Mme. de Guermantes in thus launching it could not refrain (so far did the love that she bore for her own originality prevail over the deference due to the Princess de Parme) from casting at her other guests a smiling glance of amusement. They too made an effort to smile, at once frightened, bewildered, and above all delighted to think that they were being ear-witnesses of Oriane’s very “latest” and could carry it away with them “red hot.” They were only half shocked, knowing that the Duchess had the knack of strewing the ground with all the Courvoisier prejudices to achieve a vital success more thrilling and more enjoyable. Had she not, within the last few years, brought together Princesse Mathilde and that Duc d’Aumale who had written to the Princess’s own brother the famous letter: “In my family all the men are brave and the women chaste”? And inasmuch as Princes remain princely even at those moments when they appear anxious to forget that they are, the Duc d’Aumale and Princesse Mathilde had enjoyed themselves so greatly at Mme. de Guermantes’s that they had thereafter formed a defensive alliance, with that faculty for forgetting the past which Louis