 section 23 of Swan's Way this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Dennis Sayers Swan's Way by Marcel Proust translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief section 23 by this love Swan had been so far detached from all other interests that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion reminding himself that his social relations like a beautifully wrought setting although she would not have been able to form any exact estimate of its worth might still add a little to his own value in Odette's eyes as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love itself which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself he would feel there simultaneously with his distress at being in places and among people that she did not know the same detached sense of pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class just as at home he used to enjoy the thought of this smooth efficiency of his household the smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants liveries the soundness of his investments with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon who was one of his favorite authors of the machinery of daily life at Versailles what madame de Montenon ate and drank or the shrewd avarice and great pomp of Louis and in the small extent to which this detachment was not absolute the reason for this small pleasure which swan was tasting was that he could immigrate for a moment into those few and distant parts of himself which had remained almost foreign to his love and to his pain in this respect the personality with which my great aunt endowed him of young swan as distinct from the more individual personality of Charles swan was that in which he most now delighted once when because it was the birthday of the princess de Parme and because she could often be of use indirectly to Odette by letting her have seats for galleys and jubilees and all that sort of thing he had decided to send her a basket of fruit and was not quite sure where or how to order it he had entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother who delighted to be doing a commission for him had written to him laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit at the same place but the grapes from Crapout whose specialty they were the strawberries from charret the pears from chevet who always had the best and so every fruit visited and examined one by one by myself and in the sequel by the cordiality with which the princess thanked him he had been able to judge of the flavor of the strawberries and the rightness of the pears but most of all that every fruit visited and examined one by one by myself had brought balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he rarely visited although it was his by right as the heir of a rich and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from generation to generation the knowledge of the right places and the art of ordering things from shops of a truth he had too long forgotten that he was young swan not to feel when he assumed that part again for a moment a keener pleasure than he was capable of feeling at other times when indeed he was grown sick of pleasure and if the friendliness of the middle-class people for whom he had never been anything else than young swan was less animated than that of the aristocrats though more flattering for all that since in the middle class mine friendship is inseparable from respect no letter from a royal personage offering him some princely entertainment could ever be so attractive to swan as the letter which asked him to be a witness or merely to be present at a wedding in the family of some old friends of his parents some of whom had kept up with him like my grandfather who the year before these events had invited him to my mother's wedding while others barely knew him by sight but were they thought in duty bound to show civility to the son to the worthy successor of the late mr swan but by virtue of his intimacy already time honored with so many of them the people of fashion in a certain sense were also a part of his house his service and his family he felt when his mind dwelt upon his brilliant connections the same external support the same solid comfort as when he looked at the finest state the fine silver the fine table linen which had come down to him from his forebears and the thought that if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the house the people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would be the duke to chart the prince de ruse the duke de lexambord and the baron de charleux brought him the same consolation as our old france was derived from the knowledge that she would one day be buried in her own fine clothes marked with her name not darned at all or so exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and patience of the seamstress a shroud from the constant image of which in her mind's eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense if not of wealth and prosperity at any rate of self-esteem but most of all since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference to odette swan was constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed feeling that he was perhaps not less dear but at least less welcome to her than anyone even the most wearisome of the verdurant faithful when he took himself to a world in which he was the paramount example of taste a man whom no pains were spared to attract whom people were genuinely sorry not to see he began once again to believe in the existence of a happier life almost to feel an appetite for it as an invalid may feel who has been in bed for months and on a strict diet when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an official banquet or the advertisement of a cruise round Sicily if he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not paying them visits it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her that he sought to excuse himself to odette he still paid them asking himself at the end of each month whether seeing that he had perhaps exhausted her patience and had certainly gone rather often to see her it would be enough if he sent her four thousand francs and for each visit he found a pretext a present that he had to bring her some information which she required matured charlieu whom he had met actually going to her house and who insisted upon swans accompanying him and failing any excuse he would beg matured charlieu to go to her at once and to tell her as though spontaneously in the course of conversation that he had just remembered something he had to say to swan and would she please send a message to swans house asking him to come to her then and there but as a rule swan waited at home in vain and matured charlieu informed him later in the evening that his device had not proved successful with the result that if she was now frequently away from paris even when she was there he scarcely saw her that she who when she was in love with him used to say i am always free and what can it matter to me what other people think now whenever he wanted to see her appealed to the proprieties or pleaded some engagement when he spoke of going to a charity entertainment or a private view or a first night at which she was to be present she would expost late that he wished to advertise their relations in public that he was treating her like a woman off the streets things came to such a pitch that in an effort to save himself from being altogether forbidden to meet her anywhere swan remembering that she knew and was deeply attached to my great uncle adolf whose friend he himself also had been went one day to see him in his little flat in the rue de belchez to ask him to use his influence with odette as it happened she invariably adopted when she spoke to swan about my uncle a poetical tone saying ah he he is not in the least like you it is an exquisite thing a great a beautiful thing his friendship for me he's not the sort of man who would have so little consideration for me as to let himself be seen with me everywhere in public this was embarrassing for swan who did not know quite to what rhetorical pitch he could screw himself up in speaking of odette to my uncle he began by alluding to her excellent a priori the axiom of her seraphic superhumanity the revelation of her inexpressible virtues no conception of which could possibly be formed i should like to speak to you about her he went on you who know what a woman supreme above all women what an adorable being what an angel odette is but you know also what life is in paris everyone doesn't see odette in the light in which you and i have been privileged to see her and so there are people who think that i am behaving rather foolishly she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors at the theater now you in whom she has such enormous confidence couldn't you say a few words for me to her just to assure her that she exaggerate the harm which my bowing to her in the street might do her my uncle advised swan not to see odette for some days after which she would love him all the more he advised odette to let swan meet her everywhere and as often as he pleased a few days later odette told swan that she had just had a rude awakening she had discovered that my uncle was the same as other men he had tried to take her by assault she calmed swan who at first was for rushing out to