In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [166]
“I don’t mind saying that I thought him extremely stupid.”
M. Verdurin took it up: “He’s not sincere. He’s a crafty customer, always sitting on the fence, always trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. What a difference between him and Forcheville. There at least you have a man who tells you straight out what he thinks. Either you agree with him or you don’t. Not like the other fellow, who’s never definitely fish or fowl. Did you notice, by the way, that Odette seemed all for Forcheville, and I don’t blame her, either. And besides, if Swann wants to come the man of fashion over us, the champion of distressed duchesses, at any rate the other man has got a title—he’s always Comte de Forcheville,” he concluded with an air of discrimination, as though, familiar with every page of the history of that dignity, he were making a scrupulously exact estimate of its value in relation to others of the sort.
“I may tell you,” Mme Verdurin went on, “that he saw fit to utter some venomous and quite absurd insinuations against Brichot. Naturally, once he saw that Brichot was popular in this house, it was a way of hitting back at us, of spoiling our party. I know his sort, the dear, good friend of the family who runs you down behind your back.”
“Didn’t I say so?” retorted her husband. “He’s simply a failure, one of those small-minded individuals who are envious of anything that’s at all big.”
In reality there was not one of the “faithful” who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but they all took the precaution of tempering their calumnies with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the slightest reservation on Swann’s part, undraped in any such conventional formula as “Of course, I don’t mean to be unkind,” to which he would not have deigned to stoop, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least outspokenness is thought shocking because they have not begun by flattering the tastes of the public and serving up to it the commonplaces to which it is accustomed; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin. In his case as in theirs it was the novelty of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his designs.
Swann was still unconscious of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins’, and continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light, through the admiring eyes of love.
As a rule he met Odette only in the evenings; he was afraid of her growing tired of him if he visited her during the day as well, but, being reluctant to forfeit the place that he held in her thoughts, he was constantly looking out for opportunities of claiming her attention in ways that would not be displeasing to her. If, in a florist’s or a jeweller’s window, a plant or an ornament caught his eye, he would at once think of sending them to Odette, imagining that the pleasure which the casual sight of them had given him would instinctively be felt also by her, and would increase her affection for him; and he would order them to be taken at once to the Rue La Perouse, so as to accelerate the moment when, as she received an offering from him, he might feel himself somehow