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By Root 1651 0

the train was full, a farm labourer in a blue smock who had only a third-class ticket got into our compartment. The doctor, feeling that the Princess could not be allowed to travel with such a person, called a porter, showed a card which described him as medical officer to one of the big railway companies, and obliged the station-master to eject the intruder. This incident so pained and alarmed Saniette’s timid spirit that, as soon as he saw it beginning, fearing already lest, in view of the crowd of peasants on the platform, it should assume the proportions of a popular uprising, he pretended to be suffering from a stomach-ache, and to avoid being accused of any share in the responsibility for the doctor’s violence, rushed down the corridor pretending to be looking for what Cottard called the “waters.” Failing to find it, he stood and gazed at the scenery from the other end of the “twister.”

“If this is your first appearance at Mme Verdurin’s, Monsieur,” Brichot said to me, anxious to show off his talents before a newcomer, “you will find that there is no place where one feels more the douceur de vivre, to quote one of the inventors of dilettantism, of pococurantism, of all sorts of ‘isms’ that are in fashion among our little snoblings—I refer to M. le Prince de Talleyrand.” For, when he spoke of these great noblemen of the past, he felt that it was witty and added “period colour” to prefix their titles with “Monsieur,” and said “M. le Duc de La Rochefoucauld,” “M. le Cardinal de Retz,” referring to these from time to time also as “That struggle for lifer de Gondi,” “that Boulangist de Marcillac.” And he never failed, when referring to Montesquieu, to call him, with a smile, “Monsieur le Président Secondat de Montesquieu.” An intelligent man of society would have been irritated by this pedantry, which reeked of the lecture-room. But in the perfect manners of the man of society there is a pedantry too, when speaking of a prince, which betrays a different caste, that in which one prefixes the name “William” with “the Emperor” and addresses a Royal Highness in the third person. “Ah, now, that is a man,” Brichot continued, still referring to “Monsieur le Prince de Talleyrand,” “to whom we take off our hats. He is an ancestor.”

“It’s a delightful circle,” Cottard told me, “you’ll find a little of everything, for Mme Verdurin is not exclusive—distinguished scholars like Brichot, the nobility, for example, Princess Sherbatoff, an aristocratic Russian lady, a friend of the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, who even sees her alone at hours when no one else is admitted.”

As a matter of fact the Grand Duchess Eudoxie, not wishing Princess Sherbatoff, who for years past had been ostracised by everyone, to come to her house when there might be other people, allowed her to come only in the early morning, when Her Imperial Highness was not at home to any of those friends to whom it would have been as disagreeable to meet the Princess as it would have been awkward for the Princess to meet them. Since, for the last three years, as soon as she came away from the Grand Duchess, like a manicurist, Mme Sherbatoff would go to Mme Verdurin, who had just woken up, and stick to her for the rest of the day, one might say that the Princess’s loyalty surpassed even that of Brichot, constant as he was at those Wednesdays, both in Paris, where he had the pleasure of fancying himself a sort of Chateaubriand at l’Abbaye-aux-Bois,10 and in the country, where he saw himself becoming the equivalent of what the man whom he always referred to (with the knowing sarcasm of the man of letters) as “M. de Voltaire” must have been in the salon of Mme du Châtelet.

Her want of friends had enabled Princess Sherbatoff for some years past to display towards the Verdurins a fidelity which made her more than an ordinary member of the “faithful,” the classic example of the breed, the ideal which Mme Verdurin had long thought unattainable and which now, in her later years, she at length found incarnate in this new feminine recruit. However keenly the Mistress might feel the pangs