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By Root 2038 0

game; a bouquet of violets and pansies in pastel, the gift of a painter friend, now dead, the sole surviving fragment of a life that had vanished without leaving any trace, epitomising a great talent and a long friendship, recalling his gentle, searching eyes, his shapely, plump and melancholy hand as he painted it; the attractively disordered clutter of the presents from the faithful which had followed the lady of the house from place to place and had come in time to assume the fixity of a trait of character, of a line of destiny; the profusion of cut flowers, of chocolate-boxes, which here as in the country systematised their efflorescence in accordance with an identical mode of blossoming; the curious interpolation of those singular and superfluous objects which still appear to have just been taken from the box in which they were offered and remain for ever what they were at first, New Year presents; all those things, in short, which one could not have isolated from the rest but which for Brichot, an old habitué of Verdurin festivities, had that patina, that velvety bloom of things to which, giving them a sort of depth, a spiritual Doppelgänger has come to be attached—all this sent echoing round him so many scattered chords, as it were, awakening in his heart cherished resemblances, confused reminiscences which, here in this actual drawing-room that was speckled with them, cut out, defined, delimited—as on a fine day a shaft of sunlight cuts a section in the atmosphere—the furniture and carpets, pursued, from a cushion to a flower-stand, from a footstool to a lingering scent, from a lighting arrangement to a colour scheme, sculpted, evoked, spiritualised, called to life, a form which was as it were the idealisation, immanent in each of their successive homes, of the Verdurin drawing-room.

“We must try,” Brichot whispered in my ear, “to get the Baron on to his favourite topic. He’s prodigious.” Now on the one hand I was glad of an opportunity to try to obtain from M. de Charlus information as to the movements of Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, information for which I had decided to leave Albertine that evening. On the other hand, I did not wish to leave the latter too long alone, not that she could (being uncertain of the moment of my return, not to mention that, at so late an hour, she could not have received a visitor or left the house herself without being noticed) make any nefarious use of my absence, but simply so that she might not find it too prolonged. And so I told Brichot and M. de Charlus that I must shortly leave them.

“Come with us all the same,” said the Baron, whose social excitement was beginning to flag, but feeling that need to prolong, to spin out a conversation, which I had already observed in the Duchesse de Guermantes as well as in himself, and which, while peculiarly characteristic of their family, extends in a more general fashion to all those who, offering their minds no other fulfilment than talk, that is to say an imperfect fulfilment, remain unsatisfied even after hours in company and attach themselves more and more hungrily to their exhausted interlocutor, from whom they mistakenly expect a satiety which social pleasures are incapable of giving. “Come, won’t you,” he repeated. “This is the pleasant moment at a party, the moment when all the guests have gone, the hour of Doña Sol; let us hope that it will end less tragically.16 Unfortunately you’re in a hurry, in a hurry, no doubt, to go and do things which you would much better leave undone. People are always in a hurry, and leave at the moment when they ought to be arriving. We’re like Couture’s philosophers,17 this is the time to go over the events of the evening, to carry out what is called in military parlance a review of operations. We might ask Mme Verdurin to send us in a little supper to which we should take care not to invite her, and we might request Charlie—still Hernani—to play for us alone the sublime adagio. Isn’t it simply beautiful, that adagio? But where is the young violinist, I should like to congratulate him; this is the