In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [215]
anyone. Here she will have plenty of fresh air, and lots of clever men. In any case, I’m counting on you not to fail me next Wednesday. I heard you were having a tea-party at Rivebelle with your cousin, and M. de Charlus, and I forget who else. You should arrange to bring the whole lot on here, it would be nice if you all came in a body. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get here, and the roads are charming; if you like I can send down for you. I can’t imagine what you find attractive in Rivebelle, it’s infested with mosquitoes. Perhaps you’re thinking of the reputation of the local pancakes. My cook makes them far better. I’ll give you some Norman pancakes, the real article, and shortbread; just let me show you. Ah! if you want the sort of filth they give you at Rivebelle, you won’t get it from me, I don’t poison my guests, Monsieur, and even if I wished to, my cook would refuse to make such unspeakable muck and would give in his notice. Those pancakes you get down there, you can’t tell what they’re made of. I knew a poor girl who got peritonitis from them, which carried her off in three days. She was only seventeen. It was sad for her poor mother,” added Mme Verdurin with a mournful air beneath the spheres of her temples charged with experience and suffering. “However, go and have tea at Rivebelle if you enjoy being fleeced and flinging money out of the window. But one thing I beg of you—it’s a confidential mission I’m entrusting you with—on the stroke of six bring all your party here, don’t allow them to go straggling away by themselves. You can bring whom you please. I wouldn’t say that to everybody. But I’m sure your friends are nice, I can see at once that we understand one another. Apart from the little nucleus, there are some very agreeable people coming next Wednesday, as it happens. You don’t know little Mme de Longpont? She’s charming, and so witty, not in the least snobbish, you’ll find you’ll like her immensely. And she’s going to bring a whole troupe of friends too,” Mme Verdurin added to show me that this was the right thing to do and encourage me by the other’s example. “We shall see which of you has most influence and brings most people, Barbe de Longpont or you. And then I believe somebody’s going to bring Bergotte,” she added vaguely, this attendance of a celebrity being rendered far from likely by a paragraph which had appeared in the papers that morning to the effect that the great writer’s health was causing grave anxiety. “Anyhow, you’ll see that it will be one of my most successful Wednesdays. I don’t want to have any boring women. You mustn’t judge by this evening, which has been a complete failure. Don’t try to be polite, you can’t have been more bored than I was, I myself thought it was deadly. It won’t always be like tonight, you know! I’m not thinking of the Cambremers, who are impossible, but I’ve known society people who were supposed to be agreeable, and compared with my little nucleus they didn’t exist. I heard you say that you thought Swann clever. I must say, to my mind it’s greatly exaggerated, but without even speaking of the character of the man, which I’ve always found fundamentally antipathetic, sly, underhand, I often had him to dinner on Wednesdays. Well, you can ask the others, even compared with Brichot, who is far from being a genius, who’s a good secondary schoolmaster whom I got into the Institute all the same, Swann was simply nowhere. He was so dull!” And as I expressed a contrary opinion: “It’s the truth. I don’t want to say a word against him since he was your friend, indeed he was very fond of you, he spoke to me about you in the most charming way, but ask the others here if he ever said anything interesting at our dinners. That, after all, is the test. Well, I don’t know why it was, but Swann, in my house, never seemed to come off, one got nothing out of him. And yet the little he had he picked up here.” I assured her that he was highly intelligent. “No, you only thought that because you didn’t know him as long as I did. Really, one got to the end of him very soon.