eir ideas
about artistic circles are altogether wrong! Possibly I make no great
intellectual demands upon conversation, but I am perfectly happy talking
to Cottard, although he does trot out those idiotic puns. And as for
the painter, if he is rather unpleasantly affected when he tries to be
paradoxical, still he has one of the finest brains that I have ever come
across. Besides, what is most important, one feels quite free there, one
does what one likes without constraint or fuss. What a flow of humour
there is every day in that drawing-room! Certainly, with a few rare
exceptions, I never want to go anywhere else again. It will become more
and more of a habit, and I shall spend the rest of my life among them."

And as the qualities which he supposed to be an intrinsic part of
the Verdurin character were no more, really, than their superficial
reflection of the pleasure which had been enjoyed in their society by
his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound,
more vital, as that pleasure increased. Since Mme. Verdurin gave Swann,
now and then, what alone could constitute his happiness; since, on an
evening when he felt anxious because Odette had talked rather more to
one of the party than to another, and, in a spasm of irritation, would
not take the initiative by asking her whether she was coming home, Mme.
Verdurin brought peace and joy to his troubled spirit by the spontaneous
exclamation: "Odette! You'll see M. Swann home, won't you?"; since,
when the summer holidays came, and after he had asked himself uneasily
whether Odette might not leave Paris without him, whether he would still
be able to see her every day, Mme. Verdurin was going to invite them
both to spend the summer with her in the country; Swann, unconsciously
allowing gratitude and self-interest to filter into his intelligence and
to influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim that Mme. Verdurin
was "a great and noble soul." Should any of his old fellow-pupils in the
Louvre school of painting speak to him of some rare or eminent artist,
"I'd a hundred times rather," he would reply, "have the Verdurins." And,
with a solemnity of diction which was new in him: "They are magnanimous
creatures, and magnanimity is, after all, the one thing that matters,
the one thing that gives us distinction here on earth. Look you, there
are only two classes of men, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have
reached an age when one has to take sides