had happened in court that, in the
evening, as he sat at home, he would long to immerse himself again
in that beautiful dream and would hurry out, to a restaurant
frequented by both parties, in search of friends with whom he would
go over interminably the whole of the day’s proceedings, and make
up, by a supper ordered in an imperious tone which gave him the
illusion of power, for the hunger and exhaustion of a day begun so
early and unbroken by any interval for luncheon. The human mind,
hovering perpetually between the two planes of experience and
imagination, seeks to fathom the ideal life of the people it knows
and to know the people whose life it has had to imagine. To Bloch’s
questions M. de Norpois replied:
“There are two officers involved in the case now being tried of
whom I remember hearing some time ago from a man in whose
judgment I felt great confidence, and who praised them both highly
—I mean M. de Miribel. They are Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and
Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart.”
“But,” exclaimed Bloch, “the divine Athena, daughter of Zeus, has
put in the mind of one the opposite of what is in the mind of the
other. And they are fighting against one another like two lions.
Colonel Picquart had a splendid position in the Army, but his Moira
has led him to the side that was not rightly his. The sword of the
Nationalists will carve his tender flesh, and he will be cast out as
food for the beasts of prey and the birds that wax fat upon the
bodies of men.”
M. de Norpois made no reply.
“What are those two palavering about over there?” M. de
Guermantes asked Mme. de Villeparisis, indicating M. de Norpois and
Bloch.
“The Dreyfus case.”
“The devil they are. By the way, do you know who is a red-hot
supporter of Dreyfus? I give you a thousand guesses. My nephew
Robert! I can tell you that, at the Jockey, when they heard of his
goings on, there was a fine gathering of the clans, a regular hue and
cry. And as he’s coming up for election next week....”
“Of course,” broke in the Duchess, “if they’re all like Gilbert, who
keeps on saying that all the Jews ought to be sent back to
Jerusalem.”
“Indeed; then the Prince de Guermantes is quite of my way of
thinking,” put in M. d’Argencourt.
The Duke made a show of his wife, but did not love her. Extremely
self-centred, he hated to be interrupted, besides he was in the habit,
at home, of treating her brutally. Convulsed with the twofold rage of
a bad husband when his wife speaks to him, and a good talker when
he is not listened to, he stopped short and transfixed the Duchess
with a glare which made everyone feel uncomfortable.
 “What makes you think we want to hear about Gilbert and
Jerusalem? It’s nothing to do with that. But,” he went on in a gentler
tone, “you will agree that if one of our family were to be pilled at the
Jockey, especially Robert, whose father was chairman for ten years,
it would be a pretty serious matter. What can you expect, my dear,
it’s got ’em on the raw, those fellows; they’re all over it. I don’t
blame them, either; personally, you know that I have no racial
prejudice, all that sort of thing seems to me out of date, and I do
claim to move with the times; but damn it all, when one goes by the
name of ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more
can I say?”
M. de Guermantes uttered the words: “When one goes by the
name of Marquis de Saint-Loup,” with some emphasis. He knew very
well that it was a far greater thing to go by that of Duc de
Guermantes. But if his self-esteem had a tendency to exaggerate if
anything the superiority of the title Duc de Guermantes over all
others, it was perhaps not so much the rules of good taste as the
laws of imagination that urged him thus to attenuate it. Each of us
sees in the brightest colours what he sees at a distance, what he
sees in other people. For the general laws which govern perspective
in imagination apply just as much to dukes as to ordinary mortals.
