In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [187]
“Do you shoot much, Monsieur?” said Mme Verdurin contemptuously to M. de Cambremer.
“Has Ski told you of the near shave we had today?” Cottard inquired of the Mistress.
“I shoot mostly in the forest of Chantepie,” replied M. de Cambremer.
“No, I’ve told her nothing,” said Ski.
“Does it deserve its name?” Brichot asked M. de Cambremer, after a glance at me from the corner of his eye, for he had promised me that he would introduce the topic of etymology, begging me at the same time to conceal from the Cambremers the scorn that he felt for the researches of the Combray priest.
“I’m afraid I must be very stupid, but I don’t grasp your question,” said M. de Cambremer.
“I mean: do many magpies sing in it?” replied Brichot.
Cottard meanwhile could not bear Mme Verdurin’s not knowing that they had nearly missed the train.
“Out with it,” Mme Cottard said to her husband encouragingly, “tell us about your odyssey.”
“Well, it really is rather out of the ordinary,” said the doctor, and repeated his narrative from the beginning. “When I saw that the train was in the station, I was dumbfounded. It was all Ski’s fault. You’re pretty eccentric with your information, my dear fellow! And there was Brichot waiting for us at the station!”
“I assumed,” said the scholar, casting around him what he could still muster of a glance and smiling with his thin lips, “that if you had been detained at Graincourt, it would mean that you had encountered some peripatetic siren.”
“Will you hold your tongue! What if my wife were to hear you?” said the Doctor. “This wife of mine, it is jealous.”
“Ah! that Brichot,” cried Ski, moved to traditional merriment by Brichot’s spicy witticism, “he’s always the same,” although he had no reason to suppose that the worthy academic had ever been specially lecherous. And, to embellish these time-honoured words with the ritual gesture, he made as though he could not resist the desire to pinch Brichot’s leg. “He never changes, the rascal,” Ski went on, without stopping to think of the effect, at once sad and comic, that Brichot’s semi-blindness gave to his words: “Always an eye for the ladies.”
“You see,” said M. de Cambremer, “what it is to meet a scholar. Here have I been shooting for fifteen years in the forest of Chantepie, and I’ve never even thought of what the name meant.”
Mme de Cambremer cast a stern glance at her husband; she did not like him to humiliate himself thus before Brichot. She was even more displeased when, at every “ready-made” expression that Cancan employed, Cottard, who knew the ins and outs of them all, having himself laboriously acquired them, pointed out to the Marquis, who admitted his stupidity, that they meant nothing: “Why ‘drink like a fish’? Do you suppose fish drink more than other creatures? You say: ‘mind your p’s and q’s.’ Why p’s and q’s in particular? Why ‘easy as pie’? Why ‘at sixes and sevens’? Why ‘sow one’s wild oats’?”
But at this, the defence of M. de Cambremer was taken up by Brichot, who explained the origin of each expression. Mme de Cambremer, however, was chiefly occupied in examining the changes the Verdurins had introduced at La Raspelière, so that she could criticise some and import others, or perhaps the same ones, to Féterne. “I wonder what that chandelier is that’s hanging all askew. I hardly recognise my old Raspelière,” she went on, with a familiarly aristocratic air, as she might have spoken of an old servant meaning not so much to indicate his age as to say that he had seen her in her cradle. And as she was a trifle bookish in her speech: “All the same,” she added in an undertone, “I can’t help feeling that if I were living in another person’s house I should feel some compunction about altering everything like this.”
“It’s a pity you didn’t come with them,” said Mme Verdurin to M. de Charlus and Morel, hoping that M. de Charlus was now “enrolled” and would submit to