I, for which Elstir had fashioned a Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour out of sealing-wax. In short Brichot, seeing again with the eyes of memory the salon of those days, the drawing-room with its high windows, its low settees bleached by the midday sun which had had to be replaced, declared that he preferred it to the drawing-room of today. Of course, I quite understood that by “salon” Brichot meant—as the word church implies not merely the religious edifice but the congregation of worshippers—not merely the apartment, but the people who frequented it, and the special pleasures that they came to enjoy there, and that were symbolised in his memory by those settees upon which, when you called to see Mme Verdurin in the afternoon, you waited until she was ready, while the blossom on the chestnut-trees outside, and the carnations in vases on the mantelpiece, seemed to offer a graceful and kindly thought for the visitor, expressed in the smiling welcome of their rosy hues, as they watched unblinkingly for the tardy appearance of the lady of the house. But if that salon seemed to him superior to the present one, it was perhaps because one’s mind is an old Proteus who cannot remain the slave of any one shape and, even in the social world, suddenly transfers its allegiance from a salon which has slowly and arduously climbed to a pitch of perfection to another that is less brilliant, just as the “touched-up” photographs which Odette had had taken at Otto’s, in which she queened it in a “princess” gown, her hair waved by Lenthéric, appealed less to Swann than a little snapshot taken at Nice, in which, in a plain cloth cape, her loosely dressed hair protruding beneath a straw hat trimmed with pansies and a black velvet bow, though a woman of fashion twenty years younger, she looked (for the earlier a photograph the older a woman looks in it) like a little maidservant twenty years older. Perhaps too Brichot derived some pleasure from praising to me what I myself had never known, from showing me that he had enjoyed pleasures that I could never have. He succeeded, moreover, merely by citing the names of two or three people who were no longer alive and whom he invested with a kind of mysterious charm by the way he spoke of them. I felt that everything that had been told me about the Verdurins was far too crude; and indeed in the case of Swann, whom I had known, I reproached myself for not having paid sufficient attention to him, for not having paid attention to him in a sufficiently disinterested spirit, for not having listened to him properly when he used to entertain me while we waited for his wife to come home for lunch and he showed me his treasures, now that I knew that he was to be classed with the most brilliant talkers of the past.
Just as we were coming to Mme Verdurin’s doorstep, I caught sight of M. de Charlus, steering towards us the bulk of his huge body, drawing unwillingly in his wake one of those ruffians or beggars who nowadays when he passed sprang out without fail from even the most apparently deserted corners, and by whom this powerful monster was, despite himself, invariably escorted, although at a certain distance, as a shark is by its pilot—in short, contrasting so markedly with the haughty stranger of my first visit to Balbec, with his stern aspect, his affectation of virility, that I seemed to be discovering, accompanied by its satellite, a planet at a wholly different period of its revolution, when one begins to see it full, or a sick man devoured by the malady that a few years ago was but a tiny spot which was easily concealed and the gravity of which was never suspected. Although an operation that Brichot had undergone had restored to some small extent the sight which he had thought to be lost for ever, I do not know whether he had observed the ruffian following in the Baron’s footsteps. Not that this mattered much, for since La Raspelière, and notwithstanding the professor’s friendly regard for M. de Charlus, the sight of the latter always made him feel somehow uneasy. No doubt to every man the life of