challenge my uncle to a duel but he refused to shake hands with him when they met again he regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped if he had met my uncle adult again sometimes and had contrived to talk things over with him in strict confidence to be able to get him to throw a light on certain rumors with regard to the life that odette had led in the old days at niece for my uncle adult used to spend the winter there and swan thought it might indeed have been there perhaps that he had first known odette the few words which someone had let fall in his hearing about a man who it appeared had been odette's lover had left swan dumbfounded but the very things which he would before knowing them have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe were once he knew them incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow he admitted them he could no longer have understood they're not existing only each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line altering the picture that he had formed of his mistress at one time indeed he felt that he could understand that this moral lightness of which he would never have suspected odette was perfectly well known and that at baden or niece when she had gone in the past to spend several months in one or the other place she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety he attempted in order to question them to get into touch again with certain men of that stamp but these were aware that he knew odette and besides he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their heads of setting them once more upon her track but he to whom up till then nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of baden or of niece now that he learned that odette had perhaps led a gay life once in those pleasure cities although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which thanks to himself she no longer felt or from some capricious instinct which might at any moment revive in her he would lean in impotent anguish blinded and dizzy over the bottomless abyss into which had passed in which had been engulfed those years of his own early and mcmayon's septonaut in which one spent the winter on the promenade d'anglais the summer beneath the limes of baden and would find in those years a sad but splendid profundity such as a poet might have lent to them and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant details that made up the daily round on the coat d'azur in those days if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in the smile or the eyes of odette more enthusiasm than does the esthete who ransacks the extent documents of 15th century florins so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the primavera the fair vana or the venus of boticelli he would sit often without saying a word to her only gazing at her and dreaming and she would comment you look so sad it was not very long since from the idea that she was an excellent creature comparable to the best women that he had known he had passed to that of her being kept and yet already by the inverse process he had returned from the odette de crissie perhaps too well known to the holiday makers to the ladies men of niece and botan to this face the expression on which was so often gentle to this nature so imminently human he would ask himself what does it mean after all to say that everyone at niece knows who odette de crissie is reputations of that sort even when they're true are always based upon other people's ideas he would reflect that this legend even if it were authentic was something external to odette was not inherent in her like a mischievous and eradicable personality that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank eyes a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others a docile body which he had pressed tightly in his arms and explored with his fingers a woman of whom he might one day come into absolute possession if he succeeded in making himself indispensable to her there she was often tired her face left blank for the nonce by that eager feverish preoccupation with the unknown things which made swan suffer she would push back her hair with both hands her forehead her whole face would seem to grow larger then suddenly some ordinary human thought some worthy sentiment such as is to be found in all creatures when in a moment of rest or meditation they are free to express themselves would flash out from her eyes like a ray of gold and immediately the whole of her face would light up like a gray landscape swathed in clouds which suddenly are swept away and the dull scene transfigured at the moment of the sun setting the life which occupied odette at such times even the future which she seemed to be dreamily regarding swan could have shared with her no evil disturbance seemed to have left any effect on them rare as they became those moments did not occur in vain by the process of memory swan joined the fragments together abolish the intervals between them cast as in molten gold the image of an odette compact of kindness and tranquility for whom he was to make later on as we shall see in the second part of this story sacrifices which the other odette would never have won from him but how rare those moments were and how seldom he now saw her even in regard to their evening meetings she would never tell him until the last minute whether she would be able to see him for reckoning on his being always free she wished first to be certain that no one else would offer to come to her she would plead that she was obliged to wait for an answer which was of the very greatest importance and if even after she had made swan come to her house any of her friends asked her halfway through the evening to join them at some theater or at supper afterwards she would jump for joy and dress herself up with all speed as her toilet progressed every movement that she made brought swan nearer to the moment when he would have to part from her when she would fly off with irresistible force and when at length she was ready and plunging into her mirror a last glance strained and brightened by her anxiety to look well smeared a little salve on her lips fixed a stray loci of hair over her brow and called for the cloak of sky blue silk with golden tassels swan would be looking so wretched that she would be unable to restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him so that is how you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute and I thought I was being so nice to you well I shall know better another time sometimes at the risk of annoying her he made up his mind that he would find out where she had gone and even dreamed of a defensive alliance with force fuel who might perhaps been able to tell him but anyhow when he knew with whom she was spending the evening it was very seldom that he could not discover among all his innumerable acquaintance someone who knew if only indirectly the man with whom she had gone out and could easily obtain this or that piece of information about him and while he was writing to one of his friends asking him to try to get a little light thrown upon some point or other he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to vex himself with questions to which there was no answer and transferring to someone else the strain of interrogation it is true that swan was little the wiser for such information as he did receive to know a thing does not enable us always to prevent it's happening but after all the things that we know we do hold if not in our hands at any rate in our minds where we can dispose of them as we choose which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them he was quite happy whenever matured charlieu was with odette he knew that between matured charlieu and her nothing untoward could ever happen that when matured charlieu went anywhere with her it was out of friendship for himself and that he would make no difficulty about telling him everything that she had done sometimes she had declared so emphatically to swan that it was impossible for him to see her a particular evening she seemed to be looking forward so keenly to some outing that swan attached a very real importance to the fact that matured charlieu was free to accompany her next day without daring to put many questions to matured charlieu he would force him by appearing not quite to understand his first answers to give him more after each of which he would feel himself increasingly relieved for he very soon learned that odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of dissipations but what do you mean my dear meme i don't quite understand you didn't go straight from her house to the mousse grave surely you went somewhere else first no that is very odd you don't know how amusing you are my dear meme but what an odd idea of hers to go to the chat noir afterwards it was her idea i suppose no yours that's strange after all it wasn't a bad idea she must have known dozens of people there no she never spoke to a soul how extraordinary then you sat there like that just you and she all by yourselves i can picture you sitting there you are a worthy fellow my dear meme i'm exceedingly fond of you swan was now quite at ease to him who had so often happened when talking to friends who knew nothing about his love friends to whom he hardly listened to hear certain detached sentences as for instance i saw madame de crissie yesterday she was with a man i didn't know sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid state grew hard as stalagmites and seared and tore him as they laid their irremovable how charming by way of contrast were the words she didn't know a soul she never spoke to a soul how freely they coursed through him how fluid they were how vaporous how easy to breathe and yet a moment later he was telling himself that odette must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred to his company and their very insignificance though it reassured him pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery even when he could not discover where she had gone it would have suffice to alleviate the anguish that he then felt for which odette's presence the charm of her company was the sole specific specific which in the long run served like many other remedies to aggravate the disease but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings it would have sufficed had odette only permitted him to remain in her house while she was out to wait there until that hour of her return into whose stillness and peace would flow to be mingled and lost there all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery some cursed spell had made him imagine as somehow different from the rest but she would not he must return home he forced himself on the way to form various plans cease to think of odette he even reached the stage while he undressed of turning over all sorts of happy ideas in his mind it was with a light heart buoyed with the anticipation of going to see some favorite work of art on the morrow that he jumped into bed and turned out the light but no sooner had he made himself ready to sleep relaxing a self control of which he was not even conscious so habitual had it become that an icy shudder convulsed his body and he burst into sobs he did not wish to know why but dried his eyes sane with a smile this is delightful i'm becoming neurasthenic after which he could not save himself from utter exhaustion at the thought that next day he must begin afresh his attempt to find out what odette had been doing must use all his influence to contrive to see her this compulsion to an activity without respite without variety without result was so cruel a scourge that one day noticing a swelling over his stomach he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had perhaps a tumor which would prove fatal that he need not concern himself with anything further that it was his malady which was going to govern his life to make a plaything of him until the not distant end if indeed at this period it often happened that though without admitting it even to himself he longed for death it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle and yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no longer loved her when she would have no reason for lying to him when at length he might learn from her whether on the day when he had gone to see her in the afternoon she had or had not been in the arms of force field often for several days on end the suspicion that she was in love with someone else would distract his mind from the question of force field making it almost immaterial to him like those new developments of a continuous state of ill health which seemed for a little time to have delivered us from their predecessors there were even days when he was not tormented by any suspicion he fancied that he was cured but next morning when he awoke he felt in the same place the same pain a sensation which the day before he had as it were diluted in the torrent of different impressions but it had not stirred from its place indeed it was the sharpness of this pain that had awakened him since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important matters which took up so much of her time every day albeit he had lived long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything else than pleasures he could not sustain for any length of time the effort to imagine them his brain would become a void then he would pass a finger over his tired eyelids in the same way as he might have wiped his eyeglass and would cease altogether to think they're emerged however from this unexplored tract certain occupations which reappeared from time to time vaguely connected by Odette with some obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who in as much as they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning as preventing her from seeing him seemed to swan to compose the necessary unalterable setting of her life because of the tone in which she referred from time to time to the day when I go with my friend to the hippodrome if when he felt unwell and had thought perhaps Odette will be kind and come to see me he remembered suddenly that it was one of those very days he would correct himself with and oh no it's not worth while asking her to come I should have thought of it before this is the day when she goes with her friend to the hippodrome we must confine ourselves to what is possible no use wasting our time in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in advance and this duty that was incumbent upon Odette of going to the hippodrome to which swan thus gave way seemed to him to be not merely ineluctable in itself but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely connected with it if when Odette in the street had acknowledged the salute of a passerby which had aroused swan's jealousy she would apply to his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him if for instance she said that's a gentleman who was in my friend's box the other day the one I go to the hippodrome with that explanation would set swan's suspicions at rest it was after all inevitable that this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the hippodrome but he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any coherent impression of them oh how he would have loved to know her that friend who went to the hippodrome how he would have loved her to invite him there with Odette how readily he would have sacrificed all his acquaintance for no matter what person who was in the habit of seeing Odette were she but a manicurist or a girl from a shop he would have taken more trouble incurred more expense for them than for queens would they not have supplied him out of what was contained in their knowledge of the life of Odette with the one potent anodyne for his pain with what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with one or other of these humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly relations either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity of nature how willingly would he have fixed his abode forever in the attics of some sordid but enviable house where Odette went but never took him and where if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker whose lover he would readily have pretended to be he would have been visited by Odette almost daily in those regions that were almost slums what a modest existence abject if you please but delightful nourished by tranquility and happiness he would have consented to lead indefinitely it sometimes happened again that when after meeting Swan she saw some man approaching whom he did not know he could distinguish upon Odette's face that look of sorrow which she had worn on the day when he had come to her while Forchville was there but this was rare for on the days when in spite of all that she had to do and of her dread of what people would think she did actually manage to seize one the predominant quality in her attitude now was self assurance a striking contrast perhaps an unconscious revenge for perhaps a natural reaction from the temerous emotion which in the early days of their friendship she had felt in his presence and even in his absence when she began a letter to him with the words my dear my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write so at least she pretended and a little of that emotion must have been sincere or she would not have been anxious to enlarge and emphasize it so Swan had been pleasing to her then our hands do not tremble except for ourselves or for those whom we love when they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful how easy how bold do we become in their presence in speaking to him in writing to him now she no longer employed those words by which she had sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her creating opportunities for saying my and mine when she referred to him you are all that I have in the world it is the perfume of our friendship I shall keep it nor spoke to him of the future of death itself as of a single adventure which they would have to share in those early days whatever he might say to her she would answer admiringly you know you will never be like other people she would gaze at his long slightly bald head of which people who know only of his success used to think he's not regularly good looking if you like but he is smart that tuft that eyeglass that smile and with more curiosity perhaps to know him as he really was then desire to become his mistress she would sigh I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of yours but now whatever he might say she would answer in a tone sometimes of irritation sometimes indulgent ah so you never will be like other people she would gaze at his head which was