f whom in our presence is forbidden; Mme. Verdurin, so that
her silence should have the appearance, not of consent but of the
unconscious silence which inanimate objects preserve, had suddenly
emptied her face of all life, of all mobility; her rounded forehead was
nothing, now, but an exquisite study in high relief, which the name of
those La Tremoilles, with whom Swann was always 'shut up,' had failed
to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrinkled in a frown, exposed to
view two dark cavities that were, surely, modelled from life. You would
have said that her half-opened lips were just about to speak. It was
all no more, however, than a wax cast, a mask in plaster, the sculptor's
design for a monument, a bust to be exhibited in the Palace of Industry,
where the public would most certainly gather in front of it and marvel
to see how the sculptor, in expressing the unchallengeable dignity of
the Verdurins, as opposed to that of the La Tremoilles or Laumes, whose
equals (if not, indeed, their betters) they were, and the equals and
betters of all other 'bores' upon the face of the earth, had managed to
invest with a majesty that was almost Papal the whiteness and rigidity
of his stone. But the marble at last grew animated and let it be
understood that it didn't do to be at all squeamish if one went to that
house, since the woman was always tipsy and the husband so uneducated
that he called a corridor a 'collidor'!

"You'd need to pay me a lot of money before I'd let any of that lot set
foot inside my house," Mme. Verdurin concluded, gazing imperially down
on Swann.

She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to
echo the holy simplicity of the pianist's aunt, who at once exclaimed:
"To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody
to go near them; I'm sure I should be afraid; one can't be too careful.
How can people be so common as to go running after them?"

But he might, at least, have replied, like Forcheville: "Gad, she's a
duchess; there are still plenty of people who are impressed by that sort
of thing," which would at least have permitted Mme. Verdurin the final
retort, "And a lot of good may it do them!" Instead of which, Swann
merely smiled, in a manner which shewed, quite clearly, that he could
not, of course, take such an absurd suggestion seriously. M. Verdurin,
who was still casting furtive and intermittent glances at his wife,
could see with regret, and could