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The anger of the Cambremers was extreme; and in the meantime other incidents brought about a certain tension in their relations with the little clan. As we were returning, the Cottards, Charlus, Brichot, Morel and I, from a dinner at La Raspelière one evening after the Cambremers, who had been to lunch with friends at Harambouville, had accompanied us for part of our outward journey, “Since you’re so fond of Balzac, and can find examples of him in the society of today,” I had remarked to M. de Charlus, “you must feel that those Cambremers come straight out of the Scènes de la vie de province.” But M. de Charlus, for all the world as though he had been their friend and I had offended him by my remark, at once cut me short: “You say that because the wife is superior to the husband,” he remarked drily. “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that she was the Muse du département, or Mme de Bargeton, although . . .” M. de Charlus again interrupted me: “Say rather, Mme de Mortsauf.” The train stopped and Brichot got out. “Didn’t you see us making signs to you? You’re incorrigible.” “What do you mean?” “Why, haven’t you noticed that Brichot is madly in love with Mme de Cambremer?” I could see from the attitude of the Cottards and Charlie that there was not a shadow of doubt about this in the little nucleus. I thought that it must be malice on their part. “What, you didn’t notice how distressed he became when you mentioned her,” went on M. de Charlus, who liked to show that he had experience of women, and spoke of the sentiment they inspire as naturally as if it was what he himself habitually felt. But a certain equivocally paternal tone in addressing all young men—in spite of his exclusive affection for Morel—gave the lie to the womanising views which he expressed. “Oh! these children,” he said in a shrill, mincing, sing-song voice, “one has to teach them everything, they’re as innocent as newborn babes, they can’t even tell when a man is in love with a woman. I was more fly than that at your age,” he added, for he liked to use the expressions of the underworld, perhaps because they appealed to him, perhaps so as not to appear, by avoiding them, to admit that he consorted with people whose current vocabulary they were. A few days later, I was obliged to bow to the facts and acknowledge that Brichot was enamoured of the Marquise. Unfortunately he accepted several invitations to lunch with her. Mme Verdurin decided that it was time to put a stop to these proceedings. Quite apart from what she saw as the importance of such an intervention for the politics of the little nucleus, she had developed an ever-keener taste for remonstrations of this sort and the dramas to which they gave rise, a taste which idleness breeds just as much in the bourgeoisie as in the aristocracy. It was a day of great excitement at La Raspelière when Mme Verdurin was seen to disappear for a whole hour with Brichot, whom (it transpired) she proceeded to inform that Mme de Cambremer cared nothing for him, that he was the laughing-stock of her drawing-room, that he would be dishonouring his old age and compromising his situation in the academic world. She went so far as to refer in touching terms to the laundress with whom he lived in Paris, and to their little girl. She won the day; Brichot ceased to go to Féterne, but his grief was such that for two days it was thought that he would lose his sight altogether, and in any case his disease had taken a leap forward from which it never retreated. In the meantime, the Cambremers, who were furious with Morel, deliberately invited M. de Charlus on one occasion without him. Receiving no reply from the Baron, they began to fear that they had committed a gaffe, and, deciding that rancour was a bad counsellor, wrote somewhat belatedly to Morel, an ineptitude which made M. de Charlus smile by proving to him the extent of his power. “You shall answer for us both that I accept,” he said to Morel. When the evening of the dinner came, the party assembled in the great drawing-room of F