concerts, following the music from the score. So far, this latent social success of the Verdurins had expressed itself in two facts only. In the first place, Mme Verdurin would say of the Princesse de Caprarola: “Ah! she’s intelligent, that one, she’s a charming woman. What I cannot endure are the imbeciles, the people who bore me—they drive me mad.” Which would have made anybody at all perspicacious realise that the Princesse de Caprarola, a woman who moved in the highest society, had called upon Mme Verdurin. She had even mentioned the Verdurins’ name in the course of a visit of condolence which she had paid to Mme Swann after the death of her husband, and had asked whether she knew them. “What name did you say?” Odette had asked with sudden wistfulness. “Verdurin? Oh, yes, of course,” she had continued glumly, “I don’t know them, or rather, I know them without really knowing them, they’re people I used to meet with friends years ago, they’re quite nice.” When the Princesse de Caprarola had gone, Odette regretted not having told the bare truth. But the immediate falsehood was not the fruit of her calculations, but the revelation of her fears and her desires. She denied not what it would have been adroit to deny, but what she would have liked not to be the case, even if her interlocutor was bound to hear an hour later that it was indeed the case. A little later she had recovered her self-assurance, and would even anticipate questions by saying, so as not to appear to be afraid of them: “Mme Verdurin, why, I used to know her terribly well,” with an affectation of humility, like a great lady who tells you that she has taken the tram. “There has been a great deal of talk about the Verdurins lately,” Mme de Souvré would remark. Odette, with the smiling disdain of a duchess, would reply: “Yes, I do seem to have heard a lot about them lately. Every now and then there are new people like that who arrive in society,” without reflecting that she herself was among the newest. “The Princesse de Caprarola has dined there,” Mme de Souvré would continue. “Ah!” Odette would reply, accentuating her smile, “that doesn’t surprise me. That sort of thing always begins with the Princesse de Caprarola, and then someone else follows suit, like Comtesse Molé.” Odette, in saying this, appeared to be filled with a profound contempt for the two great ladies who made a habit of “house-warming” in recently established salons. One felt from her tone that the implication was that she, Odette, like Mme de Souvré, was not the sort of person to let herself in for that sort of thing.
After the admission that Mme Verdurin had made of the Princesse de Caprarola’s intelligence, the second indication that the Verdurins were conscious of their future destiny was that (without, of course, their having formally requested it) they were most anxious that people should now come to dine with them in evening dress. M. Verdurin could now have been greeted without shame by his nephew, the one who was “a wash-out.”
Among those who entered my carriage at Graincourt was Saniette, who long ago had been driven from the Verdurins’ by his cousin Forcheville, but had since returned. His faults, from the social point of view, had originally been—notwithstanding his superior qualities—somewhat similar to Cottard’s: shyness, anxiety to please, fruitless attempts to succeed in doing so. But if the course of life, by making Cottard assume (if not at the Verdurins’, where, because of the influence that past associations exert over us when we find ourselves in familiar surroundings, he had remained more or less the same, at least in his practice, in his hospital work, and at the Academy of Medicine) an outer shell of coldness, disdain, gravity, that became more and more pronounced as he trotted out his puns to his indulgent students, had created a veritable gulf between the old Cottard and the new, the same defects had on the contrary become more extreme in Saniette the more he sought to correct them. Conscious that he was frequently boring, that people did not listen to him, instead