for a minute or two until she finished her game while continuing to talk to us. What I told her about my impressions was not entirely pleasing to her. For one thing I was shocked to observe that she and her husband came indoors every day long before the hour of those sunsets which were considered so fine when seen from that cliff, and finer still from the terrace of La Raspelière, and which I would have travelled miles to see. “Yes, it’s incomparable,” said Mme Verdurin carelessly, with a glance at the huge windows which gave the room a wall of glass. “Even though we have it in front of us all the time, we never grow tired of it,” and she turned her attention back to her cards. But my very enthusiasm made me exacting. I complained of not being able to see from the drawing-room the rocks of Darnetal which Elstir had told me were quite lovely at that hour, when they reflected so many colours. “Ah! you can’t see them from here, you’d have to go to the end of the gardens, to the ‘view of the bay.’ From the seat there, you can take in the whole panorama. But you can’t go there by yourself, you’ll lose your way. I can take you there, if you like,” she added half-heartedly. “Come now, no,” said her husband, “haven’t you had enough of those rheumatic pains you had the other day? Do you want a new lot? He can come back and see the view of the bay another time.” I did not insist, and realised that it was enough for the Verdurins to know that this sunset made its way into their drawing-room or dining-room, like a magnificent painting, like a priceless Japanese enamel, justifying the high rent they were paying for La Raspelière, furnished, without their having constantly to raise their eyes towards it; the important thing here for them was to live comfortably, to go for drives, to eat well, to talk, to entertain agreeable friends whom they provided with amusing games of billiards, good meals, merry tea-parties. I noticed, however, later on, how intelligently they had got to know the district, taking their guests for excursions as “novel” as the music to which they made them listen. The part which the flowers of La Raspelière, the paths along the edge of the sea, the old houses, the undiscovered churches, played in M. Verdurin’s life was so great that those who saw him only in Paris and who themselves substituted urban luxuries for seaside and country life could barely understand the exalted idea that he himself had of his own life, or the importance that his pleasures gave him in his own eyes. This importance was further enhanced by the fact that the Verdurins were convinced that La Raspelière, which they hoped to purchase, was a property without its match in the world. This superiority which their self-esteem made them attribute to La Raspelière justified in their eyes my enthusiasm which, but for that, would have annoyed them slightly, because of the disappointments which it involved (like those which my first experience of Berma had once caused me) and which I frankly admitted to them.
“I hear the carriage coming back,” the Mistress suddenly murmured. Let us here briefly remark that Mme Verdurin, quite apart from the inevitable changes due to increasing years, no longer resembled what she had been at the time when Swann and Odette used to listen to the little phrase in her house. Even when she heard it played, she was no longer obliged to assume the air of exhausted admiration which she used to assume then, for that had become her normal expression. Under the influence of the countless headaches which the music of Bach, Wagner, Vinteuil, Debussy had given her, Mme Verdurin’s forehead had assumed enormous proportions, like limbs that become permanently deformed by rheumatism. Her temples, suggestive of a pair of burning, pain-stricken, milk-white spheres, in which Harmony endlessly revolved, flung back silvery locks on either side, and proclaimed, on the Mistress’s behalf, without any need for her to say a word: “I know what is in store for me tonight.” Her features no longer took the trouble to formulate, one after another, aesthetic