[...] that had simply given a touch of coolness to those burning temples recalling certain portraits by Romney. One simple unity among the crowd of visitors, yet one could perceive from the slow authority of her entrance, to the slight movement of her lips that she made when she greeted Mme Swann, that she was a person of importance. It was Mme Verdurin. Inasmuch as that name conjured up a whole set of persons, it had to be admired that this person could have shrunk sufficiently to fit like that into a single armchair, in the guise of a visitor swathed in a cloak trimmed with grebe feathers, as downy as the white furs that carpeted Odette's apartment, and which for her alone was a salon within a salon. And also after expressing surprise at this contraction and that Mme Verdurin was making visits, attention turned to expand this lady, to make emerge as if from a large, curly-haired toy, all the receptions she hosted, all of the faithful; it was intimidating and most interesting to see Odette's salon populated with ladies who in their turn embodied salons within salons, Odette's salon, the importance of which grew when, on her Day, one could see certain women there, playing the part of guests. When he married Odette, Swann had persuaded her that she should no longer frequent the little clan. He had many reasons for asking her, and even had he not, he would have asked all the same, in obedience to a law of ingratitude that admits of no exceptions and highlights the shortsightedness or selfishness of each and every procurer. From that day on Odette had paid no more than two visits a year to Mme Verdurin. Mme Verdurin had been indignant. Had Odette not been treated all those years as the chosen child of the household, where her intimacy with Swann had been established and every evening places were set for them both? The "faithful" too had greatly resented the insult rendered to Mme Verdurin and if she had followed the wishes of some of them, she would never have paid any visits to Odette, would have shown her the door if she ever dared come back, and she even would have deprived Odette of the two visits that she made in the year and deprived her too of the satisfaction of saying: "We only go to Mme Verdurin's very rarely. It was all very well when my husband was unmarried, but it's not so easy with a family. Monsieur Swann would not appreciate it very much if I went there regularly, and faithful spouse that I am..." However the specific considerations that a third party fails to take into account often prevent people from carrying out to such extremes the attitude one would like to see them adopt in order to annoy someone else. And once a year, Mme Verdurin, disdainful and dignified, paid her visit to Odette, but deep down she was deeply impressed. Odette spoke to the Mistress as if it were an ordinary visit but one had the impression that she was saying to herself: "I really must be unpretentious and my drawing-room elegant, for Mme Verdurin to be sitting like this on a plain chair amidst the hubbub of visitors." And with more insistence than usual she offered the other guests tea, tarts, lavishing on the [...]
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[...] smiles, to show them that she was quite at ease all the same, and also to flatter them by being so amicable towards them in front of such an illustrious personage. But she did not introduce them so as Mme Verdurin would not hear their obscure names and could believe that she was surrounded by celebrities. And at most if some intelligent friend of Swann's was there, she would call him by his title: "General", "dear Prince", which allowed Mme Verdurin to say of the evening: "There was the whole flower of the Reactionaries there. What a charming circle of people!" The more timid of the women, upon hearing that it was Mme Verdurin, thought that they should withdraw out of discretion and using the plural just as one might wish to make it understood to others that it is wiser not to overtire a convalescent who is out of bed for the first time, they said: "Odette, we're going to leave you." I recently attended a very elegant dinner-party where among the guests were the Duc and Duchesse de Penthiève, Prince and Princesse de Broglie, Prince and Princesse de Léon, Prince and Princesse d'Arenberg, etc. It was at Mme Verdurin's who despite her great age was entertaining. The composition of the dinner-party, would, had I been informed about it many years earlier, when I made the acquaintance of Mme Verdurin at Mme Swann's, and even some time after that still, have greatly astonished me and even more so that my astonishment was not shared by anyone else and would have been understood by very few others. Doubtless, one will soon see that my imagination gave to every salon a particular individuality; but that did not stop me nevertheless from classifying them by types, from placing them at different levels of the social scale. I was fully aware when I abstacted myself from all the mirages of the imagination, at which rank the Verdurin salon was placed, at which rank the Guermantes salon and the irreducible distance between them. In the same way that a city presenting itself as unique, does not prevent it from being aware at the same time of its geography and history, and at what distance this city, as unreal as it might seem, be it Parma or Venice, is from one or other frontier. In the same way, during this period of my debuts at Mme Swann's, my knowledge of society (even if the way I pictured society was, as we shall see, a little different) was as something I imagined to be immutable, in which the power and nationality of each salon was derived by definition from an irremovable position. And I imagined that the Verdurins would remain Verdurins and Guermantes