“I told you,” was my answer, “that Mme. de Cambremer was the sister of an engineer, M. Legrandin. I never said a word to you about M. de Charlus. There is about as much connexion between him and Mme. de Cambremer as between the Great Condé and Racine.” “Indeed! I thought there was,” said Ski lightly, with no more apology for his mistake than he had made a few hours earlier for the mistake that had nearly made his party miss the train. “Do you intend to remain long on this coast?” Mme. Verdurin asked M. de Charlus, in whom she foresaw an addition to the faithful and trembled lest he should be returning too soon to Paris. “Good Lord, one never knows,” replied M. de Charlus in a nasal drawl. “I should like to stay here until the end of September.” “You are quite right,” said Mme. Verdurin; “that is the time for fine storms at sea.”
“To tell you the truth, that is not what would influence me. I have for some time past unduly neglected the Archangel Saint Michael, my patron, and I should like to make amends to him by staying for his feast, on the 29th of September, at the Abbey on the Mount.” “You take an interest in all that sort of thing?” asked Mme. Verdurin, who might perhaps have succeeded in hushing the voice of her outraged anti-clericalism, had she not been afraid that so long an expedition might make the violinist and the Baron ‘fail’ her for forty-eight hours. “You are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness,” M. de Charlus replied insolently. “I have told you that Saint Michael is one of my glorious patrons.”
Then, smiling with a benevolent ecstasy, his eyes gazing into the distance, his voice strengthened by an excitement which seemed now to be not merely aesthetic but religious: “It is so beautiful at the offertory when Michael stands erect by the altar, in a white robe, swinging a golden censer heaped so high with perfumes that the fragrance of them mounts up to God.” “We might go there in a party,” suggested Mme. Verdurin, notwithstanding her horror of the clergy.
“At that moment, when the offertory begins,” went on M. de Charlus who, for other reasons but in the same manner as good speakers in Parliament, never replied to an interruption and would pretend not to have heard it, “it would be wonderful to see our young friend Palestrinising, indeed performing an aria by Bach. The worthy Abbot, too, would be wild with joy, and that is the greatest homage, at least the greatest public homage that I can pay to my Holy Patron. What an edification for the faithful! We must mention it presently to the young Angelico of music, a warrior like Saint Michael.”
Saniette, summoned to make a fourth, declared that he did not know how to play whist. And Cottard, seeing that there was not much time left before our train, embarked at once on a game of écarté with Morel. M. Verdurin was furious, and bore down with a terrible expression upon Saniette. “Is there anything in the world that you can play?” he cried, furious at being deprived of the opportunity for a game of whist, and delighted to have found one to insult the old registrar.
He, in his terror, did his best to look clever. “Yes, I can play the piano,” he said. Cottard and Morel were seated face to face. “Your deal,” said Cottard. “Suppose we go nearer to the card-table,” M. de Charlus, worried by the sight of Morel in Cottard’s company, suggested to M. de Cambremer. “It is quite as interesting as those questions of etiquette which in these days have ceased to count for very much. The only kings that we have left, in France at least, are the kings in the pack of cards, who seem to me to be positively swarming in the hand of our young virtuoso,” he added a moment later, from an admiration for Morel which extended to his way of playing cards, to flatter him also, and finally to account for his suddenly turning to lean over the young violinist’s shoulder.
“I-ee cut,” said (imitating the accent of a cardsharper) Cottard, whose children burst out laughing, like his students and the chief dresser, whenever the master, even by the bedside of a serious case, uttered with the emotionless face of an epileptic one of his hackneyed witticisms. “I don’t know what to play,” said Morel, seeking advice from M. de Charlus. “Just as you please, you’re bound to lose, whatever you play, it’s all the same (c’est égal).” “Egal… Ingalli?” said the doctor, with an insinuating, kindly glance at M. de Cambremer. “She was what we call a true diva, she was a dream, a Carmen such as we shall never see again. She was wedded to the part.
I used to enjoy too listening to Ingalli—married.” The Marquis drew himself up with that contemptuous vulgarity of well-bred people who do not realise that they are insulting their host by appearing uncertain whether they ought to associate with his guests, and adopt English manners by way of apology for a scornful expression: “Who is that gentleman playing cards, what does he do for a living, what does he sell?
I rather like to know whom I am meeting, so as not to make friends with any Tom, Dick or Harry. But I didn’t catch his name when you did me the honour of introducing me to him.” If M. Verdurin, availing himself of this phrase, had indeed introduced M. de Cambremer to his fellow-guests, the other would have been greatly annoyed. But, knowing that it was the opposite procedure that was observed, he thought it gracious to assume a genial and modest air, without risk to himself. The pride that M. Verdurin took in his intimacy with Cottard had increased if anything now that the doctor had become an eminent professor. But it no longer found expression in the artless language of earlier days. Then, when Cottard was scarcely known to the public, if you spoke to M. Verdurin of his wife’s facial neuralgia: “There is nothing to be done,” he would say, with the artless self-satisfaction of people who assume that anyone whom they know must be famous, and that everybody knows the name of their family singing-master.
“If she had an ordinary doctor, one might look for a second opinion, but when that doctor is called Cottard” (a name which he pronounced as though it were Bouchard or Charcot) “one has simply to bow to the inevitable.” Adopting a reverse procedure, knowing that M. de Cambremer must certainly have heard of the famous Professor Cottard, M. Verdurin adopted a tone of simplicity. “He’s our family doctor, a worthy soul whom we adore and who would let himself be torn in pieces for our sakes; he is not a doctor, he is a friend, I don’t suppose you have ever heard of him or that his name would convey anything to you, in any case to us it is the name of a very good man, of a very dear friend, Cottard.” This name, murmured in a modest tone, took in M. de Cambremer who supposed that his host was referring to some one else. “Cottard? You don’t mean Professor Cottard?” At that moment one heard the voice of the said Professor who, at an awkward point in the game, was saying as he looked at his cards: “This is where Greek meets Greek.” “Why, yes, to be sure, he is a professor,” said M. Verdurin. “What! Professor Cottard! You are not making a mistake?-You are quite sure it’s the same man?
The one who lives in the Rue du Bac?” “Yes, his address is 43, Rue du Bac. You know him?” “But everybody knows Professor Cottard. He’s at the top of the tree! You might as well ask me if I knew Bouffe de Saint-Biaise or Courtois-Suffit. I could see when I heard him speak that he was not an ordinary person, that is why I took the liberty of asking you.” “Come now, what shall I play, trumps?” asked Cottard. Then abruptly, with a vulgarity which would have been offensive even in heroic circumstances, as when a soldier uses a coarse expression to convey his contempt for death, but became doubly stupid in the safe pastime of a game of cards, Cottard, deciding to play a trump, assumed a sombre, suicidal air, and, borrowing the language of people who are risking their skins, played his card as though it were his life, with the exclamation: “There it is, and be damned to it!” It was not the right card to play, but he had a consolation. In the middle of the
