im"; he went on, fastening
a pair of goggle eyes on the celebrity. "It's always interesting to
meet well-known people at dinner. But, I say, you ask us to very select
parties here. No dull evenings in this house, I'm sure."

"Well, you know what it is really," said Mme. Verdurin modestly.
"They feel safe here. They can talk about whatever they like, and the
conversation goes off like fireworks. Now Brichot, this evening, is
nothing. I've seen him, don't you know, when he's been with me, simply
dazzling; you'd want to go on your knees to him. Well, with anyone else
he's not the same man, he's not in the least witty, you have to drag the
words out of him, he's even boring."

"That's strange," remarked Forcheville with fitting astonishment.

A sort of wit like Brichot's would have been regarded as out-and-out
stupidity by the people among whom Swann had spent his early life,
for all that it is quite compatible with real intelligence. And the
intelligence of the Professor's vigorous and well-nourished brain might
easily have been envied by many of the people in society who seemed
witty enough to Swann. But these last had so thoroughly inculcated into
him their likes and dislikes, at least in everything that pertained
to their ordinary social existence, including that annex to social
existence which belongs, strictly speaking, to the domain of
intelligence, namely, conversation, that Swann could not see anything
in Brichot's pleasantries; to him they were merely pedantic, vulgar,
and disgustingly coarse. He was shocked, too, being accustomed to
good manners, by the rude, almost barrack-room tone which this
student-in-arms adopted, no matter to whom he was speaking. Finally,
perhaps, he had lost all patience that evening as he watched Mme.
Verdurin welcoming, with such unnecessary warmth, this Forcheville
fellow, whom it had been Odette's unaccountable idea to bring to the
house. Feeling a little awkward, with Swann there also, she had asked
him on her arrival: "What do you think of my guest?"

And he, suddenly realising for the first time that Forcheville, whom
he had known for years, could actually attract a woman, and was quite a
good specimen of a man, had retorted: "Beastly!" He had, certainly,
no idea of being jealous of Odette, but did not feel quite so happy as
usual, and when Brichot, having begun to tell them the story of Blanche
of Castile's mother, who, according to him, "had been with Henry
Plantagenet for ye