For the first few moments after the little group had swept into the carriage, I could not even speak to Cottard, for he was completely breathless, not so much from having run in order not to miss the train as from astonishment at having caught it at the last second. He felt more than the joy of success, almost the hilarity of a merry prank. “Ah! that was a good one!” he said when he had recovered himself. “A minute later! ’Pon my soul, that’s what they call arriving in the nick of time!” he added with a wink, intended not so much to inquire whether the expression was apt, for he now overflowed with confidence, but to express his self-satisfaction. At length he was able to introduce me to the other members of the little clan. I was dismayed to see that they were almost all in the dress which in Paris is called a “smoking.” I had forgotten that the Verdurins were beginning to make tentative moves in the direction of fashionable ways, moves which, slowed down by the Dreyfus case, accelerated by the “new” music, they in fact denied, and would continue to deny until they were complete, like those military objectives which a general does not announce until he has reached them, so as not to appear defeated if he fails. Society for its part was quite prepared to go half-way to meet them. At the moment it had reached the point of regarding them as people to whose house nobody in Society went but who were not in the least perturbed by the fact. The Verdurin salon was understood to be a Temple of Music. It was there, people affirmed, that Vinteuil had found inspiration and encouragement. And although Vinteuil’s sonata remained wholly unappreciated and almost unknown, his name, referred to as that of the greatest contemporary composer, enjoyed an extraordinary prestige. Finally, certain young men of the Faubourg having decided that they ought to be as well educated as the middle classes, three of them had studied music and among these Vinteuil’s sonata enjoyed an enormous vogue. They would speak of it, on returning to their homes, to the intelligent mothers who had encouraged them to improve their minds. And, taking an interest in their sons’ studies, these mothers would gaze with a certain respect at Mme Verdurin in her front box at concerts, following the music from the score. So far, this latent social success of the Verdurins had expressed itself in two facts only. In the first place, Mme Verdurin would say of the Princesse de Caprarola: “Ah! she’s intelligent, that one, she’s a charming woman. What I cannot endure are the imbeciles, the people who bore me—they drive me mad.” Which would have made anybody at all perspicacious realise that the Princesse de Caprarola, a woman who moved in the highest society, had called upon Mme Verdurin. She had even mentioned the Verdurins’ name in the course of a visit of condolence which she had paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband, and had asked whether she knew them. “What name did you say?” Odette had asked with sudden wistfulness. “Verdurin? Oh, yes, of course,” she had continued glumly, “I don’t know them, or rather, I know them without really knowing them, they’re people I used to meet with friends years ago, they’re quite nice.” When the Princesse de Caprarola had gone, Odette regretted not having told the bare truth. But the immediate falsehood was not the fruit of her calculations, but the revelation of her fears and her desires. She denied not what it would have been adroit to deny, but what she would have liked not to be the case, even if her interlocutor was bound to hear an hour later that it was indeed the case. A little later she had recovered her self-assurance, and would even anticipate questions by saying, so as not to appear to be afraid of them: “Mme Verdurin, why, I used to know her terribly well,” with an affectation of humility, like a great lady who tells you that she has taken the tram. “There has been a great deal of talk about the Verdurins lately,” Mme de Souvré would remark. Odette, with the smiling disdain of a duchess, would reply: “Yes, I do seem to have heard a lot about them lately. Every now and then there are new people like that who arrive in society,” without reflecting that she herself was among the newest. “The Princesse de Caprarola has dined there,” Mme de Souvré would continue. “Ah!” Odette would reply, accentuating her smile, “that doesn’t surprise me. That sort of thing always begins with the Princesse de Caprarola, and then someone else follows suit, like Comtesse Molé.” Odette, in saying this, appeared to be filled with a profound contempt for the two great ladies who made a habit of “house-warming” in recently established salons. One felt from her tone that the implication was that she, Odette, like Mme de Souvré, was not the sort of person to let herself in for that sort of thing.
After the admission that Mme Verdurin had made of the Princesse de Caprarola’s intelligence, the second indication that the Verdurins were conscious of their future destiny was that (without, of course, their having formally requested it) they were most anxious that people should now come to dine with them in evening dress. M. Verdurin could now have been greeted without shame by his nephew, the one who was “a wash-out.”
Among those who entered my carriage at Graincourt was Saniette, who long ago had been driven from the Verdurins’ by his cousin Forcheville, but had since returned. His faults, from the social point of view, had originally been—notwithstanding his superior qualities—somewhat similar to Cottard’s: shyness, anxiety to please, fruitless attempts to succeed in doing so. But if the course of life, by making Cottard assume (if not at the Verdurins’, where, because of the influence that past associations exert over us when we find ourselves in familiar surroundings, he had remained more or less the same, at least in his practice, in his hospital work, and at the Academy of Medicine) an outer shell of coldness, disdain, gravity, that became more and more pronounced as he trotted out his puns to his indulgent students, had created a veritable gulf between the old Cottard and the new, the same defects had on the contrary become more extreme in Saniette the more he sought to correct them. Conscious that he was frequently boring, that people did not listen to him, instead of then slackening his pace as Cottard would have done, and forcing their attention by an air of authority, not only did he try to win forgiveness for the unduly serious turn of his conversation by adopting a playful tone, but he speeded up his delivery, rushed his remarks, used abbreviations in order to appear less long-winded, more familiar with the matters of which he spoke, and succeeded only, by making them unintelligible, in appearing interminable. His self-assurance was not like that of Cottard, who so petrified his patients that when other people lauded his social affability they would reply: “He’s a different man when he receives you in his consulting room, you with your face to the light, and he with his back to it, and those piercing eyes.” It failed to make any effect, one felt that it cloaked an excessive shyness, that the merest trifle would be enough to dispel it. Saniette, whose friends had always told him that he was wanting in self-confidence, and who had indeed seen men whom he rightly considered greatly inferior to himself obtain with ease the successes that were denied to him, now never began a story without smiling at its drollery, fearing lest a serious air might make his hearers underestimate the value of his wares. Sometimes, taking on trust the humour which he himself appeared to see in what he was about to say, his audience would oblige him with a general silence. But the story would fall flat. A kind-hearted fellow-guest would sometimes give Saniette the private, almost secret encouragement of a smile of approbation, conveying it to him furtively, without attracting attention, as one slips a note into someone’s hand. But nobody went so far as to assume the responsibility, to risk the public backing of an honest laugh. Long after the story was ended and had fallen flat, Saniette, crestfallen, would remain smiling to himself, as though relishing in it and for himself the delectation which he pretended to find adequate and which the others had not felt.
