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“Why, of course,” said the Princess who, upon hearing Cottard address her, but only then, raised from her magazine a pair of eyes which, like the eyes of M. de Charlus, although gentler, saw perfectly well the people of whose presence she pretended to be unaware. Cottard, reflecting that the fact of my having been invited to meet the Cambremers was a sufficient recommendation, decided, after a momentary hesitation, to introduce me to the Princess, who bowed with great courtesy but appeared to be hearing my name for the first time.

“Confound it!” cried the Doctor, “my wife has forgotten to have the buttons on my white waistcoat changed. Ah, women! They never remember anything. Don’t you ever marry, my boy,” he said to me. And as this was one of the pleasantries which he considered appropriate when he had nothing else to say, he peeped out of the corner of his eye at the Princess and the rest of the faithful, who, because he was a professor and an Academician, smiled back at him, admiring his good humour and lack of arrogance.

The Princess informed us that the young violinist had been found. He had been confined to bed the day before by a sick headache, but was coming that evening and bringing with him a friend of his father whom he had met at Doncières. She had learned this from Mme Verdurin with whom she had lunched that morning, she told us in a rapid voice, rolling her rs, with her Russian accent, softly at the back of her throat, as though they were not rs but ls. “Ah! you lunched with her this morning,” Cottard said to the Princess, but his eyes were on me, for the object of this remark was to show me on what intimate terms the Princess was with the Mistress. “You really are one of the faithful!”

“Yes, I love this little gloup, so intelligent, so agleeable, so simple, not snobbish or spiteful, and clevel to their fingel-tips.”

“Devil take it! I must have lost my ticket, I can’t find it anywhere,” cried Cottard, without being unduly alarmed. He knew that at Douville, where a couple of landaus would be awaiting us, the collector would let him pass without a ticket, and would only touch his cap the more deferentially in order to provide an explanation for his leniency, which was that he had of course recognised Cottard as one of the Verdurins’ regular guests. “They won’t shove me in the lock-up for that,” the Doctor concluded.

“You were saying, Monsieur,” I inquired of Brichot, “that there used to be some famous waters near here. How do we know that?”

“The name of the next station is one of a multitude of proofs. It is called Fervaches.”

“I don’t undelstand what he’s talking about,” mumbled the Princess, as though she were saying to me out of kindness: “He’s rather a bore, isn’t he?”

“Why, Princess, Fervaches means hot springs. Fervidae aquae. But to return to the young violinist,” Brichot went on, “I was quite forgetting, Cottard, to tell you the great news. Had you heard that our poor friend Dechambre, who used to be Mme Verdurin’s favourite pianist, has just died? It’s dreadful.”

“He was still quite young,” replied Cottard, “but he must have had some trouble with his liver, there must have been something sadly wrong in that quarter, he’d been looking very queer indeed for a long time past.”

“But he wasn’t as young as all that,” said Brichot. “In the days when Elstir and Swann used to come to Mme Verdurin’s, Dechambre had already made himself a reputation in Paris, and, what is remarkable, without having first received the baptism of success abroad. Ah! he was no follower of the Gospel according to St Barnum, that fellow.”

“You must be mistaken, he couldn’t have been going to Mme Verdurin’s at that time, he was still in the nursery.”

“But, unless my old memory plays me false, I was under the impression that Dechambre used to play Vinteuil’s sonata for Swann when that clubman, being at odds with the aristocracy, had still no idea that he was one day to become the embourgeoised prince consort of our sainted Odette.”

“That’s impossible. Vinteuil’s