And not only the laws of imagination, but those of speech. Now,
either of two laws of speech may apply here, one being that which
makes us express ourselves like others of our mental category and
not of our caste. Under this law M. de Guermantes might be, in his
choice of expressions, even when he wished to talk about the
nobility, indebted to the humblest little tradesman, who would have
said: “When one goes by the name of Duc de Guermantes,” whereas
an educated man, a Swann, a Legrandin would not have said it. A
duke may write novels worthy of a grocer, even about life in high
society, titles and pedigrees being of no help to him there, and the
epithet “aristocratic” be earned by the writings of a plebeian. Who
had been, in this instance, the inferior from whom M. de
Guermantes had picked up “when one goes by the name”, he had
probably not the least idea. But another law of speech is that, from
time to time, as there appear and then vanish diseases of which
nothing more is ever heard, there come into being, no one knows
how, spontaneously perhaps or by an accident like that which
introduced into France a certain weed from America, the seeds of
which, caught in the wool of a travelling rug, fell on a railway
embankment, forms of speech which one hears in the same decade
on the lips of people who have not in any way combined together to
use them. So, just as in a certain year I heard Bloch say, referring to
himself, that “the most charming people, the most brilliant, the best
known, the most exclusive had discovered that there was only one
man in Paris whom they felt to be intelligent, pleasant, whom they
could not do without—namely Bloch,” and heard the same phrase
used by countless other young men who did not know him and
varied it only by substituting their own names for his, so I was often
to hear this “when one goes by the name”.
“What can one expect,” the Duke went on, “with the influence he’s
come under; it’s easy to understand.”
“Still it is rather comic,” suggested the Duchess, “when you think
of his mother’s attitude, how she bores us to tears with her Patrie
Française, morning, noon and night.”
“Yes, but there’s not only his mother to be thought of, you can’t
humbug us like that. There’s a damsel, too, a fly-by-night of the
worst type; she has far more influence over him than his mother,
and she happens to be a compatriot of Master Dreyfus. She has
passed on her state of mind to Robert.”
“You may not have heard, Duke, that there is a new word to
describe that sort of mind,” said the librarian, who was Secretary to
the Antirevisionist Committee. “They say ‘mentality’. It means exactly
the same thing, but it has this advantage that nobody knows what
you’re talking about. It is the very latest expression just now, the
‘last word’ as people say.” Meanwhile, having heard Bloch’s name, he
was watching him question M. de Norpois with misgivings which
aroused others as strong though of a different order in the Marquise.
Trembling before the librarian, and always acting the anti-Dreyfusard
in his presence, she dreaded what he would say were he to find out
that she had asked to her house a Jew more or less affiliated to the
“Syndicate”.
 “Indeed,” said the Duke, “‘mentality’, you say; I must make a note
of that; I shall use it some day.” This was no figure of speech, the
Duke having a little pocket-book filled with such “references” which
he used to consult before dinner-parties. “I like ‘mentality’. There are
a lot of new words like that which people suddenly start using, but
they never last. I read somewhere the other day that some writer
was ‘talentuous’. You may perhaps know what it means; I don’t. And
since then, I’ve never come across the word again.”
“But ‘mentality’ is more widely used than ‘talentuous’,” the
historian of the Fronde made his way into the conversation. “I am on
a Committee at the Ministry of Education at which I have heard it
used several times, as well as at my Club, the Volney, and indeed at
dinner at M. Emile Ollivier’s.”
“I, who have not the honour to belong to the Ministry of
Education,” replied the Duke with a feigned humility but with a
vanity so intense that his lips could not refrain from curving in a
smile, nor his eyes from casting round his audience a glance
sparkling with joy, the ironical scorn in which made the poor
historian blush, “I who have not the honour to belong to the Ministry
of Education,” he repeated, relishing the sound of his words, “nor to
the Volney Club (my only clubs are the Union and the Jockey—you
aren’t in the Jockey, I think, sir?” he asked the historian, who,
blushing a still deeper red, scenting an insult and failing to
understand it, began to tremble in every limb.) “I, who am not even
invited to dine with M. Emile Ollivier, I must confess that I had never
heard ‘mentality’. I’m sure you’re in the same boat, Argencourt.
“You know,” he went on, “why they can’t produce the proofs of
Dreyfus’s guilt. Apparently it’s because the War Minister’s wife was
his mistress, that’s what people are saying.”
“Ah! I thought it was the Prime Minister’s wife,” said M.
d’Argencourt.
