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By Root 1533 0

to know aroused more curiosity than admiration. At the name of Mme Trombert, my mother exclaimed: “Ah! there’s a new recruit who will bring in others.” And as though she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid, and violent manner in which Mme Swann conquered her new connections and a colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe: “Now that the Tromberts have been subdued, the neighbouring tribes will soon surrender.” If she had passed Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us when she came home: “I saw Mme Swann in all her war-paint; she must have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the Massachutoes, or the Singhalese, or the Tromberts.” And so with all the new people whom I told her that I had seen in that somewhat composite and artificial society, to which they had often been brought with some difficulty and from widely different worlds, Mamma would at once divine their origin, and, speaking of them as of trophies dearly bought, would say: “Brought back from the expedition against the so-and-so!”

As for Mme Cottard, my father was astonished that Mme Swann could see anything to be gained from inviting so utterly undistinguished a woman to her house, and said: “In spite of the Professor’s position, I must say that I cannot understand it.” Mamma, on the other hand, understood very well; she knew that a great deal of the pleasure which a woman finds in entering a class of society different from that in which she has previously lived would be lacking if she had no means of keeping her old associates informed of those others, relatively more brilliant, with whom she has replaced them. For this, she requires an eye-witness who may be allowed to penetrate this new, delicious world (as a buzzing, browsing insect bores its way into a flower) and will then, so it is hoped, as the course of her visits may carry her, spread abroad the tidings, the latent germ of envy and of wonder. Mme Cottard, who might have been created on purpose to fulfil this role, belonged to that special category in a visiting list which Mamma (who inherited certain facets of her father’s turn of mind) used to call “Go tell the Spartans” people. Besides—apart from another reason which did not come to our knowledge until many years later—Mme Swann, in inviting this good-natured, reserved and modest friend to her “at homes,” had no need to fear lest she might be introducing into her drawing-room a traitor or a rival. She knew what a vast number of bourgeois calyxes that busy worker, armed with her plume and card-case, could visit in a single afternoon. She knew her power of pollination, and, basing her calculations upon the law of probability, was justified in thinking that almost certainly some intimate of the Verdurins would be bound to hear, within two or three days, how the Governor of Paris had left cards upon her, or that M. Verdurin himself would be told how M. Le Hault de Pressagny, the President of the Horse Show, had taken them, Swann and herself, to the King Theodosius gala; she imagined the Verdurins to be informed of these two events, both so flattering to herself, and of these alone, because the particular manifestations in which we envisage and pursue fame are but few in number, through the deficiency of our own minds, which are incapable of imagining at one and the same time all the forms which we none the less hope—on the whole—that fame will not fail simultaneously to assume for our benefit.

Mme Swann had, however, met with no success outside what was called the “official world.” Elegant women did not go to her house. It was not the presence there of Republican notables that frightened them away. In the days of my early childhood, everything that pertained to conservative society was worldly, and no respectable salon would ever have opened its doors to a Republican. The people who lived in such an atmosphere imagined that the impossibility of ever inviting an “opportunist”—still, more a “horrid radical”—was something that would endure for ever, like oil-lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But, like a kaleidoscope