later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to
meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he
was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and
rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of
those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when
they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute
depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and
one's actual happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which
she had asked to see. She was not very well; she received him, wearing
a wrapper of mauve _crêpe de Chine_, which draped her bosom, like a
mantle, with a richly embroidered web. As she stood there beside him,
brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one
knee in what was almost a dancer's pose, so that she could lean without
tiring herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with bended
head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when
there was nothing to animate her, Swann was struck by her resemblance to
the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's Daughter, which is to be seen in one
of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination
in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general
characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but
rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual
features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust
of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the
slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman
Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a
portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an
outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen
eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted,
in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of
life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find
a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his
perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had
admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give
those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness
to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far
succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he
felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious
and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and
repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had
retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine
satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the
abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern
original, whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be,
and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he, for some time
past, had been receiving--though, indeed, they had come to him rather
through the channel of his appreciation of music--had enriched his
appetite for painting as well, it was with an unusual intensity
of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his
character and conduct, that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the
Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom one shrinks from giving
his more popular surname, now that 'Botticelli' suggests not so much the
actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which
has of late obtained common currency. He no longer based his estimate
of the merit of Odette's face on the more or less good quality of her
cheeks, and the softness and sweetness--as of carnation-petals--which,
he supposed, would greet his lips there, should he ever hazard an
embrace, but regarded it rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken
threads, which his gazing eyes collected and wound together, following
the curving line from the skein to the ball, where he mingled the
cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her
eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself, in which her type was
made clearly intelligible.
He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in
her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to
recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking
of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine
masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been
reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered
her more precious in his sight. Swann reproached himself with his
failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the
great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his
pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own
system of aesthetic. He told himself that, in choosing the thought of
Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not,
as he had until then supposed, falling back, merely, upon an expedient
of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in
herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He
failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring
Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply
because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The
words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him
(gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the image of Odette
into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been
debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And
whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his
misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her
beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept
away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of
her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles; while the kiss,
the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but moderately
attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered
flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his
adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as
exquisite as they would be supernatural.
And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done
nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was
not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an
inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different,
an especially charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would
contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind
of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual
thrill of a collector.
On his study table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were a
photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would
gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the
imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair
that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt
to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman,
he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated
himself on finding assembled in the person of one whom he might,
ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a
spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh
and blood, of Jethro's Daughter, became a desire which more than
compensated, thenceforward, for that with which Odette's physical charms
had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long time
gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli,
who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him
the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette
against his heart.
It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains
to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that,
since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer
to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid
lest the manner--at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly
unalterable--which she now adopted when they were together should
ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when
she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become
and would remain her lover. And so to alter, to give a fresh moral
aspect to that Odette, of whose unchanging mood he was afraid of growing
weary, he wrote, suddenly, a letter full of hinted discoveries and
feigned indignation, which he sent off so that it should reach her
before dinner-time. He knew that she would be frightened, and that she
would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at
her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard
her utter: and he was right--by repeating this device he had won from
her the most affectionate letters that she had, so far, written him, one
of them (which she had sent to him at midday by a special messenger from
the Maison Dorée--it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête given for
the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) beginning "My dear, my hand
trembles so that I can scarcely write----"; and these letters he had
kept in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she
had not had time to write, when he arrived at the Verdurins' she would
come running up to him with an "I've something to say to you!" and he
would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what
she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.
Even as he drew near to the Verdurins' door, and caught sight of the
great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were
never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming
creature whom he would see, as he entered the room, basking in that
golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out, sharp
and black, between lamp and window, shutting off the light, like those
little pictures which one sees sometimes pasted here and there upon a
glass screen, whose other panes are mere transparencies. He would try
to make out Odette. And then, when he was once inside, without thinking,
his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin
said to the painter: "H'm. Seems to be getting warm." Indeed, her
presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited
seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which
ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his
heart.
And so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism,
namely the 'little clan,' were transformed for Swann into a series of
daily encounters with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to
the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing
which he incurred no very great risk since, even although he had written
to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and
accompany her home.
