had several good reasons for this stipulation, though, had he had none, he would have made it just the same in obedience to a law of ingratitude which admits no exception, and proves that every “go-between” is either lacking in foresight or else singularly disinterested.) He had conceded only that Odette and
Mme. Verdurin might exchange visits once a year, and even this seemed excessive to some of the “faithful,” indignant at the insult offered to the “Mistress” who for so many years had treated Odette and even Swann himself as the spoiled children of her house. For if it contained false brethren who “failed” upon certain evenings in order that they might secretly accept an invitation from Odette, ready, in the event of discovery, with the excuse that they were curious to meet Bergotte (although the Mistress assured them that he never went to the Swanns’, and even if he did had no vestige of talent, really—in spite of which she was making the most strenuous efforts, to quote one of her favourite expressions, to “attract” him), the little group had its “diehards” also. And these, though ignorant of those conventional refinements which often dissuade people from the extreme attitude one would have liked to see them adopt in order to annoy someone else, would have wished
Mme. Verdurin, but had never managed to prevail upon her to sever all connection with Odette, and thus deprive her of the satisfaction of saying, with a mocking laugh: “We go to the Mistress’s very seldom now, since the Schism. It was all very well while my husband was still a bachelor, but when one is married, you know, it isn’t always so easy. … If you must know,
M. Swann can’t abide old Ma Verdurin, and he wouldn’t much like the idea of my going there regularly, as I used to. And I, as a dutiful spouse, don’t you see … ?” Swann would accompany his wife to their annual evening there but would take care not to be in the room when
Mme. Verdurin came to call. And so, if the “Mistress” was in the drawing-room, the Prince d’Agrigente would enter it alone. Alone, too, he was presented to her by Odette, who preferred that
Mme. Verdurin should be left in ignorance of the names of her humbler guests, and so might, seeing more than one strange face in the room, be led to believe that she was mixing with the cream of the aristocracy, a device which proved so far successful that
Mme. Verdurin said to her husband, that evening, with profound contempt: “Charming people, her friends! I met all the fine flower of the Reaction!” Odette was living, with respect to
Mme. Verdurin, under a converse illusion. Not that the latter’s salon had ever begun, at that time, to develop into what we shall one day see it to have become.
Mme. Verdurin had not yet reached the period of incubation in which one dispenses with one’s big parties, where the few brilliant specimens recently acquired would be lost in too numerous a crowd, and prefers to wait until the generative force of the ten righteous whom one has succeeded in attracting shall have multiplied those ten seventy-fold. As Odette was not to be long now in doing,
Mme. Verdurin did indeed entertain the idea of “Society” as her final objective, but her zone of attack was as yet so restricted, and moreover so remote from that in which Odette had some chance of arriving at an identical goal, of breaking the line of defence, that the latter remained absolutely ignorant of the strategic plans which the “Mistress” was elaborating. And it was with the most perfect sincerity that Odette, when anyone spoke to her of
Mme. Verdurin as a snob, would answer, laughing, “Oh, no, quite the opposite! For one thing, she never gets a chance of being a snob; she doesn’t know anyone. And then, to do her justice, I must say that she seems quite pleased not to know anyone. No, what she likes are her Wednesdays, and people who talk well.” And in her hearts of hearts she envied
Mme. Verdurin (for all that she did not despair of having herself, in so eminent a school, succeeded in acquiring them) those arts to which the “Mistress” attached such paramount importance, albeit they did but discriminate between shades of the Nonexistent, sculpture the void, and were, properly speaking, the Arts of Nonentity: to wit those, in the lady of a house, of knowing how to “bring people together,” how to “group,” to “draw out,” to “keep in the background,” to act as a “connecting link.”
In any case, Mme. Swann’s friends were impressed when they saw in her house a lady of whom they were accustomed to think only as in her own, in an inseparable setting of her guests, amid the whole of her little group which they were astonished to behold thus suggested, summarised, assembled, packed into a single armchair in the bodily form of the “Mistress,” the hostess turned visitor, muffled in her cloak with its grebe trimming, as shaggy as the white skins that carpeted that drawing-room embowered in which Mme. Verdurin was a drawing-room in herself. The more timid among the women thought it prudent to retire, and using the plural, as people do when they mean to hint to the rest of the room that it is wiser not to tire a convalescent who is out of bed for the first time: “Odette,” they murmured, “we are going to leave you.” They envied Mme. Cottard, whom the “Mistress” called by her Christian name. “Can I drop you anywhere?” Mme. Verdurin asked her, unable to bear the thought that one of the faithful was going to remain behind instead of following her from the room. “Oh, but this lady has been so very kind as to say, she’ll take me,” replied Mme. Cottard, not wishing to appear to be forgetting, when approached by a more
