would like me to come, or
if you find a loophole, you've only to send me a line at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's up till midnight; after that I shall be here. Ever so
many thanks for all you are doing for me--you know what I feel about
you!"

His friend promised to go and do as Swann wished as soon as he had
deposited him at the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where he arrived
soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening
in the Rue La Perouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to
everything that did not involve Odette, and in particular to the details
of fashionable life, a state which invested them with the charm that is
to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire,
appears to us in its own guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the
foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which
hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions,
and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and
setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of
Balzac's 'tigers'--now 'grooms'--. who normally followed their mistress
when she walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out
of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the
stables, as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of
their several flower-beds. The peculiar tendency which he had always
had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits
in galleries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more
general form; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached
from it, which presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the
cloak-room, into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of
fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to emerge from it in
evening dress, but without any impression of what had occurred there,
his mind having been, during the minute or two that he had spent in
it, either still at the party which he had just left, or already at the
party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for
the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest,
the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous footmen
who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until,
pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their feet
and gathered in a circle round about him.

One of them, of a partic