hardly aged at all by his recent anxieties though people now thought of it by the same mental process which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music of which one has read the program or the likenesses in a child whose family one has known he's not positively ugly if you like but he is really rather absurd that eyeglass that tuft that smile realizing in their imagination fed by suggestion the invisible boundary which divides at a few months interval the head of an ardent lover from a cuckold's and would say oh I do wish I could change you put some sense into that head of yours always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped if it was only Odette's way of behaving to him that left room for doubt he would fling himself gridly upon her words you can if you like he would tell her and he tried to explain to her that to comfort him to control him to make him work would be a noble task to which numbers of other women asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves though it is only fair to add that in those other women's hands the noble task would have seemed to swan nothing more than an indiscreet and intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action if she didn't love me just a little he told himself she would not wish to have me altered to alter me she would have to see me more often and so he was able to trace in these faults which she found in him a proof at least of her interest perhaps even of her love and in fact she gave him so little now of the last that he was obliged to regard as proofs of her interest in him the various things which every now and then she forbade him to do one day she announced that she did not care for his coachman who she thought was perhaps setting swan against her and anyhow did not show that promptness and deference to swan's orders which he would have liked to see she felt that he wanted to hear her say don't have him again when you come to me just as he might have wanted her to kiss him so being in a good temper she said it and he was deeply moved that evening when talking to matured to charlie with whom he had the satisfaction of being able to speak of her openly for the most trivial remarks that he uttered now even to people who had never heard of her had always some sort of reference to odette he said to him i believe all the same that she loves me she is so nice to see me now and she certainly takes an interest in what i do and if when he was starting off for her house getting into his carriage with a friend whom he was to drop somewhere on the way his friend said hello that isn't loradan on the box with what melancholy joy would swan answer him oh good heavens no i i can tell you i daren't take loradan when i go to the ru la peruse odette doesn't like me to have loradan she thinks he doesn't suit me what on earth is one to do women you know women my dear fellow she would be furious oh lord yes i've only to take remi there i should never hear the last of it these new manners indifferent listless irritable which odette now adopted with swan undoubtedly made him suffer but he did not realize how much he suffered since it had been with a regular progression day after day that odette had chilled towards him it was only by directly contrasting what she was today with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place now this change was his deep his secret wound which paint him day and night and whenever he felt that his thoughts were strained too near it he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made to suffer too keenly he might say to himself in a vague way there was a time when odette loved me more but he never formed any definite picture of that time just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he contrived never to look which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever he entered or left the room because in one of its drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage and the letters in which she said why did you not forget your heart also I should never have let you have that back and at whatever hour of the day or night you may need me just send me a word and dispose of me as you please so there was a place in his heart to which he would never allow his thoughts to cresp us too near forcing them if need be to evade it by a long course of reasoning so that they should not have to pass within reach of it the place in which lingered his memories of happy days but his so meticulous prudence was defeated one evening when he had gone out to a party it was at the marquis de saint du verre on the last for that season of the evenings on which she invited people to listen to the musicians who would serve later on for her charity concerts swan who had intended to go to each of the previous evenings in turn but had never been able to make up his mind received while he was dressing for his party a visit from the baron de charlotte who came with an offer to go with him to the marquis's if his company could be of any use in helping swan not to feel so bored when he got there to be a little less unhappy but swan had thanked him with you can't conceive how glad I should be of your company but the greatest pleasure that you can give me will be if you will go instead to see Odette you know what a splendid influence you have over her I don't suppose she'll be going anywhere this evening unless she goes to her old dressmaker and I'm sure she would be delighted if you went with her there in any case you'll find her at home before then try to keep her amused and also to give her a little sound advice if you could arrange something for tomorrow which would please her something that we could all three do together try to put out a feeler to for the summer see if there's anything she wants to do a cruise that we might all three take anything you can think of I don't count upon seeing her tonight myself still if she would like me to come or if you find a loophole you've only to send me a line at madame de sainte uvers up till midnight after that I shall be here ever so many thanks for all you are doing for me you know what I feel about you his friend promised to go and do as swan wished as soon as he had deposited him at the door of the sainte uvers house where he arrived soothed by the thought that monsieur de charloux would be spending the evening in the rue la peruse but in a state of melancholy indifference to everything that did not involve odette and in particular to the details of fashionable life a state which invested them with the charm that is to be found in anything which being no longer an object of our desire appears to us in its own guise on a lighting from his carriage in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions and in which they show a great regard for accuracy of costume and setting swan was amused to discover the heirs and predecessors of balzacs tigers now grooms who normally followed their mistress when she walked abroad but now hatted and booted were posted out of doors in front of the house on the gravel drive or outside the stables as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of their several flower beds the peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits and galleries reasserted itself here but in a more positive and more general form it was society as a whole now that he was detached from it which presented itself to him in a series of pictures in the cloakroom into which in the old days when he was still a man of fashion he would have gone in his overcoat to emerge from it in evening dress but without any impression of what had occurred there his mind having been during the minute or two that he had spent in it either still at the party which he had just left or already at the party into which he was just about to be ushered he now noticed for the first time roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals the enormous footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests until pointing their noble greyhound profiles they towered upon their feet and gathered in a circle round about him one of them of a particularly ferocious aspect and not unlike the headsmen in certain renaissance pictures which represent executions tortures and the like advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things but the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves so effectively that as he approached swan he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat he took it with a care to which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost over fastidious and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching by the evidence of his splendid strength then he passed it to one of his satellites anavis and temet who was expressing the panic that overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction and displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of its captivity end of section 23 section 24 of swan's way this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Dennis Sayers swan's way by Marcel Proust translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief section 24 a few feet away a strapping great lad in livery stood musing motionless statuesque useless like that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Montaigne's paintings lost in dreams leaning upon his shield while all around him are fighting and bloodshed and death