Page 448 - swanns-way

He is quite what you might call a personal friend...’ ‘I sin-
cerely trust that we sha’n’t!’ cried Mme. Verdurin. ‘Heaven
preserve us from him; he’s too deadly for words, a stupid,
ill-bred boor.’
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense as-
tonishment 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. After which there was
no more talk of Swann at the Verdurins’.
And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann
and Odette together became an obstacle in the way of their
meeting. She no longer said to him, as she had said in the
early days of their love: ‘We shall meet, anyhow, to-morrow
evening; there’s a supper-party at the Verdurins’,’ but ‘We
sha’n’t be able to meet to-morrow evening; there’s a supper-
party at the Verdurins’.’ Or else the Verdurins were taking
her to the Opéra-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cléopâtre,
and Swann could read in her eyes that terror lest he should
ask her not to go, which, but a little time before, he could not
have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it flitted across
the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him.
‘Yet I’m not really angry,’ he assured himself, ‘when I see
how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that
dunghill of cacophony. I’m disappointed; not for myself, but

448 Swann’s Way