The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen and D’Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind’s eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once “put in” the people he meets. This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one can “read between the lines,” “unmask” the characters. After all, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors. M. de Guermantes considered “quite all right” only the gentleman who did the funeral notices in the Gaulois . He, at any rate, confined himself to including M.