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.