“I think you’re all equally tiresome about this wretched case,” said
the Duchesse de Guermantes, who, in the social sphere, was always
anxious to shew that she did not allow herself to be led by anyone.
“It can’t make any difference to me, so far as the Jews are
concerned, for the simple reason that I don’t know any of them, and
I intend to remain in that state of blissful ignorance. But on the
other hand I do think it perfectly intolerable that just because
they’re supposed to hold ‘sound’ views and don’t deal with Jewish
tradesmen, or have ‘Down with the Jews’ printed on their
sunshades, we should have a swarm of Durands and Dubois and so
forth, women we should never have known but for this business,
forced down our throats by Marie-Aynard or Victurnienne. I went to
see Marie-Aynard a couple of days ago. It used to be so nice there.
Nowadays one finds all the people one has spent one’s life trying to
avoid, on the pretext that they’re against Dreyfus, and others of
whom you have no idea who they can be.”
“No; it was the War Minister’s wife; at least, that’s the bedside
rumour,” went on the Duke, who liked to flavour his conversation
with certain expressions which he imagined to be of the old school.
“Personally, of course, as everyone knows, I take just the opposite
view to my cousin Gilbert. I am not feudal like him, I would go about
with a negro if he was a friend of mine, and I shouldn’t care two
straws what anybody thought; still after all you will agree with me
that when one goes by the name of Saint-Loup one doesn’t amuse
oneself by running clean against the rails of public opinion, which
has more sense than Voltaire or even my nephew. Nor does one go
in for what I may be allowed to call these acrobatics of conscience a
week before one comes up for a club. It is a bit stiff, really! No, it is
probably that little wench of his that has put him on his high horse. I
expect she told him that he would be classed among the
‘intellectuals’. The intellectuals, they’re the very cream of those
gentry. It’s given rise, by the way, to a rather amusing pun, though a
very naughty one.”
And the Duke murmured, lowering his voice, for his wife’s and M.
d’Argencourt’s benefit, “Mater Semita,” which had already made its
way into the Jockey Club, for, of all the flying seeds in the world,
that to which are attached the most solid wings, enabling it to be
disseminated at the greatest distance from its parent branch, is still
a joke.
“We might ask this gentleman, who has a nerudite air, to explain it
to us,” he went on, indicating the historian. “But it is better not to
repeat it, especially as there’s not a vestige of truth in the
suggestion. I am not so ambitious as my cousin Mirepoix, who
claims that she can trace the descent of her family before Christ to
the Tribe of Levi, and I will undertake to prove that there has never
been a drop of Jewish blood in our family. Still there is no good in
our shutting our eyes to the fact, you may be sure that my dear
nephew’s highly original views are liable to make a considerable stir
at Landerneau. Especially as Fezensac is ill just now, and Duras will
be running the election; you know how he likes to make nuisances,”
concluded the Duke, who had never succeeded in learning the exact
meaning of certain phrases, and supposed “making nuisances” to
mean “making difficulties”.
Bloch tried to pin M. de Norpois down on Colonel Picquart.
“There can be no two opinions;” replied M. de Norpois, “his
evidence had to be taken. I am well aware that, by maintaining this
attitude, I have drawn screams of protest from more than one of my
colleagues, but to my mind the Government were bound to let the
Colonel speak. One can’t dance lightly out of a blind alley like that,
or if one does there’s always the risk of falling into a ditch. As for the
officer himself, his statement gave one, at the first hearing, a most
excellent impression. When one saw him, looking so well in that
smart Chasseur uniform, come into court and relate in a perfectly
simple and frank tone what he had seen and what he had deduced,
and say: ‘On my honor as a soldier’” (here M. de Norpois’s voice
shook with a faint patriotic throb) “‘such is my conviction,’ it is
impossible to deny that the impression he made was profound.”
“There; he is a Dreyfusard, there’s not the least doubt of it,”
thought Bloch.
