Presently, everything became boring. “Beautiful things are such a bore. Oh! Pictures! They’re enough to drive one mad. How right you are, it is such a bore having to write letters!” Finally it was life itself that she declared to be rasante , leaving her hearers to wonder where she applied the term.

I do not know whether it was the effect of what the Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening when I first dined at her house, had said of this interior, but the card, or smoking-room, with its pictorial floor, its tripods, its figures of gods and animals that gazed at you, the sphinxes stretched out along the arms of the chairs, and most of all the huge table, of marble or enamelled mosaic, covered with symbolical signs more or less imitated from Etruscan and Egyptian art, gave me the impression of a magician’s cell. And, on a chair drawn up to the glittering, augural table, M.