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By Root 1550 0

at “putting things in order” and “stopping the rot.” This she had found all the easier in the case of one of the dangerous persons in that the latter was simply Brichot’s laundress, and Mme Verdurin, having free access to the fifth-floor rooms of the Professor, who was crimson with pride whenever she deigned to climb his stairs, had only had to throw the wretched woman out. “What!” the Mistress had said to Brichot, “a woman like myself does you the honour of calling upon you, and you entertain a creature like that?” Brichot had never forgotten the service that Mme Verdurin had rendered him by preventing his old age from foundering in the mire, and became more and more attached to her, whereas, in contrast to this renewal of affection and possibly because of it, the Mistress was beginning to be tired of this too docile follower of whose obedience she could be certain in advance. But Brichot acquired from his intimacy with the Verdurins a glamour which set him apart from all his colleagues at the Sorbonne. They were dazzled by the accounts that he gave them of dinner-parties to which they would never be invited, by the mention made of him in the reviews, or the portrait of him exhibited in the Salon, by some writer or painter of repute whose talent the occupants of the other chairs in the Faculty of Letters esteemed but whose attention they had no prospect of attracting, and in particular by the elegance of the mundane philosopher’s attire, an elegance which they had mistaken at first for slovenliness until their colleague had benevolently explained to them that a top hat could quite acceptably be placed on the floor when one was paying a call and was not the right thing for dinners in the country, however smart, where it should be replaced by a trilby, which was perfectly all right with a dinner-jacket.

For the first few moments after the little group had swept into the carriage, I could not even speak to Cottard, for he was completely breathless, not so much from having run in order not to miss the train as from astonishment at having caught it at the last second. He felt more than the joy of success, almost the hilarity of a merry prank. “Ah! that was a good one!” he said when he had recovered himself. “A minute later! ‘Pon my soul, that’s what they call arriving in the nick of time!” he added with a wink, intended not so much to inquire whether the expression was apt, for he now overflowed with confidence, but to express his self-satisfaction. At length he was able to introduce me to the other members of the little clan. I was dismayed to see that they were almost all in the dress which in Paris is called a “smoking.” I had forgotten that the Verdurins were beginning to make tentative moves in the direction of fashionable ways, moves which, slowed down by the Dreyfus case, accelerated by the “new” music, they in fact denied, and would continue to deny until they were complete, like those military objectives which a general does not announce until he has reached them, so as not to appear defeated if he fails. Society for its part was quite prepared to go half-way to meet them. At the moment it had reached the point of regarding them as people to whose house nobody in Society went but who were not in the least perturbed by the fact. The Verdurin salon was understood to be a Temple of Music. It was there, people affirmed, that Vinteuil had found inspiration and encouragement. And although Vinteuil’s sonata remained wholly unappreciated and almost unknown, his name, referred to as that of the greatest contemporary composer, enjoyed an extraordinary prestige. Finally, certain young men of the Faubourg having decided that they ought to be as well educated as the middle classes, three of them had studied music and among these Vinteuil’s sonata enjoyed an enormous vogue. They would speak of it, on returning to their homes, to the intelligent mothers who had encouraged them to improve their minds. And, taking an interest in their sons’ studies, these mothers would gaze with a certain respect at Mme Verdurin in her front box at