'
"M. de Forcheville was just going to say something dreadful about you,"
Mme. Cottard warned her husband as he reappeared in the room. And he,
still following up the idea of Forcheville's noble birth, which had
obsessed him all through dinner, began again with: "I am treating a
Baroness just now, Baroness Putbus; weren't there some Putbuses in the
Crusades? Anyhow they've got a lake in Pomerania that's ten times the size
of the Place de la Concorde. I am treating her for dry arthritis; she's a
charming woman. Mme. Verdurin knows her too, I believe."
Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone with Mme.
Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with: "He's an
interesting man, too; you can see that he knows 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.
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