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By Root 1487 0

—something diffused and general, which can be found existing at different periods. But if one had listened to Swann, the retinues of the Magi, already so anachronistic when Benozzo Gozzoli introduced in their midst various Medicis, would have been even more so, since they would have included the portraits of a whole crowd of men, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, subsequent, that is to say, not only by fifteen centuries to the Nativity but by four to the painter himself. There was not missing from those cortèges, according to Swann, a single living Parisian of note, any more than there was from that act in one of Sardou’s plays, in which, out of friendship for the author and for the leading lady, and also because it was the fashion, all the notabilities of Paris, famous doctors, politicians, barristers, amused themselves, each on a different evening, by “walking on.”

“But what has she got to do with the Zoo?” “Everything!” “What? You don’t suggest that she’s got a sky-blue behind, like the monkeys?” “Charles, you really are too dreadful! I was thinking of what the Singhalese said to her. Do tell him, Charles, it really is a gem.” “Oh, it’s too silly. You know Mme Blatin loves accosting people, in a tone which she thinks friendly, but which is really condescending.” “What our good friends on the Thames call patronising,” interrupted Odette. “Exactly. Well, she went the other day to the Zoo, where they have some black-amoors—Singhalese I think I heard my wife say—she is much better at ethnology than I am.” “Now, Charles, don’t mock.” “I’m not mocking at all. Well, to continue, she went up to one of these black fellows with ‘Good morning, nigger? . . .” “She’s a nothing!” Mme Swann interjected. “Anyhow, this classification seems to have displeased the black. ‘Me nigger,’ he said angrily to Mme Blatin, ‘me nigger; you old cow!’ ” “I do think that’s so delightful! I adore that story. Don’t you think it’s a good one. Can’t you see old Blatin standing there?: ‘Me nigger; you old cow!’ ”

I expressed an intense desire to go there and see these Singhalese, one of whom had called Mme Blatin an old cow. They did not interest me in the least. But I reflected that on the way to the Zoo, and again on our way home, we should pass through the Allée des Acacias in which I used to gaze so admiringly at Mme Swann, and that perhaps Coquelin’s mulatto friend, to whom I had never managed to exhibit myself in the act of saluting her, would see me there, seated at her side, as the victoria swept by.

During those minutes in which Gilberte, having gone to get ready, was not in the room with us, M. and Mme Swann would take delight in revealing to me all the rare virtues of their child. And everything that I myself observed seemed to prove the truth of what they said. I remarked that, as her mother had told me, she had not only for her friends but for the servants, for the poor, the most delicate attentions, carefully thought out, a desire to give pleasure, a fear of causing displeasure, expressed in all sorts of little things over which she often took a great deal of trouble. She had done a piece of needlework for our stall-keeper in the Champs-Elysées, and went out in the snow to give it to her with her own hands, so as not to lose a day. “You have no idea how kind-hearted she is, since she never lets it be seen,” her father assured me. Young as she was, she appeared far more sensible already than her parents. When Swann boasted of his wife’s grand friends Gilberte would turn away and remain silent, but without any appearance of reproaching him, for it seemed inconceivable to her that her father could be the object of the slightest criticism. One day, when I had spoken to her of Mlle Vinteuil, she said to me:

“I never want to know her, for a very good reason, and that is that she was not nice to her father, from what one hears, and made him very unhappy. You can’t understand that any more than I, can you? I’m sure you could no more live without your papa than I could, which is quite natural after all. How can one ever forget a person