THE DUCHESSE AND ALBERTINE III
Avenue Gabriel had happened only yesterday. But by employing
an impossible means in pursuit of an unattainable object he had
shown an unconscious desire for failure; and a possible latent
motive is revealed by the effect that his failure soon produced.
He was now deterred from falling in love with mother-images by
the fear of reopening the wound he had goaded the countess into
inflicting. He could still fall unsuccessfully in love with a young
girl, and did so, for the last time for many years, in the following
summer. But his concealed perversion had been using the self-
sought failure of his early loves, however sincere they had been,
to bar all way~ that led from itself; and the process was now nearly
complete.
Mme de Chevigne, now in her middle thirties, had married in
1879 Comte Adheaume de Chevigne, a gentleman-in-waiting of
the Comte de Chambord, the dispossessed heir to the throne of
France, known to his adherents as Henri V. Count Adheaume
was a tall, bald gentleman with a pink, angular face, and a manner
SO breezy that when he came into the room people half expected
the doors and windows to rattle. For eight months of the year,
until his exiled master's death in 1883, he served at the gloomy
castle of F rohsdorf in Austria, amid a parody of the frozen
etiquette of Versailles. For a few weeks in every year his wife
accompanied him, and so became well-acquainted with the
ancient courtiers whom the Duchesse de Guermantes called 'the
old Frohsdorfs'.l One day when driving out with her deaf
mistress she remarked to their footman: "Oh, Joseph, how bored
I'm going to be to-day," and was horrified when the royal lady,
whose hearing happened to be better than usual that morning,
replied: "My poor child, how sorry I am to hear it!" But for the
rest of the year she was free in Paris. At first she preferred a some-
what Bohemian society of artists and singers, but gradually she
acquired the friendship of a group of elderly, intelligent clubmen
who liked to hear her talk-'she is an eighteenth-century woman,
whose emotions turn instantaneously into wit,' wrote Proust's
friend Reynaldo Hahn. All were intimate friends of Charles Haas,
though we are not told that he was among them. Punctually at
two o'clock, immediately after lunch, her butler Gustave would
admit the Marquis du Lau, Comte Joseph de Gontaut-Biron,
Marquis Henri de Breteuil, Comte Costa de Beauregard and the
III, 36