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spectable middle-class family, excessively rich and wholly
undistinguished, with which she had gradually and of her
own accord severed all connection) to a young woman al-
most of a ‘certain class,’ a Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme.
Verdurin called by her Christian name, Odette, and pro-
nounced a ‘love,’ and to the pianist’s aunt, who looked as
though she had, at one period, ‘answered the bell’: ladies
quite ignorant of the world, who in their social simplicity
were so easily led to believe that the Princesse de Sagan and
the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to pay large sums
of money to other poor wretches, in order to have anyone
at their dinner-parties, that if somebody had offered to pro-
cure them an invitation to the house of either of those great
dames, the old doorkeeper and the woman of ‘easy virtue’
would have contemptuously declined.
The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your
‘place laid’ there. There was never any programme for the
evening’s entertainment. The young pianist would play, but
only if he felt inclined, for no one was forced to do anything,
and, as M. Verdurin used to say: ‘We’re all friends here. Lib-
erty Hall, you know!’
If the pianist suggested playing the Ride of the Valkyries,
or the Prelude to Tristan, Mme. Verdurin would protest, not
that the music was displeasing to her, but, on the contrary,
that it made too violent an impression. ‘Then you want me
to have one of my headaches? You know quite well, it’s the
same every time he plays that. I know what I’m in for. To-
morrow, when I want to get up—nothing doing!’ If he was
not going to play they talked, and one of the friends—usu-

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