detached from the group of his companions who were thronging about swan he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in the scene which he found vaguely with his cruel greenish eyes as if it had been the massacre of the innocence or the martyrdom of st. James he seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race if indeed it ever existed save in the riridass of sanzino and the frescoes of the Arimatani where swan had come in contact with it and where it still dreams fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue by someone of the master's pageant models or of albert dorere's saxons and the locks of his reddish hair crinkled by nature but glued to his head by brilliantine retreated broadly as they are in that Greek sculpture which the manchuan painter never ceased to study in which if in its creator's purpose it represents but man manages at least to extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness borrowed as it were from the whole of animated nature that ahead of hair by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls or in the overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses can suggest at once a bunch of seaweed a brood of fledgling doves a bed of hyacinths and a serpents writhing back others again no less colossal were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase which by their decorative presence and memorian immobility was made worthy to be named like that god-crowned descent in the palace of the doges the staircase of the giants and on which swan now set foot saddened by the thought that Odette had never climbed it ah with what joy would he on the other hand have raced up the dark evil smelling break net flights to the little dressmakers in whose attic he would so gladly have paid the price of a weekly stagepox at the opera for the right to spend the evening there when Odette came and other days too for the privilege of talking about her of living among people whom she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there and who on that account seen to keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his mistress more real more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew whereas upon that pestilential enviable staircase to the old dressmakers since there was no other no service stair in the building one saw in the evening outside every door an empty unwashed milk can set out in readiness for the morning round upon the doormat on the despicable enormous staircase which swan was at the moment climbing on either side of him at different levels before each and fractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests a gatekeeper a major domo a steward worthy men who spent the rest of the weekend semi-independence in their own domains dined there by themselves like small shopkeepers and might tomorrow lapse to the plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate scrupulous and carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at long intervals in which they did not feel altogether at their ease stood each in the arcade of his doorway their splendid pomp tempered by a democratic good fellowship like saints in their niches and a gigantic usher dressed swiss guard fashion like the beetle in a church struck the pavement with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him coming to the top of the staircase up which he had been followed by a servant with the pallid continents and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head like one of Goya's sacristans or a tabellan in an old play swan passed by an office in which the lackeys seated like notaries before their massive registers rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name he next crossed a little hall which just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art from which they take their name and in their studied bareness contain nothing else besides displayed to him as he entered it like some priceless effigy by venvenduto selene of an armed watchman a young footman his body slightly bent forward rearing above his crimson gorge and even more crimson face from which seemed to burst forth torrents of fire timidity and zeal who as he pierced the ovison tapestries that screened the door of the room in which the music was being given with his impetuous vigilant desperate gaze appeared with the soldierly impassibility or a supernatural faith an allegory of alarm's incarnation of alertness commemoration of a riot appeared to be looking out angel or sentinel from the tower of dungeon or cathedral for the approach of the enemy or for the hour of judgment swan had now only to enter the concert room the doors of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains who bowed low before him as though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city but he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have been if Odette had but permitted and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk can upon a doormat rung his heart he speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when on the other side of the tapestry curtain the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests but even this ugliness of faces which of course were mostly familiar to him seemed something new and uncanny now that their features instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after burdens to be avoided or courtesies to be acknowledged now that their features were at rest measurable by aesthetic coordinates alone in the autonomy of their curves and angles and in these men in the thick of whom swan now found himself packed there was nothing even to the monocle which many of them wore and which previously would at the most have enabled swan to say that so and so wore a monocle which no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit the same and all of them did not strike him with a sense of individuality in each perhaps because he did not regard general defrobe revealed and the marquee de brioche who were talking together just inside the door as anything more than two figures in a picture whereas they were old and useful friends who had put him up for the jockey club and had supported him in duels the general's monocle stuck like a shell splinter in his common scarred victorious overbearing face in the middle of a forehead which it left half-blinded like the single-eyed flashing front of the cyclops appeared to swan as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose while that which mr. de brioche wore as a festive badge with his pearl gray gloves his crush hat and white tie substituting it for the familiar pair of classes as swan himself did when he went out to places bore glued to its other side like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of sea leans the delightfulness of parties the interestingness of programs and the excellence of refreshments hello you here why it's ages since i've seen you the general greeted swan and noticing the look of strain on his face and concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away went on you're looking well old man well mr. de brioche turned with my dear fellow what on earth are you doing here to a society novelist who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his own monocle the sole instrument that he used in his psychological investigations and remorseless analyses of character and who now replied with an air of mystery and importance rolling the r i am absurd the marquita forestels monocle was minute and rimless and by enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it was encrusted like a superfluous cartilage the presence of which there was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable it gave to his face a melancholy refinement and led women to suppose incapable of suffering terribly when in love but that of monsieur de sancton girdled like Saturn with an enormous ring was the center of gravity of a face which composed itself afresh every moment in relation to the glass while his thrusting red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavored by their grimaces to rise to the level of the steady flame of wit that sparkled in the polished disc and saw itself preferred to the most ravishing eyes in the world by the smart depraved young women whom it set dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss and then behind him monsieur de palency who with his huge carp's head and goggling eyes moved slowly up and down the stream of festive gatherings unlocking his great mandibles at every moment as though in search of his orientation had the air of caring about upon his person only an accidental and perhaps purely symbolic fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium apart intended to suggest the whole which recalled to swan a firmit admirer of Giotto's vices and virtues at padua that injustice by whose side a leafy bow evokes the idea of the forests that enshroud his secret lair swan had gone forward into the room under pressure from madame de santu verre and in order to listen to an aria from or fail which was being rendered on the flute and had taken up a position in a corner from which unfortunately his horizon was bounded by two ladies of uncertain age seated side by side the marquis de comberme and the fricontes de francto who because they were cousins used to spend their time at parties in wandering through the rooms each clutching