the Guermantes for time eternal, at an unchangable distance from any particular frontiers. But then when we have lived for a fairly long time not only have we changed place, and everything that is in the perspective of our point of view also changes the place of things, but during that time things themselves also change. M. de Norpois, who had for some time believed that Venice was inside of the frontier to Austria, had seen this frontier actually change place and leave Venice outside of it, just as his father had seen Parma change country, just as his grandfather had seen one of the most tangible realities of his youth, the kingdom of Poland no longer be anything but a name in people's memories of times gone by and which immediately gave any mention of it a retrospective air. When one has seen in this way mountain frontiers that appear to be the most enduring of the greatest empires, in private life the largest fortunes, the most indestructible affections sink to earth under the blow of a defeat, a market crash, a divorce, and elsewhere other upheavals raise up new mountains, next to this we find it rather insignificant that the people who were "chic" are no longer so and that they are so towards those who were not. And on seeing that it is not the new composition of a salon, but the surprise that this novelty excites among everyone which astonishes others, others who are tempted to believe that everything has always been like this, that the Verdurin salon has always been the most elegant in Paris, that there had never been a kingdom of Poland, and that there has always been a kingdom of Italy, we ask ourselves whether we ourselves when we made our debut in society have not been the victim of the same illusion, if the state of affairs which at that time appeared to be indestructible according to the immovable order in which we then framed things, were themselves frequently not very recent, as recent as the Verdurins seemed ancient. But these reflexions will be the concern of another day and it is time to come back to those of the present, a present that is already very distant. Unfortunately, because a small thing as antithetic as this elegance of Mme Verdurin had here a perfect symetry with an earlier scene to which it formed a counterpoint, was enticing, this change in the worldly position at the Verdurin's, a change that would have already had plenty of time to occur at the period when I was making my debuts. Mme Swann had not yet played her part. It was not, as we shall see later, that Mme Verdurin had not already made any attempts to draw closer into society, but they had not as yet had any appreciable results. She was not even yet at the incubation period in which one dispenses with the big parties and in which the brilliant specimens that one knows would be too much drowned out, and where one prefers to wait for the generative power of ten just men whom one has succeeded in attracting and who in their turn would have brought us seventy times those ten. Odette too had begun to put herself forward in society as an objective, but just like those worlds which were so frequented that everyone was totally unaware of the other, it was all the more so since they were attacking the Faubourg Saint-Germain from opposite directions. And it was with the best faith in the world that when one [...]
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[...] "The most beautiful," Mme Verdurin corrected. "The word chrysanthemum is masculine." "You must be right," said Mme Swann, "but I must confess that I like the
feminine better." "Ah! if you have a preference for the feminine gender I have nothing to add," replied Mme Verdurin with a smile and while looking all around her to see if her
spiteful joke had found any echo. "But all the same," continued Odette who was pretending not to understand, "in a melody that my husband was very fond of because it relates a little
to the way in which we met, there is:
It is at the time of the chrysanthemum,
Which flowers on the threshold of winter,
That the fervent love that I have for you,
Deep in my heart has opened up."
"Whose verses are they?" asked Mme Verdurin. "An ignoramus evidently." "The name is on the tip of my tongue but I can't remember it," Mme Swann said, "in any case he must be a talented
poet because the music is by Massenet." "Oh, don't speak to me about music!" Mme Verdurin cried in a shrill voice as if someone were trying to do her phsical harm. "I have just come
from the Mass in D and I'm going to see Ferval this evening! I would prefer it if you were outright to sing one of Paulus's ditties." "But I wasn't wanting to sing anything," Odette
replied. "In any case that wouldn't have been so easy here, it seemed to me that there is a terrible lot of echo." "Well! I can't say I've ever noticed it." "Ask your footman, that
tall devil who opened the door for me, at least as well as I could make him out, because it's pitch black in your vestibule!" "But on the contrary," Mme Cottard, who had not yet left,
spoke up. "Odette has charmed us. In any case the sound is kept well down by these lovely tapestries," she added, lifting up the door curtains. "Do you call those tapestries?" Mme
Verdurin said. "Me, I call them dust traps. They must be a headache for your footmen, those tall devils that I saw when I came in, at least as well as I could make out, because it's
pitch black in your vestibule!" "Just the other day I heard somebody maintain to me that the word chrysanthemum is masculine. You have to admit, you would never have suspected it,"
Mme Cottard said. "Let's just say that you could never see any more beautiful." "Why do you arrange them like that Odette?" Mme Verdurin asked. "They are Japanese flowers, you have
to set them out the way the Japanese do."
