After dinner, Forcheville went up to the Doctor. «She can’t have been at all bad looking, Mme. Verdurin; anyhow, she’s a woman you can really talk to; that’s all I want. Of course she’s getting a bit broad in the beam. But Mme. de Crécy! There’s a little woman who knows what’s what, all right. Upon my word and soul, you can see at a glance she’s got the American eye, that girl has. We are speaking of Mme. de Crécy,» he explained, as M. Verdurin joined them, his pipe in his mouth. «I should say that, as a specimen of the female form—»
«I’d rather have it in my bed than a clap of thunder!» the words came tumbling from Cottard, who had for some time been waiting in vain until Forcheville should pause for breath, so that he might get in his hoary old joke, a chance for which might not, he feared, come again, if the conversation should take a different turn; and he produced it now with that excessive spontaneity and confidence which may often be noticed attempting to cover up the coldness, and the slight flutter of emotion, inseparable from a prepared recitation. Forcheville knew and saw the joke, and was thoroughly amused. As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of his merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by a symbol, different from his wife’s, but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man who was ‘shaking with laughter’ than he would begin also to cough, as though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of smoke from his pipe. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity. So he and Mme. Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story, was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre, each representing Comedy, but in a different way.
M. Verdurin had been wiser than he knew in not taking his pipe out of his mouth, for Cottard, having occasion to leave the room for a moment, murmured a witty euphemism which he had recently acquired and repeated now whenever he had to go to the place in question: «I must just go and see the Duc d’Aumale for a minute,» so drolly, that M. Verdurin’s cough began all over again.
«Now, then, take your pipe out of your mouth; can’t you see, you’ll choke if you try to bottle up your laughter like that,» counselled Mme. Verdurin, as she came round with a tray of liqueurs.
«What a delightful man your husband is; he has the wit of a dozen!» declared Forcheville to Mme. Cottard. «Thank you, thank you, an old soldier like me can never say ‘No’ to a drink.»
«M. de Forcheville thinks Odette charming,» M. Verdurin told his wife.
«Why, do you know, she wants so much to meet you again some day at luncheon. We must arrange it, but don’t on any account let Swann hear about it. He spoils everything, don’t you know. I don’t mean to say that you’re not to come to dinner too, of course; we hope to see you very often. Now that the warm weather’s coming, we’re going to have dinner out of doors whenever we can. That won’t bore you, will it, a quiet little dinner, now and then, in the Bois? Splendid, splendid, that will be quite delightful….
«Aren’t you going to do any work this evening, I say?» she screamed suddenly to the little pianist, seeing an opportunity for displaying, before a ‘newcomer’ of Forcheville’s importance, at once her unfailing wit and her despotic power over the ‘faithful.’
«M. de Forcheville was just going to say something dreadful about you,» Mme. Cottard warned her husband as he reappeared in the room. And he, still following up the idea of Forcheville’s noble birth, which had obsessed him all through dinner, began again with: «I am treating a Baroness just now, Baroness Putbus; weren’t there some Putbuses in the Crusades? Anyhow they’ve got a lake in Pomerania that’s ten times the size of the Place de la Concorde. I am treating her for dry arthritis; she’s a charming woman. Mme. Verdurin knows her too, I believe.»
Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone with Mme. Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with: «He’s an interesting man, too; you can see that he knows some good people. Gad! but they get to know a lot of things, those doctors.»
«D’you want me to play the phrase from the sonata for M. Swann?» asked the pianist.
«What the devil’s that? Not the sonata-snake, I hope!» shouted M. de Forcheville, hoping to create an effect. But Dr. Cottard, who had never heard this pun, missed the point of it, and imagined that M. de Forcheville had made a mistake. He dashed in boldly to correct it: «No, no. The word isn’t serpent-à-sonates, it’s serpent-à-sonnettes!» he explained in a tone at once zealous, impatient, and triumphant.
Forcheville explained the joke to him. The Doctor blushed.
«You’ll admit it’s not bad, eh, Doctor?»
«Oh! I’ve known it for ages.»
Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves above it—and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley—the little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville.
«Ah! you’ve come too late!» Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the ‘faithful,’ whose invitation had been only ‘to look in after dinner,’ «we’ve been having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence! But he’s gone. Isn’t that so, M. Swann? I believe it’s the first time you’ve met him,» she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her that Swann owed the introduction. «Isn’t that so; wasn’t he delicious, our Brichot?»
Swann bowed politely.
«No? You weren’t interested?» she asked dryly.
«Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little too peremptory, a little too jovial for my taste. I should like to see him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one feels that he knows a great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound fellow.»
The party broke up very late. Cottard’s first words to his wife were: «I have rarely seen Mme. Verdurin in such form as she was to-night.»
«What exactly is your Mme. Verdurin? A bit of a bad hat, eh?» said Forcheville to the painter, to whom he had offered a ‘lift.’ Odette watched his departure with regret; she dared not refuse to let Swann take her home, but she was moody and irritable in the carriage, and, when he asked whether he might come in, replied, «I suppose so,» with an impatient shrug of her shoulders. When they had all gone, Mme. Verdurin said to her husband: «Did you notice the way Swann laughed, such an idiotic laugh, when we spoke about Mme. La Trémoïlle?»
She had remarked, more than once, how Swann and Forcheville suppressed the particle ‘de’ before that lady’s name. Never doubting that it was done on purpose, to shew that they were not afraid of a title, she had made up her mind to imitate their arrogance, but had not quite grasped what grammatical form it ought to take. Moreover, the natural corruptness of her speech overcoming her implacable republicanism, she still said instinctively «the de La Trémoïlles,» or, rather (by an abbreviation sanctified by the usage of music-hall singers and the writers of the ‘captions’ beneath caricatures, who elide the ‘de’), «the d’La Trémoïlles,» but she corrected herself at once to «Madame La Trémoïlle.—The Duchess, as Swann calls her,» she added ironically, with a smile which proved that she
