• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1461 0

for me to be sitting in Swann’s library, it was the attachment to those objects—which might have been the ugliest in the world—of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had for so many years located in that room and which still impregnated it; similarly the multitude of mirrors, of silver-backed brushes, of altars to Saint Anthony of Padua carved and painted by the most eminent artists, her friends, counted for nothing in the feeling of my own unworthiness and of her regal benevolence which was aroused in me when Mme Swann received me for a moment in her bedroom, in which three beautiful and impressive creatures, her first, second and third lady’s-maids, smilingly prepared for her the most marvellous toilettes, and towards which, on the order conveyed to me by the footman in knee-breeches that Madame wished to say a few words to me, I would make my way along the tortuous path of a corridor perfumed for the whole of its length with the precious essences which ceaselessly wafted from her dressing-room their fragrant exhalations.

When Mme Swann had returned to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing, for even with only two people in the room, and as though she had to cope with all the “chums” at once, she would raise her voice, ejaculate her words, as she had so often in the “little clan” heard the “Mistress” do, at the moments when she “led the conversation.” The expressions which we have recently borrowed from other people being those which, for a time at least, we are fondest of using, Mme Swann used to select sometimes those which she had learned from distinguished people whom her husband had not been able to avoid introducing to her (it was from them that she derived the mannerism which consists in suppressing the article or demonstrative pronoun before an adjective qualifying a person’s name), sometimes others more vulgar (such as “He’s a mere nothing!”—the favourite expression of one of her friends), and tried to place them in all the stories which, from a habit formed in the “little clan,” she loved to tell. She would follow these up automatically with, “I do love that story!” or “Do admit, it’s a very good story!” which came to her, through her husband, from the Guermantes whom she did not know.

Mme Swann had left the dining-room, but her husband, having just returned home, would make his appearance among us in turn. “Do you know if your mother is alone, Gilberte?” “No, Papa, she still has some visitors.” “What, still? At seven o’clock! It’s appalling. The poor woman must be absolutely broken. It’s odious.” (At home I had always heard the first syllable of this word pronounced with a long “o,” like “ode,” but M. and Mme Swann made it short, as in “odd.”) “Just think of it; ever since two o’clock this afternoon!” he went on, turning to me. “And Camille tells me that between four and five he let in at least a dozen people. Did I say a dozen? I believe he told me fourteen. No, a dozen; I don’t remember. When I came home I had quite forgotten it was her ‘day,’ and when I saw all those carriages outside the door I thought there must be a wedding in the house. And just now, while I’ve been in the library for a short while, the bell has never stopped ringing; upon my word, it’s given me quite a headache. And are there a lot of them in there still?” “No; only two.” “Who are they, do you know?” “Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps.” “Oh! the wife of the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Public Works.” “I know her husband works in some Ministry or other, but I don’t know what as,” Gilberte would say in a babyish manner.

“What’s that? You silly child, you talk as if you were two years old. What do you mean: ‘works in some Ministry or other’ indeed! He’s nothing less than Chief Secretary, head of the whole show, and what’s more—what on earth am I thinking of? Upon my word, I’m getting as stupid as yourself: he isn’t the Chief Secretary, he’s the Permanent Secretary.”

“How should I know? Is that supposed to mean a lot, being Permanent Secretary?” answered Gilberte, who never let slip an opportunity