“But where he entirely forfeited all the sympathy that he had
managed to attract was when he was confronted with the registrar,
Gribelin. When one heard that old public servant, a man who had
only one answer to make,” (here M. de Norpois began to accentuate
his words with the energy of his sincere convictions) “when one
listened to him, when one saw him look his superior officer in the
face, not afraid to hold his head up to him, and say to him in a tone
that admitted of no response: ‘Colonel, sir, you know very well that I
have never told a lie, you know that at this moment, as always, I am
speaking the truth,’ the wind changed; M. Picquart might move
heaven and earth at the subsequent hearings; he made a complete
fiasco.”
“No; evidently he’s an anti-Dreyfusard; it’s quite obvious,” said
Bloch to himself. “But if he considers Picquart a traitor and a liar,
how can he take his revelations seriously, and quote them as if he
found them charming and believed them to be sincere. And if, on the
other hand, he sees in him an honest man easing his conscience,
how can he suppose him to have been lying when he was
confronted with Gribelin?”
“In any case, if this man Dreyfus is innocent,” the Duchess broke
in, “he hasn’t done much to prove it. What idiotic, raving letters he
writes from that island. I don’t know whether M. Esterhazy is any
better, but he does shew some skill in his choice of words, a
different tone altogether. That can’t be very pleasant for the
supporters of M. Dreyfus. What a pity for them there’s no way of
exchanging innocents.” Everybody laughed. “You heard what Oriane
said?” the Duc de Guermantes inquired eagerly of Mme. de
Villeparisis. “Yes; I think it most amusing.” This was not enough for
the Duke. “Well, I don’t know, I can’t say that I thought it amusing;
or rather it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether a
thing is amusing or not. I don’t care about wit.” M. d’Argencourt
protested. “It is probably because I’ve been a Member of Parliament,
where I have listened to brilliant speeches that meant absolutely
nothing. I learned there to value, more than anything, logic. That’s
probably why they didn’t elect me again. Amusing things leave me
cold.” “Basin, don’t play the heavy father like that, my child, you
know quite well that no one admires wit more than you do.” “Please
let me finish. It is just because I am unmoved by a certain type of
humour, that I am often struck by my wife’s wit. For you will find it
based, as a rule, upon sound observation. She reasons like a man;
she states her case like a writer.”
Possibly the explanation of M. de Norpois’s speaking in this way to
Bloch, as though they had been in agreement, may have lain in the
fact that he himself was so keen an anti-Dreyfusard that, finding the
Government not anti-Dreyfusard enough, he was its enemy just as
much as the Dreyfusards. Perhaps because the object to which he
devoted himself in politics was something more profound, situated
on another plane, from which Dreyfusism appeared as an
unimportant modality which did not deserve the attention of a
patriot interested in large questions of foreign policy. Perhaps, rather,
because the maxims of his political wisdom being applicable only to
questions of form, of procedure, of expediency, they were as
powerless to solve questions of fact as in philosophy pure logic is
powerless to tackle the problems of existence; or else because that
very wisdom made him see danger in handling such subjects and so,
in his caution, he preferred to speak only of minor incidents. But
where Bloch made a mistake was in thinking that M. de Norpois,
even had he been less cautious by nature and of a less exclusively
formal cast of mind, could (supposing he would) have told him the
truth as to the part played by Henry, Picquart or du Paty de Clam, or
as to any of the different aspects of the case. The truth, indeed, as
to all these matters Bloch could not doubt that M. de Norpois knew.
