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By Root 1882 0

this Mme Verdurin should have invited me. I can’t imagine who these people are, I don’t know them.’ She was already saying a year ago that you were wearying her with your advances. She’s a fool; never invite her again. After all, she’s nothing so very wonderful. She can perfectly well come to your house without making a fuss about it, seeing that I come here. In short,” he concluded, “it seems to me that you have every reason to thank me, for, as far as it went, the whole thing was perfect. The Duchesse de Guermantes didn’t come, but one never knows, perhaps it was better that she didn’t. We shan’t hold it against her, we’ll think of her all the same another time, not that one can help remembering her, her very eyes say to us ‘Forget me not!’, for they remind one of those flowers” (here I thought to myself how strong the Guermantes spirit—the decision to go to one house and not to another—must be, to have outweighed in the Duchess’s mind her fear of Palamède). “Faced with so complete a success, one is tempted like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to see everywhere the hand of Providence. The Duchesse de Duras was enchanted. She even asked me to tell you so,” added M. de Charlus, dwelling upon the words as though Mme Verdurin must regard this as a sufficient honour. Sufficient and indeed scarcely credible, for he thought it necessary, in order to be believed, to add “Yes, indeed,” completely carried away by the madness of those whom Jupiter has decided to destroy. “She has engaged Morel to come to her house, where the same programme will be repeated, and I’m even thinking of asking her for an invitation for M. Verdurin.” This civility to the husband alone was, although no such idea even occurred to M. de Charlus, the most cruel insult to the wife, who, believing herself to possess with regard to the violinist, by virtue of a sort of ukase which prevailed in the little clan, the right to forbid him to perform elsewhere without her express authorisation, was absolutely determined to forbid his appearance at Mme de Duras’s party.

The Baron’s volubility was in itself an irritation to Mme Verdurin, who did not like people to form separate conversational groups within the little clan. How often, even at La Raspelière, hearing M. de Charlus talking incessantly to Charlie instead of being content with taking his part in the concerted ensemble of the clan, had she not pointed to him and exclaimed: “What a windbag he is! What a windbag! He really is the most colossal windbag?”?15 But this time it was far worse. Intoxicated by the sound of his own voice, M. de Charlus failed to realise that by acknowledging Mme Verdurin’s role and confining it within narrow limits, he was unleashing that feeling of hatred which was in her only a special, social form of jealousy. Mme Verdurin was genuinely fond of her regular visitors, the faithful of the little clan, but wished them to be entirely devoted to their Mistress. Cutting her losses, like those jealous lovers who will tolerate unfaithfulness, but only under their own roof and even in front of their eyes, that is to say when it scarcely counts as unfaithfulness, she would allow the men to have mistresses or male lovers, on condition that the affair had no social consequence outside her own house, that the tie was formed and perpetuated in the shelter of her Wednesdays. In the old days, every furtive giggle that came from Odette when she was with Swann had gnawed at Mme Verdurin, and so of late had every aside exchanged by Morel and the Baron; she found one consolation alone for her vexations, which was to destroy the happiness of others. She would have been unable to endure the Baron’s for long. And here was that rash individual precipitating the catastrophe by appearing to restrict the Mistress’s position in her little clan. Already she could see Morel going into society, without her, under the Baron’s aegis. There was only one remedy, to make Morel choose between the Baron and herself, and, taking advantage of the ascendancy that she had acquired over Morel by giving him proof of her extraordinary