In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [162]
“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 to do so as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann upon some unexpected success. “Isn’t that so, Swann? I never see anything of you, do I?—But then, where on earth is one to see him? The fellow spends all his time ensconced with the La Trémoïlles, 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 scarcely went anywhere except to the Verdurins’. But the mere name of a person whom the Verdurins did not know was greeted by them with a disapproving silence. M. Verdurin, dreading the painful impression which the names of these “bores,” especially when flung at her in this tactless fashion in front of all the “faithful,” were bound to make on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anxious solicitude. He saw then that in her determination not to take cognisance of, not to have been affected by the news which had just been imparted to her, not merely to remain dumb, but to have been deaf as well, as we pretend to be when a friend who has offended us attempts to slip into his conversation some excuse which we might appear to be accepting if we heard it without protesting, or when someone 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 of inanimate objects, had suddenly emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her domed forehead was no more than an exquisite piece of sculpture in the round, which the name of those La Trémoïlles with whom Swann was always “ensconced” had failed to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrinkled in a frown, exposed to view two dark cavities that seemed modelled from life. You would have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. She was no more than a wax cast, a plaster mask, a maquette for a monument, a bust for the Palace of Industry, in front of which the public would most certainly gather 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 contrived to impart an almost papal majesty to the whiteness and rigidity of the stone. But the marble at last came to life and let it be understood that it didn’t do to be at all squeamish if one went to that house, since the wife was always drunk 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 imperiously 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 retort, “And a lot of good may it do them!” Instead of which, Swann merely smiled, in a manner which intimated that he could not, of course, take such an outrageous statement seriously. M. Verdurin, who was still casting furtive glances at his wife, saw with regret and understood only