her bag and followed by her daughter hunting for one another like people at a railway station and could never be at rest until they had reserved by marking them with their fans or anchorchiefs to adjacent chairs madame de comberme since she knew scarcely anyone being all the more glad of a companion while madame de francto who on the contrary was extremely popular thought it effective and original to show all her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common filled with ironical melancholy swan watched them as they listened to the pianoforte in terror meso lists saint francis preaching to the birds which came after the flute and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy flight madame de francto anxiously her eyes starting from her head as though the keys over which his fingers slipped with such agility were a series of trapezes from any one of which he might come crashing a hundred feet to the ground stealing now and then a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her companion as who should say it isn't possible i would never have believed that a human being could do all that madame de comberme as a woman who had received a sound musical education beating time with her head transformed for the nonce into the pendulum of a metronome the sweep and rapidity of whose movements from one shoulder to the other performed with that look of wild abandonment in her eye which a sufferer shows who is no longer able to analyze his pain nor anxious to master it and says merely i can't help it so increased that at every moment her diamond earrings caught in the trembling of her bodice and she was obliged to put straight the bunch of black grapes which she had in her hair though without any interruption of her constantly accelerated motion on the other side and a little way in front of madame de francto was the marquise de galardon absorbed in her favorite meditation namely upon her own kinship with the gourmand family from which she derived both publicly and in private a good deal of glory not unmingled with shame the most brilliant ornaments of that house remaining somewhat aloof from her perhaps because she was just a tiresome old woman or because she was a scandalous old woman or because she came of an inferior branch of the family or very possibly for no reason at all when she found herself seated next to someone whom she did not know as she was at this moment next to madame de francto she suffered acutely from the feeling that her own consciousness of her gourmand connection could not be made externally manifest invisible character like those which in the mosaics in Byzantine churches placed one beneath another inscribed in a vertical column by the side of some sacred personage the words which he is supposed to be uttering at this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation or even call from her cousin the princess de l'homme during the six years that had already elapsed since the latter's marriage the thought filled her with anger and with pride for by virtue of having told everyone who expressed surprise at never seeing her at madame de l'homme's that it was because of the risk of meeting the princess matilde there a degradation which her own family the truest and bluest of the legitimists would never have forgiven her she had come gradually to believe that this actually was the reason for not visiting her young cousin she remembered it is true that she had several times inquired of madame de l'homme how they might contrive to meet but she remembered it only in a confused way and besides did more than neutralize this slightly humiliating reminiscence by murmuring after all it isn't for me to take the first step i am at least 20 years older than she is and fortified by these unspoken words she flung her shoulders proudly back until they seemed to part company with her bust while her head which lay almost horizontally upon them made one think of the stuck on head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant having been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance since she was obliged in order to console herself for not being quite on a level with the rest of the garment to repeat to herself incessantly that it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride that she saw so little of them the constant iteration had gradually remolded her body and given her a sort of bearing which was accepted by the plebeian as a sign of breeding and even kindled at times a momentary spark in the jaded eyes of old gentlemen in clubs had anyone subjected madame du gardon's conversation to that form of analysis which by noting the relative frequency of its several terms would furnish him with the key to a ciphered message he would at once had remarked that no expression not even the commonest forms of speech occurred in it nearly so often as at my cousin's the ghermont at my aunt ghermont's helzer the ghermont's health my cousin ghermont's box if anyone spoke to her of a distinguished personage she would reply that although she was not personally acquainted with him she had seen him hundreds of times at her aunt ghermont's but she would utter this reply and so icy the tone with such a hollow sound that it was at once quite clear that if she did not know the celebrity personally that was because of all the obstinate ineradicable principles against which her arching shoulders were stretched back to rest as on one of those ladders on which gymnastic instructors make us extend so as to develop the expansion of our chests at this moment the process de l'homme who had not been expected to appear at madame sent who bears that evening did in fact arrive to show that she did not wish any special attention in a house to which she had come by an act of condescension to be paid to her superior rank she had entered the room with her arms pressed close to her sides even when there was no crowd to be squeezed through no one attempting to get past her staying purposely at the back with the air of being in her proper place like a king who stands in the waiting procession at the doors of a theater where the management have not been warned of his coming and strictly limiting her field of vision so as not to seem to be advertising her presence and claiming the consideration that was her due to the study of a pattern in the carpet or of her own skirt she stood there on the spot which had struck her as the most modest and from which as she very well knew a cry of rapture from madame de santubert would extricate her as soon as her presence there was noticed next to madame comberme whom however she did not know she observed the dumb show by which her neighbor was expressing her passion for music but she refrained from copying it this was not to say that for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in madame de santubert's house the princess de l'homme would not have wished so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might so to speak count double to show herself as friendly and obliging as possible but she had a natural horror of what she called exaggerating and always made a point of letting people see that she simply must not indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her by virtue of that spirit of imitation akin to timidity which is developed in the most self-confident persons by contact with an unfamiliar environment even though it be inferior to their own she began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not perhaps be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played a piece which it might be was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house with result that in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or a pink enamel frosted with tiny diamonds which formed its simple but effective ornament studying with a cold interest her impassioned neighbor while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan but so as not to forfeit her independence she would beat a different time from the pianists when he had finished the list entremerceaux and had begun a prelude by Chopin madame de combermay turned to madame de frontot with a tender smile full of intimate reminiscence as well as of satisfaction that of a competent judge with the performance she had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long necked senuous creatures the phrases of Chopin so free so flexible so tactile which began by seeking their ultimate resting place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started the point which one might have expected them to reach phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypass only to return more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction with more precision as on a crystal bowl which if you strike it will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish to clutch at one's heart brought up in a provincial household with few friends or visitors hardly ever invited to a ball she had fuddled her mind in the solitude of her old manor house over setting the pace now crawling slow now passionate whirling breathless for all those imaginary waltzing couples gathering them like flowers leaving the ballroom for a moment to listen where the wind sighed among the pine trees on the shore of the lake and seeing of a sudden advancing towards her more different from anything one had ever dreamed of than earthly lovers are a