ations, stamps your passport and lets you proceed on your
journey without troubling to examine your luggage.

"I can well believe you don't find them amusing, those parties; indeed,
it's very good of you to go to them!" said Mme. Verdurin, who regarded
the President of the Republic only as a 'bore' to be especially dreaded,
since he had at his disposal means of seduction, and even of compulsion,
which, if employed to captivate her 'faithful,' might easily make them
'fail.' "It seems, he's as deaf as a post; and eats with his fingers."

"Upon my word! Then it can't be much fun for you, going there." A
note of pity sounded in the Doctor's voice; and then struck by the
number--only eight at table--"Are these luncheons what you would
describe as 'intimate'?" he inquired briskly, not so much out of idle
curiosity as in his linguistic zeal.

But so great and glorious a figure was the President of the French
Republic in the eyes of Dr. Cottard that neither the modesty of Swann
nor the spite of Mme. Verdurin could ever wholly efface that first
impression, and he never sat down to dinner with the Verdurins without
asking anxiously, "D'you think we shall see M. Swann here this evening?
He is a personal friend of M. Grevy's. I suppose that means he's what
you'd call a 'gentleman'?" He even went to the length of offering Swann
a card of invitation to the Dental Exhibition.

"This will let you in, and anyone you take with you," he explained, "but
dogs are not admitted. I'm just warning you, you understand, because
some friends of mine went there once, who hadn't been told, and there
was the devil to pay."

As for M. Verdurin, he did not fail to observe the distressing effect
upon his wife of the discovery that Swann had influential friends of
whom he had never spoken.

If no arrangement had been made to 'go anywhere,' it was at the
Verdurins' that Swann would find the 'little nucleus' assembled, but
he never appeared there except in the evenings, and would hardly ever
accept their invitations to dinner, in spite of Odette's entreaties.

"I could dine with you alone somewhere, if you'd rather," she suggested.

"But what about Mme. Verdurin?"

"Oh, that's quite simple. I need only say that my dress wasn't ready, or
that my cab came late. There is always some excuse."

"How charming of you."

But Swann said to himself that, if he could make Odette feel (by
consenting to meet her only after dinner) that there were other
ple