Page 407 - swanns-way

and shoulders of a man who was ‘shaking with laughter’
than he would begin also to cough, as though, in laughing
too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of smoke from
his pipe. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he
could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation
and hilarity. So he and Mme. Verdurin (who, at the other
side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story,
was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into
her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre, each repre-
senting Comedy, but in a different way.
M. Verdurin had been wiser than he knew in not tak-
ing his pipe out of his mouth, for Cottard, having occasion
to leave the room for a moment, murmured a witty euphe-
mism which he had recently acquired and repeated now
whenever he had to go to the place in question: ‘I must just
go and see the Duc d’Aumale for a minute,’ so drolly, that
M. Verdurin’s cough began all over again.
‘Now, then, take your pipe out of your mouth; can’t you
see, you’ll choke if you try to bottle up your laughter like
that,’ counselled Mme. Verdurin, as she came round with a
tray of liqueurs.
‘What a delightful man your husband is; he has the wit
of a dozen!’ declared Forcheville to Mme. Ccttard. ‘Thank
you, thank you, an old soldier like me can never say ‘No’ to
a drink.’
‘M. de Forcheville thinks Odette charming,’ M. Verdu-
rin told his wife.
‘Why, do you know, she wants so much to meet you again
some day at luncheon. We must arrange it, but don’t on any

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