“You must speak loud,” she warned Bloch, “he’s a little deaf, but he will tell you anything you want to know; he knew Bismarck very well, and Cavour. That is so, isn’t it;” she raised her voice, “you knew Bismarck well?” “Have you got anything on the stocks?” M. de Norpois asked me with a knowing air as he shook my hand warmly. I took the opportunity to relieve him politely of the hat which he had felt obliged to bring ceremonially into the room, for I saw that it was my own which he had inadvertently taken. “You shewed me a somewhat laboured little thing in which you went in for a good deal of hair-splitting. I gave you my opinion quite frankly; what you had written was literally not worth the trouble of putting it on paper. Are you thinking of letting us have anything else? You were greatly smitten with Bergotte, if I remember rightly.” “You’re not to say anything against Bergotte,” put in the Duchess. “I don’t dispute his talent as a painter; no one would, Duchess. He understands all about etching, if not brush-work on a large scale like M. Cherbuliez. But it seems to me that in these days we have a tendency to confuse the arts, and forget that the novelist’s business is rather to weave a plot and edify his readers than to fiddle away at producing a frontispiece or tailpiece in drypoint. I shall be seeing your father on Sunday at our good friend A. J.’s,” he went on, turning again to myself. I had hoped for a moment, when I saw him talking to Mme. de Guermantes, that he would perhaps afford me, for getting myself asked to her house, the help he had refused me for getting to Mme. Swann’s. “Another of my great favourites,” I told him, “is Elstir. It seems the Duchesse de Guermantes has some wonderful examples of his work, particularly that admirable _Bunch of Radishes_ which I remember at the Exhibition and should so much like to see again; what a masterpiece that is!” And indeed, if I had been a prominent person and had been asked to state what picture I liked best, I should have named this _Bunch of Radishes_. “A masterpiece?” cried M. de Norpois with a surprised and reproachful air. “It makes no pretence of being even a picture, it is merely a sketch.” (He was right.) “If you label a clever little thing of that sort ‘masterpiece’, what have you got to say about Hébert’s _Virgin_ or Dagnan-Bouveret?” “I heard you refusing to let him bring Robert’s woman,” said Mme. de Guermantes to her aunt, after Bloch had taken the Ambassador aside. “I don’t think you’ll miss much, she’s a perfect horror, as you know, without a vestige of talent, and besides she’s grotesquely ugly.” “Do you mean to say, you know her, Duchess?” asked M. d’Argencourt.