slender young man whose voice was resonant and strange and false in white clubs but nowadays the old-fashioned beauty of this music seem to have become a trifle stale having forfeited some years back the esteem of really musical people it had lost its distinction and its charm and even those whose taste was frankly bad had ceased to find in it more than a moderate pleasure to which they hardly liked to confess Madame de Combermay cast a furtive glance behind her she knew that her young daughter-in-law full of respect for her new and noble family except in such matters as related to the intellect upon which having got as far as Harmony and the Greek alphabet she was especially enlightened despised Chopin and felt quite ill when she heard him played but finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian who was sitting at some distance in a group of her own contemporaries Madame de Combermay let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite memories and sensations the process de l'homme was touched also though without any natural gift for music she had received some 15 years earlier the instruction which a music mistress of the Faubert Saint-Germain a woman of genius who had been towards the end of her life reduced to penury had started at 70 to give to the daughters and granddaughters of her old pupils this lady was now dead but her method an echo of her charming touch came to life now and then in the fingers of her pupils even of those who had been in other respects quite mediocre had given up music and hardly ever opened a piano and so madame de l'homme could let her head sway to and fro fully aware of the cause with a perfect appreciation of the manner in which the pianist was rendering this prelude since she knew it by heart the closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded already on her lips and she murmured how charming it is with the stress on the opening consonants of the adjective a token of her refinement by which she felt her lips so romantically compressed like the petals of a beautiful budding flower that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony illuminating them for a moment with a vague and sentimental gaze meanwhile madame de galardon had arrived at a point of saying to herself how annoying it was that she had so few opportunities of meeting the princess de l'homme for she meant to teach her a lesson by not acknowledging her bow she did not know that her cousin was in the room a movement of madame franque tow's head disclosed the princess at once madame de galardon dashed towards her upsetting all her neighbors although determined to preserve a distant and glacial manner which should remind everyone present that she had no desire to remain on friendly terms with a person in whose house one might find oneself any day cheek by jowl with the process matilde and to whom it was not her duty to make advances since she was not of her generation she felt bound to modify this air of dignity and reserve by some non-committal remark which would justify her overture and would force the princess to engage in conversation and so when she reached her cousin madame de galardon with a certain countenance and one hand thrust out as though she were trying to force a card began with how is your husband in the same anxious tone that she would have used if the prince had been seriously ill the princess breaking into a laugh which was one of her characteristics and was intended at once to show the rest of an assembly that she was making fun of someone and also to enhance her own beauty by concentrating her features around her animated lips and sparkling eyes why he's never been better in his life and she went on laughing madame de galardon then drew herself up and chilling her expression still further perhaps because she was still uneasy about the prince's health said to her cousin orion at once madame de l'homme looked with amused astonishment towards an invisible third whom she seemed to call to witness that she had never authorized madame de galardon to use her christian name i should be so pleased if you would look in just for a minute tomorrow evening to hear a quintet with the clarinet by mozart i should like to have your opinion of it she seemed not so much to be issuing an invitation as to be asking a favor and to want the princess's opinion of the mozart quintet just as though it had been a dish invented by a new cook whose talent it was most important that an epicure should come to judge but i know the quintet quite well i can tell you now that i adore it you know my husband isn't at all well it's his liver he would like so much to see you madame de galardon resumed making it now a corporal work of charity for the princess to appear at her party the princess never liked to tell people that she would not go to their houses every day she would write to express her regret and having been kept away by the sudden arrival of her husband's mother by an invitation from his brother by the opera by some excursion to the country from some party to which she had never for a moment dreamed of going in this way she gave many people the satisfaction of feeling that she was on intimate terms with them that she would gladly have come to their houses and that she had been prevented from doing so only by some princely occurrence which they were flattered to find competing with their own humble entertainment and then as she belonged to that witty gerbant set in which there survived something of the alert mentality stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments which dated from mary may and found its final expression in the plays of mia and a la vie she adapted its formula so as to suit even her social engagements transposed it into the courtesy which was always struggling to be positive and precise to approximate itself to the plain truth she would never develop at any length to a hostess the expression of her anxiety to be present at her party she found it more pleasant to disclose to her all the various little incidents on which it would depend whether it was or was not possible for her to come listen and i'll explain she began to madame galardon tomorrow evening i must go to a friend of mine who has been pestering me to fix a day for ages if she takes us to the theater afterwards then i can't possibly come to you much as i should love to but if we just stay in the house i know there won't be anyone else so i can slip away tell me have you seen your friend mr swan no my precious charles i never knew he was here where is he i must catch his eye it's a funny thing that he should come to old santuveres madame galardon went on oh i know he's very clever meaning by that very cunning but that makes no difference fancy a jew here and she the sister and sister-in-law of two arch bishops i am ashamed to confess that i am not in the least shocked said the process delon i know he's a converted jew and all that and his parents and grandparents before him but they do say that the converted ones are worse about their religion than the practicing ones that it's all just a pretense is that true do you think i can throw no light at all on the matter the pianist who was down to play two pieces by chauvin after finishing the prelude had at once attacked apollonaise but once madame galardon had informed her husband that swan was in the room chauvin himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in turn without madame delon paying him the slightest attention she belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels about the people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does as with many women of the fauberg san germain the presence in any room in which she might find herself of another member of her set even though she had nothing in particular to say to him would occupy her mind to the exclusion of every other consideration from that moment in the hope that swan would catch sight of her the princess could do nothing but like a tame white mouse when a lump of sugar is put down before its nose and then take it away turn her face in which were crowded a thousand signs of intimate connivance none of them with the least relevance to the sentiment underlying Chopin's music in the direction where swan was and if he moved divert accordingly the course of her magnetic smile orion don't be angry with me resume madame de gallardo who could never restrain herself from sacrificing her highest social ambitions and the hope that she might one day emerge into a light that would dazzle the world to the immediate and secret satisfaction of saying something disagreeable people do say about your mature swan that he's the sort of man one can't have in the house is that true why you of all people ought to know that it's true replied the process de l'homme for you must have asked him a hundred times and he's never been to your house once and leaving her cousin mortified afresh she broke out again into a laugh which scandalized everyone who was trying to listen to the music but attracted the attention of madame de saint hubert who had stayed out of politeness near the piano and caught sight of the princess now for the first time madame de saint hubert was all the more delighted to see madame de l'homme as she imagined her to be still at gourmand looking after her father-in-law who was ill my dear princess you here yes i tucked myself away