ld of his millions--among the riff-raff of Bohemia. One
day he received a letter from Swann asking whether my grandfather could
put him in touch with the Verdurins. "On guard! on guard!" he exclaimed
as he read it, "I am not at all surprised; Swann was bound to finish up
like this. A nice lot of people! I cannot do what he asks, because, in
the first place, I no longer know the gentleman in question. Besides,
there must be a woman in it somewhere, and I don't mix myself up in such
matters. Ah, well, we shall see some fun if Swann begins running after
the little Verdurins."

And on my grandfather's refusal to act as sponsor, it was Odette herself
who had taken Swann to the house.

The Verdurins had had dining with them, on the day when Swann made his
first appearance, Dr. and Mme. Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt,
and the painter then in favour, while these were joined, in the course
of the evening, by several more of the 'faithful.'

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to
reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or
in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial
expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose
expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a
simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been
facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he
never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features,
and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which
you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: "Do you
really mean that?" He was no more confident of the manner in which he
ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally,
than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by,
carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which
absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved,
if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware
of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of
his own.

On all those points, however, where a plain question appeared to him to
be permissible, the Doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate
the wilderness of his ignorance and uncertainty and so to complete his
education.

So it was that, following the advice given him by a wise mother on his
first coming up