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.