In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [174]
Brichot was afraid that his handclasp had not been understood. “Ah! poor Dechambre!” he said, but in an undertone, in case Mme Verdurin was within earshot.
“It’s dreadful,” replied M. Verdurin cheerfully.
“So young,” Brichot pursued the point.
Annoyed at being detained over these futilities, M. Verdurin replied hurriedly and with a high-pitched moan, not of grief but of irritated impatience: “Ah well, there we are, it’s no use crying over spilt milk, talking about him won’t bring him back to life, will it?” And, his civility returning with his joviality: “Come along, my dear Brichot, get your things off quickly. We have a bouillabaisse which mustn’t be kept waiting. But, in heaven’s name, don’t start talking about Dechambre to Mme Verdurin. You know that she always hides her feelings, but she’s quite morbidly sensitive. No, but I swear to you, when she heard that Dechambre was dead, she almost wept,” said M. Verdurin in a tone of profound irony. Hearing him, one might have concluded that it implied a form of insanity to regret the death of a friend of thirty years’ standing, and at the same time one gathered that the perpetual union of M. Verdurin and his wife did not preclude constant censure and frequent irritation on his part. “If you mention it to her, she’ll go and make herself ill again. It’s deplorable, three weeks after her bronchitis. When that happens, it’s I who have to nurse her. You can understand that I’ve had more than enough of it. Grieve for Dechambre’s fate in your heart as much as you like. Think of him, but don’t speak about him. I was very fond of Dechambre, but you cannot blame me for being fonder still of my wife. Here’s Cottard, now, you can ask him.” And indeed he knew that a family doctor can do many little services, such as prescribing that one must not give way to grief.
The docile Cottard had said to the Mistress: “Upset yourself like that, and tomorrow you’ll give me a temperature of 102,” as he might have said to the cook: “Tomorrow you’ll give me sweetbread.” Medicine, when it fails to cure, busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns.
M. Verdurin was glad to find that Saniette, notwithstanding the snubs that he had had to endure two days earlier, had not deserted the little nucleus. And indeed Mme Verdurin and her husband had acquired, in their idleness, cruel instincts for which the great occasions, occurring too rarely, no longer sufficed. They had succeeded in effecting a breach between Odette and Swann, and between Brichot and his mistress. They would try it again with others, that was understood. But the opportunity did not present itself every day. Whereas, thanks to his quivering sensibility, his timorous and easily panicked shyness, Saniette provided them with a whipping-boy for every day in the year. And so, for fear of his defecting, they took care always to invite him with friendly and persuasive words, such as the senior boys at school or the old soldiers in a regiment address to a greenhorn whom they are anxious to cajole so that they may get him into their clutches with the sole object of ragging and bullying him when he can no longer escape.
“Whatever you do,” Cottard reminded Brichot, not having heard what M. Verdurin had been saying, “mum’s the word in front of Mme Verdurin.”
“Have no fear, O Cottard, you are dealing with a sage, as Theocritus says. Besides, M. Verdurin is right, what is the use of lamentations?” Brichot added, for, though capable of assimilating verbal forms and the ideas which they suggested to him, but lacking subtlety, he had discerned and admired in M. Verdurin’s remarks the most courageous stoicism. “All the same, it’s a great talent that has gone from the world.”
“What, are you still talking about Dechambre?” said M. Verdurin, who had gone on ahead of us, and, seeing that we were