As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of his
merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by a symbol,
different from his wife's, but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he
begun the movement of head 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 representing Comedy, but in a
different way.
M. Verdurin had been wiser than he knew in not taking his pipe out of his
mouth, for Cottard, having occasion to leave the room for a moment,
murmured a witty euphemism 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.
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