Page 388 - swanns-way

they had at once discovered in him a locked door, a reserved,
impenetrable chamber in which he still professed silently to
himself that the Princesse de Sagan was not grotesque, and
that Cottard’s jokes were not amusing; in a word (and for all
that he never once abandoned his friendly attitude towards
them all, or revolted from their dogmas), they had discov-
ered an impossibility of imposing those dogmas upon him,
of entirely converting him to their faith, the like of which
they had never come across in anyone before. They would
have forgiven his going to the houses of ‘bores’ (to whom,
as it happened, in his heart of hearts he infinitely preferred
the Verdurins and all their little ‘nucleus’) had he consented
to set a good example by openly renouncing those ‘bores’
in the presence of the ‘faithful.’ But that was an abjuration
which, as they well knew, they were powerless to extort.
What a difference was there in a ‘newcomer’ whom
Odette had asked them to invite, although she herself had
met him only a few times, and on whom they were build-
ing great hopes—the Comte de Forcheville! (It turned out
that he was nothing more nor less than the brother-in-law
of Saniette, a discovery which filled all the ‘faithful’ with
amazement: the manners of the old palaeographer were
so humble that they had always supposed him to be of a
class inferior, socially, to their own, and had never expect-
ed to learn that he came of a rich and relatively aristocratic
family.) Of course, Forcheville was enormously the ‘swell,’
which Swann was not or had quite ceased to be; of course,
he would never dream of placing, as Swann now placed, the
Verdurin circle above any other. But he lacked that natu-

388 Swann’s Way