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By Root 1632 0

will be a delight, a pleasure,” failing always to observe the sequence that the recipient of her letter would naturally have expected, and with such unerring dexterity that I finally changed my mind as to the nature of these diminuendos, decided that they were deliberate, and found in them the same depravity of taste—transposed into the social key—that drove Sainte-Beuve to upset all the normal relations between words, to alter any expression that was at all habitual. Two methods, taught probably by different masters, clashed in this epistolary style, the second making Mme de Cambremer redeem the monotony of her multiple adjectives by employing them in a descending scale, and avoiding an ending on the common chord. On the other hand, I was inclined to see in these inverse gradations, no longer a stylistic refinement, as when they were the handiwork of the dowager Marquise, but a stylistic awkwardness whenever they were employed by the Marquis her son or by her lady cousins. For throughout the family, to quite a remote degree of kinship and in admiring imitation of Aunt Zélia, the rule of the three adjectives was held in great favour, as was a certain enthusiastic way of catching your breath when talking. An imitation that had passed into the blood, moreover; and whenever, in the family, a little girl from her earliest childhood took to stopping short while she was talking to swallow her saliva, her parents would say: “She takes after Aunt Zélia,” would sense that as she grew older her upper lip would soon tend to be shadowed by a faint moustache, and would make up their minds to cultivate her inevitable talent for music.

It was not long before the relations of the Cambremers with Mme Verdurin were less satisfactory than with myself, for different reasons. They felt they must invite her to dine. The “young” Marquise said to me contemptuously: “I don’t see why we shouldn’t invite that woman. In the country one meets anybody, it’s of no great consequence.” But being at heart considerably awed, they frequently consulted me as to how they should put into effect their desire to make a polite gesture. Since they had invited Albertine and myself to dine with some friends of Saint-Loup, smart people of the neighbourhood who owned the château of Gourville and represented a little more than the cream of Norman society, to which Mme Verdurin, while pretending to despise it, was partial, I advised the Cambremers to invite the Mistress to meet them. But the lord and lady of Féterne, in their fear (so timorous were they) of offending their noble friends, or else (so ingenuous were they) of the possibility that M. and Mme Verdurin might be bored by people who were not intellectual, or yet again (since they were impregnated with a spirit of routine which experience had not fertilised) of mixing different kinds of people and committing a solecism, declared that it would not “work,” that they “wouldn’t hit it off together,” and that it would be much better to keep Mme Verdurin (whom they would invite with all her little group) for another evening. For this coming evening—the smart one, to meet Saint-Loup’s friends—they invited nobody from the little nucleus but Morel, in order that M. de Charlus might indirectly be informed of the brilliant people whom they had to their house, and also that the musician might help to entertain their guests, for he was to be asked to bring his violin. They threw in Cottard as well, because M. de Cambremer declared that he had some “go” about him and would “go down well” at a dinner-party; besides, it might turn out useful to be on friendly terms with a doctor if they should ever have anybody ill in the house. But they invited him by himself, so as not to “start anything with the wife.” Mme Verdurin was outraged when she heard that two members of the little group had been invited without herself to dine “informally” at Féterne. She dictated to the Doctor, whose first impulse had been to accept, a stiff reply in which he said: “We are dining that evening with Mme Verdurin,” a plural intended to teach the Cambremers