In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [165]
“I say, aren’t you going to do any work this evening?” she screamed suddenly to the young 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 has been saying dreadful things about you,” Mme Cottard told 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, said to him: “I’m 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’m treating her for rheumatoid arthritis; she’s a charming woman. Mme Verdurin knows her too, I believe.”
Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone again with Mme Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with: “He’s an interesting man, too; you can see that he knows a few people. Gad! they do get to know a lot of things, those doctors.”
“I’m going to play the phrase from the sonata for M. Swann,” said 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 him: “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.12
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 silent; beneath the restless tremolos of the violin part which protected it with their throbbing sostenuto two octaves above it—and as in a mountainous country, behind the seeming immobility of a vertiginous waterfall, one descries, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley—the little phrase had just appeared, distant, graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it as to a confidant of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would surely tell her to 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 emphasise the fact that it was to her that Swann owed the introduction. “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’s 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’ve rarely seen Mme Verdurin in such form as she was tonight.”
“What exactly is your Mme Verdurin? A bit of a demirep, 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 all the guests had 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