You could take anything you liked--I 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 Waterloo, 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 flattering 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 Tremoilles, 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'.
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