But not a bit of
it, I am greedier than any of you, but I have no need to fill my mouth
with them when I can feed on them with my eyes. What are you all laughing
at now, pray? Ask the Doctor; he will tell you that those grapes act on me
like a regular purge. Some people go to Fontainebleau for cures; I take my
own little Beauvais cure here. But, M. Swann, you mustn't run away without
feeling the little bronze mouldings on the backs. Isn't it an exquisite
surface? No, no, not with your whole hand like that; feel them property!"
"If Mme. Verdurin is going to start playing about with her bronzes," said
the painter, "we shan't get any music to-night."
"Be quiet, you wretch! And yet we poor women," she went on, "are forbidden
pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in the world as
soft as these. None. When M. Verdurin did me the honour of being madly
jealous... come, you might at least be polite. Don't say that you never
have been jealous!"
"But, my dear, I have said absolutely nothing. Look here, Doctor, I call
you as a witness; did I utter a word?"
Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not
like to stop.
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