creature made in His
image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The
least sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale
exhalations. It is really impossible to believe that any human being is
incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at
the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand
to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be
impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell
so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin
sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot
possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried,
tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows
that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to
teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has
its limits, and mine is at an end," he concluded, as though this sacred
mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from
longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only
since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be
directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from
him.

He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and
the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin, in terrified anticipation of the wrecking
of her nerves by Beethoven's music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted, "and a
creature like that imagines that she's fond of _Art_!" She would say to
Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville,
as she had so often done for himself: "You can make room for M. de
Forcheville there, can't you, Odette?"... '"In the dark!' Codfish!
Pander!"... 'Pander' was the name he applied also to the music which
would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze in each
other's eyes, to feel for each other's hands. He felt that there was
much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorous attitude towards
the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of
education in France.

In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins', which he had so
often described as 'genuine,' seemed to him now the worst possible form
of life, and their 'little nucleus' the most degraded class of society.
"It really is," he repeated, "beneath the lowest rung of the social
ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante.