SWANN IN LOVE
To admit you to the 'little nucleus,' the 'little group,' the 'little
clan' at the Verdurins', one condition sufficed, but that one was
indispensable; you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose
articles was that the young pianist, whom Mme. Verdurin had taken under
her patronage that year, and of whom she said "Really, it oughtn't to be
allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!" left both Plante and Rubinstein
'sitting'; while Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant diagnostician than
Potain. Each 'new recruit' whom the Verdurins failed to persuade that the
evenings spent by other people, in other houses than theirs, were as dull
as ditch-water, saw himself banished forthwith. Women being in this
respect more rebellious than men, more reluctant to lay aside all worldly
curiosity and the desire to find out for themselves whether other
drawing-rooms might not sometimes be as entertaining, and the Verdurins
feeling, moreover, that this critical spirit and this demon of frivolity
might, by their contagion, prove fatal to the orthodoxy of the little
church, they had been obliged to expel, one after another, all those of
the 'faithful' who were of the female sex.
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