In Search of Lost Time, Volume VI_ Time Regained - Marcel Proust [26]
Now that Mme Verdurin could get anyone she wanted to come to her house, people were very surprised to see her make indirect advances to someone she had completely lost sight of, Odette, the general opinion being that Odette could add nothing to the brilliant set that the little group had become. But a prolonged separation, which has the effect of appeasing resentments, in some cases also reawakens feelings of friendship. And then too the phenomenon of the dying man who pronounces none but familiar names from the past, or the old man who finds pleasure in his childhood memories, has its social equivalent. To succeed in the project of making Odette return to her, Mme Verdurin employed, naturally, not the “ultras” but the less faithful members of the group who had kept a foot in each of the two drawing-rooms. “I can’t think why we no longer see her here,” she said to them. “She may have fallen out with me, I haven’t with her. After all, what harm have I done her? It was in my house that she met both her husbands. If she wants to come back, let her know that the door is open.” These words, which would have involved a sacrifice of pride for the Mistress if they had not been dictated to her by her imagination, were passed on, but without success. Mme Verdurin waited in vain for Odette, until events which will come to our notice later brought about, for entirely different reasons, what the intercession of the “deserters,” for all their zeal, had been unable to achieve. So rarely do we meet either with easy success or with irreversible defeat.
To these parties Mme Verdurin used to invite a few ladies of rather recent origin, known for their good works, who at first came magnificently dressed, with great pearl necklaces that Odette, who had a necklace just as beautiful the display of which she had herself formerly overdone, regarded, now that she was “dressed for war” in imitation of the ladies of the Faubourg, with some severity. But women know how to adapt themselves. After three or four appearances they realised that the clothes which they had thought smart were precisely the ones proscribed by people who were smart; they laid aside their gold dresses and resigned themselves to simplicity.
“It is too bad,” Mme Verdurin would say. “I must telephone to Bontemps to get things put right for tomorrow, they have blue-pencilled the whole of the end of Norpois’s article and just because he hinted that Percin had been bowler-hatted.” For the idiocy of the times caused people to pride themselves on using the expressions of the times; in this way they hoped to show that they were in the fashion, like the middle-class woman who says, when MM. de Bréauté or d’Agrigente or de Charlus is mentioned: “You mean Babal de Bréauté? Grigri? Mémé de Charlus?” As a matter of fact duchesses do this too, and duchesses felt the same pleasure in saying “bowler-hatted,” for it is in their names that these ladies—for the commoner with a poetical imagination—are exceptional; in their language and their ideas they conform to the intellectual category to which they belong and to which also belong a vast number of middle-class people. The classes of the intellect take no account of birth.
All this telephoning that Mme Verdurin did was not, however, without its disadvantages. Although we have forgotten to mention the fact, the Verdurin “salon,” if it continued to exist in spirit and in all essentials, had been temporarily transferred to one of the largest hotels in Paris, the lack of coal and light making it too difficult for the Verdurins