Translations:CP 03024/21/en
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- ↑ If Odette invites the Cottards so frequently it is because she is the doctor's mistress. This revelation is mentioned several times in the novel (RTP, I, 507 and II, 625). But the corresponding paperole, fallen out of the exercise book, was only published for the first time in 1983: after Cottard's death "a correspondence, however cold in tone it might have been but full of small facts that the doctor had explained to her differently, crushed Mme Cottard by revealing to her that her husband had never ceased to keep up, at fixed intervals, a relationship with Odette. [...] He had known her in her early youth, when she herself did not know many people (it was he who had introduced her to the Verdurins later on). Every time he gave her a little sum of money and had remained with her as an old client, at a price that was in itself desultory, even when she had become a great coquette, then Mme Swann, then Mme de Forcheville, and then when the Duc de Guermantes [had] lavished millions on her" (see Denise Mayer, "Les caractères immortels", Commentaire, 1983/4, no. 22, p. 373-378; quotation p. 374-375). [NM]