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By Root 1393 0

’s young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively that season (for all that Mme Verdurin herself was a thoroughly virtuous woman who came of a respectable middle-class family, excessively rich and wholly undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her own accord severed all connection) to a young woman almost of the demi-monde, a Mme de Crécy, whom Mme Verdurin called by her Christian name, Odette, and pronounced a “love,” and to the pianist’s aunt, who looked as though she had, at one period, “answered the door”: ladies quite ignorant of society, who in their naivety had so easily been led to believe that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to pay large sums of money to other poor wretches in order to have anyone at their dinner-parties, that if somebody had offered to procure them an invitation to the house of either of those noblewomen, the concierge and the cocotte would have contemptuously declined.

The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your “place laid” there. There was never any programme for the evening’s entertainment. The young pianist would play, but only if “the spirit moved him,” for no one was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: “We’re all friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!” If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme Verdurin would protest, not because the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary, because it made too violent an impression on her. “Then you want me to have one of my headaches? You know quite well it’s the same every time he plays that. I know what I’m in for. Tomorrow, when I want to get up—nothing doing!” If he was not going to play they talked, and one of the friends—usually the painter who was in favour there that year—would “spin,” as M. Verdurin put it, “a damned funny yarn that made ’em all split with laughter,” and especially Mme Verdurin, who had such an inveterate habit of taking literally the figurative descriptions of her emotions that Dr Cottard (then a promising young practitioner) had once had to reset her jaw, which she had dislocated from laughing too much.

Evening dress was barred, because you were all “good pals” and didn’t want to look like the “boring people” who were to be avoided like the plague and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom as possible and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the musician better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing charades and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to mingle any alien ingredient with the little “clan.”

But as the “good pals” came to take a more and more prominent place in Mme Verdurin’s life, the bores, the outcasts, grew to include everybody and everything that kept her friends away from her, that made them sometimes plead previous engagements, the mother of one, the professional duties of another, the “little place in the country” or the ill-health of a third. If Dr Cottard felt bound to leave as soon as they rose from table, so as to go back to some patient who was seriously ill, “Who knows,” Mme Verdurin would say, “it might do him far more good if you didn’t go disturbing him again this evening; he’ll have a good night without you; tomorrow morning you can go round early and you’ll find him cured.” From the beginning of December she was sick with anxiety at the thought that the “faithful” might “defect” on Christmas and New Year’s Days. The pianist’s aunt insisted that he must accompany her, on the latter, to a family dinner at her mother’s.

“You don’t suppose she’ll die, your mother,” exclaimed Mme Verdurin bitterly, “if you don’t have dinner with her on New Year’s Day, like people in the provinces!”

Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: “Now you, Doctor, you’re a sensible, broad-minded man; you’ll come of course on Good Friday, just like any other day?” she said to Cottard in the first year of the little “nucleus,” in a loud and confident voice, as though there could be no doubt of his answer. But she trembled