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Cottard, he decided that so young a husband would not deliberately, in his wife's hearing, have made any allusion to amusements of that order, and so ceased to interpret the Doctor's expression in the sense which he had at first suspected. The painter at once invited Swann to visit his studio with Odette, and Swann found him very pleasant.
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth which contradicted everything that he had previously believed, but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; with timorous emotion he bowed his head over his plate, and merely replied: "Oh oh oh oh oh!" traversing, in an orderly retirement of his forces, into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole compass of his voice.
As for the painter, he was overjoyed at the prospect of Swann's appearing at the Verdurins', because he supposed him to be in love with Odette, and was always ready to assist at lovers' meetings. "Nothing amuses me more than match-making," he confided to Cottard; "I have been tremendously successful, even with women!"
"P.S. Fallowby has shaken Hartman and his gang, thank the Lord! There is something rotten there, or it may be he's only a miser. "P.P.S. I'm more desperately in love than ever, but I'm sure she does not care a straw for me." "All right," said Trent, with a smile, to the concierge; "but tell me, how is Papa Cottard?" The old woman shook her head and pointed to the curtained bed in the lodge.
"Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn't here?" M. Verdurin asked his wife. "I think we may say that he's hooked." "The face he pulled?" exploded Dr. Cottard who, having left the house for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and did not know whom they were discussing.
The whole table burst out laughing. "What did I tell you?" said Mme. Verdurin to Forcheville. "It's simply impossible to be serious with him. When you least expect it, out he comes with a joke." But she observed that Swann, and Swann alone, had not unbent. For one thing he was none too well pleased with Cottard for having secured a laugh at his expense in front of Forcheville.
A note of pity sounded in the Doctor's voice; and then struck by the number only eight at table "Are these luncheons what you would describe as 'intimate'?" he inquired briskly, not so much out of idle curiosity as in his linguistic zeal. But so great and glorious a figure was the President of the French Republic in the eyes of Dr. Cottard that neither the modesty of Swann nor the spite of Mme.
Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a white-gloved hand from which there floated, with a transier-ticket, an atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with the harsher fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme.
"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.
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.
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