How could he fail to know it seeing that he was a friend of all the
Ministers? Naturally, Bloch thought that the truth in politics could be
approximately reconstructed by the most luminous minds, but he
imagined, like the man in the street, that it resided permanently,
beyond the reach of argument and in a material form, in the secret
files of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister, who
imparted it to their Cabinet. Now, even when a political truth does
take the form of written documents, it is seldom that these have any
more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines
that the patient’s disease is inscribed in so many words, when, as a
matter of fact, the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for
study, to be combined with a number of others, which the doctor’s
reasoning powers will take into consideration as a whole and upon
them found his diagnosis. So, too, the truth in politics, when one
goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp
it, eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus
case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession,
followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in opposite
ways by the Dreyfusard Ministers, and by Cavaignac and Cuignet
who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery and
conducted the examination; still more so among the Dreyfusard
Ministers themselves, men of the same shade of Dreyfusism, judging
not only from the same documents but in the same spirit, the part
played by Henry was explained in two entirely different ways, one
set seeing in him an accomplice of Esterhazy, the others assigning
that part to du Paty de Clam, thus rallying in support of a theory of
their opponent Cuignet and in complete opposition to their supporter
Reinach. All that Bloch could elicit from M. de Norpois was that if it
were true that the Chief of Staff, M. de Boisdeffre, had had a secret
communication sent to M. Rochefort, it was evident that a singularly
regrettable irregularity had occurred.
“You may be quite sure that the War Minister must (in petto at
any rate) be consigning his Chief of Staff to the infernal powers. An
official disclaimer would not have been (to my mind) a work of
supererogation. But the War Minister expresses himself very bluntly
on the matter inter pocula. There are certain subjects, moreover,
about which it is highly imprudent to create an agitation over which
one cannot retain control afterwards.”
“But those documents are obviously forged,” put in Bloch.
M. de Norpois made no reply to this, but announced that he did
not approve of the manifestations that were being made by Prince
Henri d’Orléans:
“Besides, they can only ruffle the calm of the pretorium, and
encourage agitations which, looked at from either point of view,
would be deplorable. Certainly we must put a stop to the anti-
militarist conspiracy, but we cannot possibly tolerate, either, a brawl
encouraged by those elements on the Right who instead of serving
the patriotic ideal themselves are hoping to make it serve them.
Heaven be praised, France is not a South American Republic, and
the need has not yet been felt here for a military pronunciamento.”
Bloch could not get him to speak on the question of Dreyfus’s
guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the civil
trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M. de Norpois seemed only
too ready to indicate the consequences of this judgment.
 “If it is a conviction,” he said, “it will probably be quashed, for it is
seldom that, in a case where there has been such a number of
witnesses, there is not some flaw in the procedure which counsel
can raise on appeal. To return to Prince Henri’s outburst, I greatly
doubt whether it has met with his father’s approval.”
“You think Chartres is for Dreyfus?” asked the Duchess with a
smile, her eyes rounded, her cheeks bright, her nose buried in her
plate, her whole manner deliciously scandalised.
“Not at all; I meant only that there runs through the whole family,
on that side, a political sense which we have seen, in the admirable
Princesse Clémentine, carried to its highest power, and which her
son, Prince Ferdinand, has kept as a priceless inheritance. You would
never have found the Prince of Bulgaria clasping Major Esterhazy to
his bosom.”
“He would have preferred a private soldier,” murmured Mme. de
Guermantes, who often met the Bulgarian monarch at dinner at the
Prince de Joinville’s, and had said to him once, when he asked if she
was not envious: “Yes, Sir, of your bracelets.”
“You aren’t going to Mme. de Sagan’s ball this evening?” M. de
Norpois asked Mme. de Villeparisis, to cut short his conversation
with Bloch. My friend had not failed to interest the Ambassador, who
told us afterwards, not without a quaint simplicity, thinking no doubt
of the traces that survived in Bloch’s speech of the neo-Homeric
manner which he had on the whole outgrown: “He is rather
amusing, with that way of speaking, a trifle old fashioned, a trifle
solemn. You expect him to come out with ‘The Learned Sisters’, like
Lamartine or Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. It has become quite
uncommon in the youth of the present day, as it was indeed in the
generation before them. We ourselves were inclined to be romantic.”
But however exceptional his companion may have seemed to him,
M. de Norpois decided that the conversation had lasted long enough.
“No, sir, I don’t go to balls any more,” she replied with a charming
grandmotherly smile. “You’re going, all of you, I suppose? You’re the
right age for that sort of thing,” she added, embracing in a
comprehensive glance M. de Châtellerault, his friend and Bloch.
“Still, I was asked,” she went on, pretending, just for fun, to be