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By Root 1690 0

‘My dear cousin, will you do me the honour of thinking of me next Friday at halfpast nine.’ Underneath were written the two less gracious words: ‘Czech Quartet.’ These seemed to me to be unintelligible, and in any case to have no more connexion with the sentence above than in those letters on the back of which one sees that the writer had begun another with the words ‘My dear—’ and nothing else, and failed to take a fresh sheet, either from absentmindedness or in order to save paper. I’m fond of Eliane, and so I bore her no ill-will; I merely ignored the strange and inappropriate allusion to a Czech Quartet, and, as I am a methodical man, I placed on my chimney-piece the invitation to think of Madame de Montmorency on Friday at half past nine. Although renowned for my obedient, punctual and meek nature, as Buffon says of the camel”—at this, laughter seemed to radiate from M. de Charlus, who knew that on the contrary he was regarded as the most impossibly difficult man—“I was a few minutes late (the time that it took me to change my clothes), though without feeling undue remorse, thinking that half past nine meant ten. At the stroke of ten, in a comfortable dressing-gown, with warm slippers on my feet, I sat down in my chimney corner to think of Eliane as she had requested me, and with an intensity which did not begin to falter until half past ten. Do tell her, if you will, that I complied strictly with her audacious request. I am sure she will be gratified.”

Mme de Mortemart swooned with laughter, in which M. de Charlus joined. “And tomorrow,” she went on, oblivious of the fact that she had already long exceeded the time that could reasonably be allotted to her, “are you going to our La Rochefoucauld cousins?”

“Oh, that, now, is quite impossible. They have invited me, and you too, I see, to a thing it is utterly impossible to imagine, which is called, if I am to believe the invitation card, a ‘the dansant.’ I used to be considered pretty nimble when I was young, but I doubt whether I could ever decently have drunk a cup of tea while dancing. And I have never cared to eat or drink in an unseemly fashion. You will remind me that my dancing days are done. But even sitting down comfortably drinking my tea—of the quality of which I am in any case suspicious since it is called ‘dancing’—I should be afraid lest other guests younger than myself, and less nimble possibly than I was at their age, might spill their cups over my tails and thus interfere with my pleasure in draining my own.”

Nor was M. de Charlus content with leaving Mme Verdurin out of the conversation while he spoke of all manner of subjects (which he seemed to take a delight in developing and varying, for the cruel pleasure which he had always enjoyed of keeping indefinitely “queuing up” on their feet the friends who were waiting with excruciating patience for their turn to come); he even criticised all that part of the entertainment for which Mme Verdurin was responsible. “But, talking of cups, what in the world are those strange little bowls which remind me of the vessels in which, when I was a young man, people used to get sorbets from Poiré Blanche? Somebody said to me just now that they were for ‘iced coffee.’ But I have seen neither coffee nor ice. What curious little objects, with so ill-defined a purpose!”

While saying this M. de Charlus had placed his white-gloved hands vertically over his lips and cautiously swivelled his eyes with a meaning look as though he were afraid of being heard and even seen by his host and hostess. But this was only a pretence, for in a few minutes he would be offering the same criticisms to the Mistress herself, and a little later would be insolently enjoining her: “No more iced-coffee cups, remember! Give them to one of your friends whose house you wish to disfigure. But warn her not to have them in the drawing-room, or people might think that they had come into the wrong room, the things are so exactly like chamberpots.”

“But, cousin,” said the guest, lowering her voice too and casting a questioning glance at M. de Charlus,