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don’t know what—this glass, say; and he’d talk away about
it for hours; no, not this glass; that’s a silly thing to say, I’m
sorry; but something a little bigger, like the battle of Water-
loo, or anything of that sort, he’d tell you things you simply
wouldn’t believe. Why, Swann was in the regiment then; he
must have known him.’
‘Do you see much of M. Swann?’ asked Mme. Verdurin.
‘Oh dear, no!’ he answered, and then, thinking that if
he made himself pleasant to Swann he might find favour
with Odette, he decided to take this opportunity of flatter-
ing him by speaking of his fashionable friends, but speaking
as a man of the world himself, in a tone of good-natured
criticism, and not as though he were congratulating Swann
upon some undeserved good fortune: ‘Isn’t that so, Swann?
I never see anything of you, do I?—But then, where on earth
is one to see him? The creature spends all his time shut up
with the La Trémoïlles, with the Laumes and all that lot!’
The imputation would have been false at any time, and was
all the more so, now that for at least a year Swann had given
up going to almost any house but the Verdurins’. But the
mere names of families whom the Verdurins did not know
were received by them in a reproachful silence. M. Verdu-
rin, dreading the painful impression which the mention of
these ‘bores,’ especially when flung at her in this tactless
fashion, and in front of all the ‘faithful,’ was bound to make
on his wife, cast a covert glance at her, instinct with anx-
ious solicitude. He saw then that in her fixed resolution to
take no notice, to have escaped contact, altogether, with the
news which had just been addressed to her, not merely to
400 Swann’s Way