As for the sculptor Ski—so styled on account of the difficulty they found in pronouncing his Polish surname, and because he himself, since he had begun to move in a certain social sphere, affected not to wish to be associated with his perfectly respectable but slightly boring and very numerous relations—he had, at forty-five and distinctly ugly, a sort of boyishness, a dreamy wistfulness which was the result of his having been,
until the age of ten, the most ravishing child prodigy imaginable, the darling of all the ladies. Mme Verdurin maintained that he was more of an artist than Elstir. Any resemblance that there may have been between them was, however, purely external. It was sufficient to make Elstir, who had met Ski once, feel for him the profound repulsion that is inspired in us not so much by the people who are completely different from us as by those who are less satisfactory versions of ourselves, in whom are displayed our less attractive qualities, the faults of which we have cured ourselves, unpleasantly reminding us of how we must have appeared to certain other people before we became what we now are. But Mme Verdurin thought that Ski had more temperament than Elstir because there was no art in which he did not have some aptitude, and she was convinced that he would have developed that aptitude into talent if he had been less indolent. This indolence seemed to the Mistress to be actually an additional gift, being the opposite of hard work which she regarded as the lot of people devoid of genius. Ski would paint anything you asked, on cuff-links or on lintels. He sang like a professional and played from memory, giving the piano the effect of an orchestra, less by his virtuosity than by his vamped basses which suggested the inability of the fingers to indicate that at a certain point the cornet entered, which in any case he would imitate with his lips. Searching for words when he spoke so as to convey an interesting impression, just as he would pause before banging out a chord with the exclamation “Ping!” to bring out the brass, he was regarded as being marvellously intelligent, but as a matter of fact his ideas boiled down to two or three, extremely limited. Bored with his reputation for whimsicality, he had taken it into his head to show that he was a practical, down-to-earth person, whence a triumphant affectation of fake precision, of fake common sense, aggravated by his having no memory and a fund of information that was always inaccurate. The movements of his head, his neck and his limbs would have been graceful if he had still been nine years old, with golden curls, a wide lace collar and red leather bootees. Having arrived at Graincourt station in the company of Cottard and Brichot with time to spare, he and Cottard had left Brichot in the waiting-room and had gone for a stroll. When Cottard proposed to turn back, Ski had replied: “But there’s no hurry. It isn’t the local train today, it’s the departmental train.” Delighted by the effect that this refinement of accuracy produced upon Cottard, he added, with reference to himself: “Yes, because Ski loves the arts, because he models in clay, people think he’s not practical. Nobody knows this line better than I do.” Nevertheless, when they had turned back towards the station, Cottard, all of a sudden catching sight of the smoke of the approaching train, had let out a bellow and exclaimed: “We shall have to run like the wind.” And they had in fact arrived with not a moment to spare, the distinction between local and departmental trains having never existed except in the mind of Ski.
“But isn’t the Princess on the train?” came in ringing tones from Brichot, whose huge spectacles, glittering like the reflectors that throat specialists attach to their foreheads to see into their patients’ larynxes, seemed to have taken their life from the Professor’s eyes, and, possibly because of the effort he made to adjust his sight to them, seemed themselves to be looking, even at the most trivial moments, with sustained attention and extraordinary fixity. Brichot’s malady, as it gradually deprived him of his sight, had revealed to him the beauties of that sense, just as, frequently, we have to make up our minds to part with some object, to make a present of it for instance, in order to study it, regret it, admire it.
“No, no, the Princess went over to Maineville with some of Mme Verdurin’s guests who were taking the Paris train. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Mme Verdurin, who had some business at Saint-Mars, may be with her! In that case, she’ll be coming with us, and we shall all travel together, which will be delightful. We shall have to keep our eyes skinned at Maineville and see what we shall see! Ah, well, never mind—we certainly came very near to missing the bus. When I saw the train I was flabbergasted. That’s what you call arriving at the psychological moment. What if we’d missed the train and Mme Verdurin had seen the carriages come back without us? You can just picture it,” added the doctor, who had not yet recovered from his excitement. “I must say we really are having quite a jaunt. Eh, Brichot, what have you to say about our little escapade?” inquired the doctor with a note of pride.
“Upon my soul,” replied Brichot, “why, yes, if you’d found the train gone, that would have taken the gilt off the trumpets, as Villemain, our late professor of eloquence, would have said.”
But I, engrossed from the very first by these people whom I did not know, was suddenly reminded of what Cottard had said to me in the ballroom of the little casino, and, as though it were possible for an invisible link to join an organ to the images of one’s memory, the image of Albertine pressing her breasts against Andrée’s brought a terrible pain to my heart. This pain did not last: the idea of Albertine’s having relations with women seemed no longer possible since the occasion, forty-eight hours earlier, when the advances she had made to Saint-Loup had excited in me a new jealousy which had made me forget the old. I was innocent enough to believe that one taste necessarily excludes another.
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