"Well, I must leave you now. Mme Cottard I'm taking you away." "My husband will be so disappointed," Mme Swann said. "How is he?" Mme Verdurin asked. "Wasn't it him who in the
past I think... had a little... eczema? Isn't it a little damp in your house?" "No, I don't think so." "You don't have rats do you?" "What a horrid idea, I've never had any!" "That's
good! I was told you have. I'm relieved to hear that, because I have a terrible fear of rats and I would never have come back to find out." "You already come so rarely." "It's just
that one has so many things to do, you know what a pleasure it is for me my dear," said Mme Verdurin, suddenly becoming affectionate at the moment of leaving. "But we do so few of the
things we want." "How very true," exclaimed Mme Bontemps who knew this phrase from having heard it spoken often. "For a whole part of humanity that's the sign of truth." "But today
has been too short," Mme Swann said, then added in a low voice, "I haven't been able to enjoy your visit so much because there were so many people. I'm selfish, I'd like to have you
all to myself when those bores won't be here." "Goodbye my dear, I must tear myself away. It's my Wednesday, just imagine how they would all behave if their Mistress was late. You know
how patient they are." I bowed at the moment she passed in front of me, not knowing in all the comings and goings of people who had been filing by for the last half an hour if she had
even recognized me. Without offering her hand to me: "Risler is coming next Thursday to play the 106th for me if you'd like to come just as you are." And seeing that Odette had overheard
her: "I'm trying to make my circle a little younger. I call it my junior class. So I've got three "youngsters" for dinner this evening. Anyway I must tear myself away. If their Mistress
was late and they had an hour of music pinched from them they would make a scene about it! They are even more mad about art than us old ones." "Is that Mme Verdurin?" several people asked
respectfully. "Yes," replied Mme Swann modestly. "She is a person with great qualities. She's a bit ascerbic, a bit tyrannical, but she loves her friends dearly. And she entertains like
nobody else. She lives within a charming little clan of the faithful. I must confess that I enjoy myself very much there, but M. Swann doesn't appreciate me going there often. And as a
faithful spouse..." "I was told a very amusing story about one of Mme Verdurin's dinner parties recently," said one of her visitors. "Ah!" replied Odette half-heartedly as she was wanting
everyone to leave and as it was time to dress for dinner. "Doesn't she know a scholar by the name of Brichot?" "I certainly think so, he's one of her faithful, and his niece has just married
a brother of Cottard's, the husband of the lady who left with Mme Verdurin." "Well, it turns out that the other day at dinner, when Mme Verdurin asked him what he thought about incest, to
show that she had gone a bit too far, he replied: 'I don't know, adultery is quite enough for me.'" "Oh, I love that story, that's delicious, I'll serve that one up again." "I heard it too,"
said another lady, "but I heard it quite differently. M. Brichot had replied: 'I don't know about being interrogated about incest, I've never got further than adultery.'"
***
[...] if the desire that we feel on such a day has the effect of transporting us, an inhabitant unknown to the man we were yesterday, in a new zone, we derive the advantage that, in this zone, everything is harmonized, deteriorates through the smallest possible differences which lead us from the pleasure that we cannot attain to pleasures of the same kind - pleasures of a different kind would not have been pleasures to us that day - which are perhaps more accessible. There are evenings on which, perhaps because we are tired, by recent over-active nights, we resign ourselves to desiring a certain woman who is merely a platonic love. But she has gone to the country far from the place we are; it is impossible for us to see her. When playing a piano piece for four hands with another, when calling for a manicure, on taking a turn in a waltz with a third person, we remain within range of these physical contacts without consequence, which without completely granting us our desire help us to delude it. One other day on which we feel nostalgia for the sunset over the canals of Amsterdam without being able to leave for Holland, we will go to see a collection - without even giving a passing glance at the Italian paintings - to see a certain portrait of a woman, by Rembrandt, a portait purchased recently at auction, but which for centuries watched the leaves yellowed by an early autumn falling in front of it on the banks of the Herengracht and which is now an exile from Holland, a small imported piece of Holland; or else we will drink a glass of Schiedam. Today on account of the perturbation caused by the troop of young girls, I continued to imagine them, to think about them and I desired if not to know them then to travel to that region of vineyards where I imagined they went on their bicycles, and of which their beauty gilded by the sun also reminded me. But even that excursion was impossible for me. But in a grand hotel such as the one in Balbec, where there were staff always at the ready and resources of an infinite variety - although useless for the present case, in the larder of the "grill room" there was to be found a means, without moving so to speak, of taking whatever excursion one wished at any hour. I asked the lift boy for what would be for me to travel, by degrees, along a path through the vines - to have me brought up a nice bunch of grapes.
Lot 538, RR Auction, Fine Autographs and Artifacts Featuring Notorious Notables and Royalty, October 14 2026. Six partially corrected proof sheets from À l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Because these proofs are partially corrected there are some repetitions of phrases. The text is very different from the published version. Cf. Pléiade, RTP I, p. 590-592.
Created 11.10.26