go-between is either lacking in foresight or else singularly disinterested.) He had conceded only that Odette might exchange visits with Mme Verdurin 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 defaulted on 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 was totally devoid of talent—in spite of which she made the most strenuous efforts, to quote one of her favourite expressions, to “attract” him), the little group had its “diehards” too. And these—though ignorant of those refinements of convention which often dissuade people from the extreme attitude one would like 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 relations with Odette and thus deprive her of the satisfaction of saying with a laugh: “We seldom go to the Mistress’s 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, dutiful spouse . . .” 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 on Odette. 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, seeing more than one strange face in the room, might be led to believe that she was mixing with the cream of the aristocracy, a device which proved so successful that Mme Verdurin said to her husband that evening with profound contempt: “Charming people, her friends! I met all the flower of Reaction!”
Odette was living, with respect to Mme Verdurin, under a converse illusion. Not that the latter’s salon had even begun, at that time, to develop into what we shall one day see it become. Mme Verdurin had not yet reached the period of incubation in which one dispenses with the big parties where the few brilliant specimens recently acquired would be lost in the crowd, and prefers to wait until the generative force of the ten just men 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 by way of which Odette stood some chance of arriving at an identical goal, of breaking through, that the latter remained in total ignorance 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 hasn’t the basis for it: she doesn’t know anyone. And then, to do her justice, I must say that she seems quite content with things as they are. No, what she likes are her Wednesdays, good talkers.” And in her heart 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, although they did no more than discriminate between shades of the non-existent, sculpture the void, and were, strictly 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.”
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