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 Tremoilles 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 animated 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 a corridor a 'collidor'!
"You'd need to pay me a lot of money before I'd let any of that lot set
foot inside my house," Mme. Verdurin concluded, gazing imperially down on
Swann.
She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to
echo the holy simplicity of the pianist's aunt, who at once exclaimed: "To
think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody to go
near them; I'm sure I should be afraid; one can't be too careful.
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