in a corner and i've been hearing such lovely things what you've been in the room quite a time oh yes quite a long time which seemed very short it was only long because i couldn't see you madame de saint hubert offered her chair to the princess who declined it with oh please no why should you it doesn't matter in the least where i sit and deliberately picking out so as the better to display the simplicity of a really great lady a low seat without a back there now that has a that's all i want it will keep my back straight oh good heavens i'm making a noise again they'll be telling you to have me chucked out meanwhile the pianist having doubled his speed the emotion of the music lovers was reaching its climax a servant was handing refreshments about on the salver and was making the spoons rattle and as on every other parking night madame de saint hubert was making signs to him which he never saw to leave the room a recent bride who had been told that a young woman ought never to appear bored was smiling vigorously trying to catch her hostess's eye so as to flash a token of her gratitude for the others having thought of her in connection with so delightful and entertainment and yet although she remained more calm than madame de fronto it was not without some uneasiness that she followed the flying fingers but alarmed her being not the pianist's fate but the pianos on which a lighted candle jumping at each fortissimo threatened if not to set its shade on fire at least to spill wax upon the ebony at last she could not contain herself any longer and running up the two steps of the platform on which the piano stood flung herself on the candle to adjust its guns but scarcely had her hand come within reach of it when on a final cord the piece finished and the pianist rose to his feet nevertheless the bold initiative shown by this young woman and the moment of blushing confusion between her and the pianist which resulted from it produced an impression that was favorable on the whole did you see what that girl did just now princess asked general de fronto who had come up to madame de long as her hostess left her for a moment odd wasn't it is she one of the performers no she's a little madame de comberme replied the princess carelessly and then with more animation i am only repeating what i heard just now myself i haven't the faintest notion who said it it was someone behind me who said they were neighbors of madame de santo verre in the country but i don't believe anyone knows them really they must be country cousins by the way i don't know whether you're particularly well up in the brilliant society which we see before us because i've no idea who all these astonishing people can be what do you suppose they do with themselves when they're not at madame de santo verre's parties she must have ordered them in with the musicians and the chairs and the food universal providers you know you must admit they're rather splendid general but can she really have the courage to hire the same supers every week is it possible oh but comberme is quite a good name old to protested the general i say no objection to its being old the princess answered dryly but whatever else it is it's not euphonious she went on isolating the word euphonious as though between inverted commas a little affectation to which the germant set were addicted you think not a she's a regular little peach though whose eyes never strayed from madame de comberme don't you agree with me princess she thrust herself forward too much i think in so young a woman that's not very nice for i don't suppose she's my generation replied madame de l'homme the last word being common it appeared to galardone and germant and then seeing that matured afroperville was still gazing at madame de comberme she added half out of malice towards the lady half wishing to oblige the general not very nice for her husband i am sorry that i do not know her since she seems to attract you so much i might have introduced you to her said the princess who if she had known the young woman would most probably have done nothing of the sort and now i must say good night because one of my friends is having a birthday party and i must go and wish her many happy returns she explained modestly and with truth reducing the fashionable gathering to which she was going to the simple proportions of a ceremony which would be boring in the extreme but at which she was obliged to be present and there would be something touching about her appearance besides i must pick up basa while i've been here he's gone to see those friends of his you know them too i'm sure who are called after a bridge oh yes the ainas it was a battle before it was a bridge princess it was a victory said the general i mean to say to an old soldier like me he went on wiping his monocle and replacing it as though he were laying a fresh dressing on the raw wound underneath while the princess instinctively looked away that empire nobility well of course it's not the same thing but after all taking it as it is it's very fine of its kind there were many people who really did fight like heroes but i have the deepest respect for heroes the princess assented though with a faint trace of irony if i don't go with basa to see this process the aina it isn't for that at all it's simply because i don't know them basa knows them he worships them oh no it's not what you think he's not in love with her i've nothing to set my face against besides what good has it ever done when i have set my face against them she queried sadly for the whole world knew that ever since the day upon which the prince de l'homme had married his fascinating cousin he had been consistently unfaithful to her anyhow it isn't that at all their people he has known for ever so long they do him very well and that suits me down to the ground but i must tell you what he's told me about their house it's quite enough can you imagine it all their furniture is on pier but my dear princess that's only natural it belonged to their grandparents i don't quite say it didn't but that doesn't make it any less ugly i quite understand that people can't always have nice things but at least they needn't have things that are merely grotesque what do you say i can think of nothing more devastating more utterly smug than that hideous style cabinets covered all over with swans heads like bath taps but i believe all the same that they've got some lovely things why they must have that famous mosaic table which the treaty of oh i don't deny they may have things that are interesting enough from the historic point of view but things like that can't ever be beautiful because they're simply horrible i've got things like that myself that came to basa from the month to skews only they're up in the attics at germont where nobody ever sees them but after all that's not the point i would fly to see them with basa i would even go to see them among all their sphinxes and brasses if i knew them but i don't know them do you know i was always taught when i was a little girl that it was not polite to call on people one didn't know she assumed a tone of childish gravity and so i am just doing what i was taught to do can't you see those good people with a totally strange woman bursting into their house why i might get a most hostile reception and she coquettishly enhanced the charm of the smile which the idea had brought to her lips by giving to her blue eyes which were fixed on the general a gentle dreamy expression my dear princess you know that they'd simply be wild with joy no why she inquired with the utmost vivacity either so as to seem unaware that it would be because she was one of the first ladies in france or so as to have the pleasure of hearing the general tell her so why how can you tell perhaps they would think it the most unpleasant thing that could possibly happen i know nothing about them but if they're anything like me i find it quite boring enough to see the people i do know i'm sure if i had to see people i didn't know as well even if they fought like heroes i should go stark mad besides except when it's an old friend like you whom one knows quite apart from that i'm not sure that heroism takes one very far in society it's often quite boring enough to have to give a dinner party but if one had to offer one's arm to spartakus to let him take one down really no it would never be verse and jeterix i should send for to make a fourteenth i feel sure i should keep him for really big crushes and as i never give any uh princess it's easy to see you're not a germant for nothing you have your share of it all right the wit of the germant but people always talk about the wit of the germant i never could make out why do you really know any others who have it she rallied him with a rippling flow of laughter her features concentrated yoke to the service of her animation her eye sparkling blazing with a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such speeches even if the princess had been able to make them herself as we're in praise of her wit or her beauty look there swan talking to your conber me woman over there beside old santu there don't you see him ask him to introduce you but hurry up he seems to be just going did you notice how dreadfully ill he's looking as the general my precious charles uh he's coming at last i was beginning to think he didn't want to see me end of section 24