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By Root 1581 0

on the contrary, the one thing he desired above all others was not to know them. “No,” he said to me, “I find that sort of clerical atmosphere maddening.” I did not at first understand the application of the adjective “clerical” to the Verdurins, but the sequel to his remark clarified his meaning, betraying his concessions to those fashions in words which one is often astonished to see adopted by intelligent men. “I mean the sort of circles,” he said, “where people form a tribe, a religious order, a chapel. You aren’t going to tell me that they’re not a little sect; they’re all honey to the people who belong, no words bad enough for those who don’t. The question is not, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong. You belong, my uncle Charlus belongs. But I can’t help it, I’ve never gone in for that sort of thing, it isn’t my fault.”

I need hardly say that the rule I had imposed upon Saint-Loup, never to come and see me unless I had expressly invited him, I promulgated no less strictly in the case of the various persons with whom I had gradually made friends at La Raspelière, Féterne, Montsurvent, and elsewhere; and when I saw from the hotel the smoke of the three o’clock train which, in the anfractuosity of the cliffs of Parville, left a stationary plume which long remained clinging to the flank of the green slopes, I had no doubts as to the identity of the visitor who was coming to tea with me and was still, like a classical deity, concealed from me beneath that little cloud. I am obliged to confess that this person whose visit I had authorised in advance was hardly ever Saniette, and I have often reproached myself for this omission. But Saniette’s own consciousness of being a bore (even more so, naturally, when he came to pay a call than when he told a story) had the effect that, although he was more learned, more intelligent and better than most people, it seemed impossible to feel in his company, not only any pleasure, but anything save an almost intolerable irritation which spoiled one’s whole afternoon. Probably, if Saniette had frankly admitted this boredom which he was afraid of causing, one would not have dreaded his visits. Boredom is one of the least of the evils that we have to endure, and his boringness existed perhaps only in the imagination of other people, or had been inoculated into him by some process of suggestion which had taken hold on his agreeable modesty. But he was so anxious not to let it be seen that he was not sought after that he dared not propose himself. Certainly he was right not to behave like the people who are so glad to be able to raise their hats in a public place that, not having seen you for years and catching sight of you in a box at the theatre with smart people whom they do not know, they give you a furtive but resounding good-evening on the pretext of the pleasure and delight they have felt on seeing you, on realising that you are going about again, that you are looking well, etc. But Saniette went to the other extreme. He might, at Mme Verdurin’s or in the little train, have told me that he would have great pleasure in coming to see me at Balbec were he not afraid of disturbing me. Such a suggestion would not have alarmed me. On the contrary, he offered nothing, but, with a tortured expression on his face and a stare as indestructible as a fired enamel, into the composition of which, however, there entered, together with a passionate desire to see one—unless he found someone else who was more entertaining—the determination not to let this desire be manifest, would say to me with a casual air: “You don’t happen to know what you will be doing in the next few days, because I shall probably be somewhere in the neighbourhood of Balbec? Not that it makes the slightest difference, I just thought I’d ask.” This casual air deceived nobody, and the reverse signs whereby we express our feelings by their opposites are so clearly legible that one asks oneself how there can still be people who say, for instance: “I have so many invitations that I don’t know which way