Page 529 - swanns-way

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 Cam-bremer. Do agree that life is a dreadful busi-
ness. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.’
Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Prin-
cess 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 pronuncia-
tion. 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 trem-
bling condition which precedes a flood of tears, he had the
same need to speak about his grief that a murderer has to

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