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.

"What the devil's that? Not the sonata-snake, I hope!" shouted M. de
Forcheville, hoping to create an effect. But Dr. Cottard, who had
never heard this pun, missed the point of it, and imagined that M. de
Forcheville had made a mistake. He dashed in boldly to correct it: "No,
no. The word isn't _serpent-a-sonates_, it's _serpent-a-sonnettes_!" he
explained in a tone at once zealous, impatient, and triumphant.

Forcheville explained the joke to him. The Doctor blushed.

"You'll admit it's not bad, eh, Doctor?"

"Oh! I've known it for ages."

Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the
violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves
above it--and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming
immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two
hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley--the
little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by
the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous
curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as
to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who
would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville.

"Ah! you've come too late!" Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the 'faithful,'
whose invitation had been only 'to look in after dinner,' "we've been
having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence!
But he's gone. Isn't that so, M. Swann? I believe it's the first time
you've met him," she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her
that Swann owed the introduction. "Isn't that so; wasn't he delicious,
our Brichot?"

Swann bowed politely.

"No? You weren't interested?" she asked dryly.

"Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little
too peremptory, a little too jovial for my taste. I should like to see
him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one
feels that he knows a great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound
fellow."

The party broke up very late. Cottard's first words to his wife were: "I
have rarely seen Mme. Verdurin in such form as she was to-night."

"What exactly is your Mme. Verdurin? A bit of a bad hat, eh?" said
Forcheville to the painter, to whom he