elf, Princess!"

"I! Why, they must have 'countries' everywhere, those creatures! Don't I
wish I had!"

"No, not the Cambremers; her own people. She was a Legrandin, and used
to come to Combray. I don't know whether you are aware that you are
Comtesse de Combray, and that the Chapter owes you a due."

"I don't know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I'm 'touched'
for a hundred francs, every year, by the Cure, which is a due that I
could very well do without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a
startling name. It ends just in time, but it ends badly!" she said with
a laugh.

"It begins no better." Swann took the point.

"Yes; that double abbreviation!"

"Some one very angry and very proper who didn't dare to finish the first
word."

"But since he couldn't stop himself beginning the second, he'd have done
better to finish the first and be done with it. We are indulging in
the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles, in the very best of
taste--but how tiresome it is that I never see you now," she went on in
a coaxing tone, "I do so love talking to you. Just imagine, I could not
make that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny about the
name Cambremer. Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It's only
when I see you that I stop feeling bored."

Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way
of looking at the little things of life--the effect, if not the cause of
which was a close analogy between their modes of expression and even of
pronunciation. This similarity was not striking because no two things
could have been more unlike than their voices. But if one took the
trouble to imagine Swann's utterances divested of the sonority that
enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one
found that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they
had the 'tone' of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and
the Princess had not an idea in common. But since Swann had become so
melancholy, and was always in that trembling condition which precedes
a flood of tears, he had the same need to speak about his grief that
a murderer has to tell some one about his crime. And when he heard
the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, he felt as much
comforted as if she had spoken to him of Odette.

"Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear
friend. What is so nice about you is that you are not cheerfu