Page 401 - swanns-way

remain dumb but to have been deaf as well, as we pretend to
be when a friend who has been in the wrong attempts to slip
into his conversation some excuse which we should appear
to be accepting, should we appear to have heard it without
protesting, or when some one utters the name of an ene-
my, the very mention of whom in our presence is forbidden;
Mme. Verdurin, so that her silence should have the appear-
ance, not of consent but of the unconscious silence which
inanimate objects preserve, had suddenly emptied her face
of all life, of all mobility; her rounded forehead was nothing,
now, but an exquisite study in high relief, which the name
of those La Trémoïlles, with whom Swann was always ‘shut
up,’ had failed to penetrate; her nose, just perceptibly wrin-
kled in a frown, exposed to view two dark cavities that were,
surely, modelled from life. You would have said that her
half-opened lips were just about to speak. It was all no more,
however, than a wax cast, a mask in plaster, the sculptor’s
design for a monument, a bust to be exhibited in the Palace
of Industry, where the public would most certainly gather in
front of it and marvel to see how the sculptor, in expressing
the unchallengeable dignity of the Verdurins, as opposed to
that of the La Trémoïlles or Laumes, whose equals (if not,
indeed, their betters) they were, and the equals and betters
of all other ‘bores’ upon the face of the earth, had managed
to invest with a majesty that was almost Papal the whiteness
and rigidity of his stone. But the marble at last grew ani-
mated and let it be understood that it didn’t do to be at all
squeamish if one went to that house, since the woman was
always tipsy and the husband so uneducated that he called

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