house. Doncières isn’t much fun. Anyhow, do just as you please, whatever suits you best,” she concluded, without insisting, so as not to appear to be trying to know people of noble birth, and because she always maintained that the system by which she governed the faithful, to wit despotism, was named liberty. “Why, what’s the matter with you,” she said, at the sight of M. Verdurin who, gesticulating impatiently, was making for the wooden terrace that ran along the side of the drawing-room above the valley, like a man who is bursting with rage and needs fresh air. “Has Saniette been irritating you again? But since you know what an idiot he is, you must resign yourself and not work yourself up into such a state . . . I hate it when he gets like this,” she said to me, “because it’s bad for him, it sends the blood to his head. But I must say that one would need the patience of an angel at times to put up with Saniette, and one must always remember that it’s an act of charity to have him in the house. For my part I must admit that he’s so gloriously silly that I can’t help enjoying him. I dare say you heard what he said after dinner: ‘I can’t play whist, but I can play the piano.’ Isn’t it superb? It’s positively colossal, and incidentally quite untrue, for he’s incapable of doing either. But my husband, beneath his rough exterior, is very sensitive, very kind-hearted, and Saniette’s self-centred way of always thinking about the effect he’s going to make drives him crazy . . . Come, dear, calm down, you know Cottard told you that it was bad for your liver. And I’m the one who’ll have to bear the brunt of it all. Tomorrow Saniette will come back and have his little fit of hysterics. Poor man, he’s very ill. But still, that’s no reason why he should kill other people. And then, even at moments when he’s really suffering, when one would like to comfort him, his silliness hardens one’s heart. He’s really too stupid. You ought to tell him quite politely that these scenes make you both ill, and he’d better not come back, and since that’s what he’s most afraid of, it will have a calming effect on his nerves,” Mme Verdurin concluded.
The sea was only just discernible from the windows on the right. But those on the other side revealed the valley, now shrouded in a snowy cloak of moonlight. From time to time one heard the voices of Morel and Cottard. “Have you any trumps?” “Yes.” “From what I saw, ’pon my soul . . .” said M. de Cambremer to Morel, in answer to his question, for he had seen that the Doctor’s hand was full of trumps. “Here comes the lady of diamonds,” said the Doctor. “Zat iss trump, you know? My trick. But there isn’t a Sorbonne any longer,” said the Doctor to M. de Cambremer, “there’s only the University of Paris.” M. de Cambremer confessed that he did not see the point of this remark. “I thought you were talking about the Sorbonne,” continued the Doctor. “I understood you to say: Sorbonne my soul,” he added, with a wink, to show that this was a pun. “Just wait a moment,” he said, pointing to his opponent, “I have a Trafalgar in store for him.” And the prospect must have been excellent for the Doctor, for in his joy his shoulders began to shake voluptuously with laughter, a motion which in his family, in the “genus” Cottard, was an almost zoological sign of satisfaction. In the previous generation the movement used to be accompanied by that of rubbing the hands together as though one were soaping them. Cottard himself had originally employed both forms of mimicry simultaneously, but one fine day, nobody ever knew by whose intervention, wifely or perhaps professional, the rubbing of the hands had disappeared. The Doctor, even at dominoes, when he forced his opponent into a corner and made him take the double six, which was to him the keenest of pleasures, contented himself with the shoulder-shake. And when—which was as seldom as possible—he went down to his native village for a few days and met his first cousin who was still at the hand-rubbing stage, he would say to Mme Cottard on his return: “I thought poor René very