“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.