«Do you see much of M. Swann?» asked Mme. Verdurin.
«Oh dear, no!» he answered, and then, thinking that if he made himself pleasant to Swann he might find favour with Odette, he decided to take this opportunity of flattering him by speaking of his fashionable friends, but speaking as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann upon some undeserved good fortune: «Isn’t that so, Swann? I never see anything of you, do I?—But then, where on earth is one to see him? The creature spends all his time shut up with the La Trémoïlles, with the Laumes and all that lot!» The imputation would have been false at any time, and was all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had given up going to almost any house but the Verdurins’. But the mere names of families whom the Verdurins did not know were received by them in a reproachful silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression which the mention of these ‘bores,’ especially when flung at her in this tactless fashion, and in front of all the ‘faithful,’ was bound to make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolution to take no notice, to have escaped contact, altogether, with the news which had just been addressed to her, not merely to remain dumb but to have been deaf as well, as we pretend to be when a friend who has been in the wrong attempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we should appear to be accepting, should we appear to have heard it without protesting, or when some one utters the name of an enemy, the very mention of whom in our presence is forbidden; Mme. Verdurin, so that her silence should have the appearance, not of consent but of the unconscious silence which inanimate objects preserve, had suddenly emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her rounded forehead was nothing, now, but an exquisite study in high relief, which the name of those La Trémoïlles, with whom Swann was always ‘shut up,’ had failed to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrinkled in a frown, exposed to view two dark cavities that were, surely, modelled from life. You would have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. It was all no more, however, than a wax cast, a mask in plaster, the sculptor’s design for a monument, a bust to be exhibited in the Palace of Industry, where the public would most certainly gather in front of it and marvel to see how the sculptor, in expressing the unchallengeable dignity of the Verdurins, as opposed to that of the La Trémoïlles or Laumes, whose equals (if not, indeed, their betters) they were, and the equals and betters of all other ‘bores’ upon the face of the earth, had managed to invest with a majesty that was almost Papal the whiteness and rigidity of his stone. But the marble at last grew animated and let it be understood that it didn’t do to be at all squeamish if one went to that house, since the woman was always tipsy and the husband so uneducated that he called a corridor a ‘collidor’!
«You’d need to pay me a lot of money before I’d let any of that lot set foot inside my house,» Mme. Verdurin concluded, gazing imperially down on Swann.
She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to echo the holy simplicity of the pianist’s aunt, who at once exclaimed: «To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody to go near them; I’m sure I should be afraid; one can’t be too careful. How can people be so common as to go running after them?»
But he might, at least, have replied, like Forcheville: «Gad, she’s a duchess; there are still plenty of people who are impressed by that sort of thing,» which would at least have permitted Mme. Verdurin the final retort, «And a lot of good may it do them!» Instead of which, Swann merely smiled, in a manner which shewed, quite clearly, that he could not, of course, take such an absurd suggestion seriously. M. Verdurin, who was still casting furtive and intermittent glances at his wife, could see with regret, and could understand only too well that she was now inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who cannot succeed in stamping out a heresy; and so, in the hope of bringing Swann round to a retractation (for the courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the ‘other side’), he broke in:
«Tell us frankly, now, what you think of them yourself. We shan’t repeat it to them, you may be sure.»
To which Swann answered: «Why, I’m not in the least afraid of the Duchess (if it is of the La Trémoïlles that you’re speaking). I can assure you that everyone likes going to see her. I don’t go so far as to say that she’s at all ‘deep’—» he pronounced the word as if it meant something ridiculous, for his speech kept the traces of certain mental habits which the recent change in his life, a rejuvenation illustrated by his passion for music, had inclined him temporarily to discard, so that at times he would actually state his views with considerable warmth—»but I am quite sincere when I say that she is intelligent, while her husband is positively a bookworm. They are charming people.»
His explanation was terribly effective; Mme. Verdurin now realised that this one state of unbelief would prevent her ‘little nucleus’ from ever attaining to complete unanimity, and was unable to restrain herself, in her fury at the obstinacy of this wretch who could not see what anguish his words were causing her, but cried aloud, from the depths of her tortured heart, «You may think so if you wish, but at least you need not say so to us.»
«It all depends upon what you call intelligence.» Forcheville felt that it was his turn to be brilliant. «Come now, Swann, tell us what you mean by intelligence.»
«There,» cried Odette, «that’s one of the big things I beg him to tell me about, and he never will.»
«Oh, but…» protested Swann.
«Oh, but nonsense!» said Odette.
«A water-butt?» asked the Doctor.
«To you,» pursued Forcheville, «does intelligence mean what they call clever talk; you know, the sort of people who worm their way into society?»
«Finish your sweet, so that they can take your plate away!» said Mme. Verdurin sourly to Saniette, who was lost in thought and had stopped eating. And then, perhaps a little ashamed of her rudeness, «It doesn’t matter; take your time about it; there’s no hurry; I only reminded you because of the others, you know; it keeps the servants back.»
«There is,» began Brichot, with a resonant smack upon every syllable, «a rather curious definition of intelligence by that pleasing old anarchist Fénelon…»
«Just listen to this!» Mme. Verdurin rallied Forcheville and the Doctor. «He’s going to give us Fénelon’s definition of intelligence. That’s interesting. It’s not often you get a chance of hearing that!»
But Brichot was keeping Fénelon’s definition until Swann should have given his own. Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant tournament of dialectic which Mme. Verdurin was rejoicing at being able to offer to Forcheville.
«You see, it’s just the same as with me!» Odette was peevish. «I’m not at all sorry to see that I’m not the only one he doesn’t find quite up to his level.»
«These de La Trémouailles whom Mme. Verdurin has exhibited to us as so little to be desired,» inquired Brichot, articulating vigorously, «are they, by any chance, descended from the couple whom that worthy old snob, Sévigné, said she was delighted to know, because it was so good for her peasants? True, the Marquise had another reason, which in her case probably came first, for she was a thorough journalist at heart, and always on the look-out for ‘copy.’ And, in the journal which she used to send regularly to her daughter, it was Mme. de La Trémouaille, kept well-informed through all her grand connections, who supplied the foreign politics.»
«Oh dear, no. I’m quite sure they aren’t the same family,» said Mme. Verdurin desperately.
Saniette who, ever since he had surrendered his untouched plate to the butler, had been plunged once more in silent meditation, emerged finally to tell them, with a nervous laugh, a story of how he had once dined with the Duc de La Trémoïlle, the point of which was that the Duke did not know that George Sand was the pseudonym of a woman. Swann, who really liked Saniette, felt bound