But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark
drive together, he had taken his other 'little girl' all the way to the
Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at
the Verdurins', he was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing
that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare
of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish; he shook with the
sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began
then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that
certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of
all our pleasures) reduced, if it did not altogether blind him to its
dimensions.
"Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn't here?" M.
Verdurin asked his wife. "I think we may say that he's hooked."
"The face he pulled?" exploded Dr. Cottard who, having left the house
for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and
did not know whom they were discussing.
"D'you mean to say you didn't meet him on the doorstep--the loveliest of
Swanns?"
"No. M. Swann has been here?"
"Just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a Swann tremendously agitated.
In a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left."
"You mean to say that she has gone the 'whole hog' with him; that she
has 'burned her boats'?" inquired the Doctor cautiously, testing the
meaning of his phrases.
"Why, of course not; there's absolutely nothing in it; in fact, between
you and me, I think she's making a great mistake, and behaving like a
silly little fool, which she is, incidentally."
"Come, come, come!" said M. Verdurin, "How on earth do you know that
there's 'nothing in it'? We haven't been there to see, have we now?"
"She would have told me," answered Mme. Verdurin with dignity. "I may
say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I
told her that she ought to live with him. She makes out that she can't;
she admits, she was immensely attracted by him, at first; but he's
always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she
doesn't care for him in that way, she says; it's an ideal love,
'Platonic,' you know; she's afraid of rubbing the bloom off--oh, I don't
know half the things she says, how should I? And yet he's exactly the
sort of man she wants."
"I beg to differ from you," M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. "I am
only half satisfied with the gentleman. I feel that he 'poses.'"
Mme. Verdurin's whole body stiffened, her eyes stared blankly as though
she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device by means of which
she might be supposed not to have caught the sound of that unutterable
word which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to 'pose'
in her house, and, therefore, that there were people in the world who
'mattered more' than herself.
"Anyhow, if there is nothing in it, I don't suppose it's because our
friend believes in her virtue. And yet, you never know; he seems to
believe in her intelligence. I don't know whether you heard the way he
lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata. I am devoted
to Odette, but really--to expound theories of aesthetic to her--the man
must be a prize idiot."
"Look here, I won't have you saying nasty things about Odette," broke in
Mme. Verdurin in her 'spoiled child' manner. "She is charming."
"There's no reason why she shouldn't be charming; we are not saying
anything nasty about her, only that she is not the embodiment of either
virtue or intellect. After all," he turned to the painter, "does it
matter so very much whether she is virtuous or not? You can't tell; she
might be a great deal less charming if she were."
On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins' butler, who had been
somewhere else a moment earlier, when he arrived, and who had been asked
by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she
would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prévost's on her
way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost's, but every few yards
his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street,
loathsome obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath
his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would
delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He
counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to
be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure, and so,
possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his
arriving at Prévost's in time, and of finding her still there. And then,
in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep
and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his
mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself
and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the
thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard
at the Verdurins' that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from
which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as
though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because
he would not see Odette, now, till to-morrow, exactly what he had been
hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme. Verdurin's. He was
obliged to admit also that now, as he sat in the same carriage and
drove to Prévost's, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone
even--but that a new personality was there beside him, adhering to him,
amalgamated with him, a creature from whom he might, perhaps, be unable
to liberate himself, towards whom he might have to adopt some such
stratagem as one uses to outwit a master or a malady. And yet, during
this last moment in which he had felt that another, a fresh personality
was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed, somehow, more
interesting.
It was in vain that he assured himself that this possible meeting at
Prévost's (the tension of waiting for which so ravished, stripped so
bare the intervening moments that he could find nothing, not one idea,
not one memory in his mind beneath which his troubled spirit might take
shelter and repose) would probably, after all, should it take place, be
much the same as all their meetings, of no great importance. As on every
other evening, once he was in Odette's company, once he had begun to
cast furtive glances at her changing countenance, and instantly to
withdraw his eyes lest she should read in them the first symbols of
desire and believe no more in his indifference, he would cease to
be able even to think of her, so busy would he be in the search for
pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately, and to
assure himself, without betraying his concern, that he would find her
again, next evening, at the Verdurins'; pretexts, that is to say, which
would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day
more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come
to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet
never dared embrace.
She was not at Prevost's; he must search for her, then, in every
restaurant upon the boulevards. To save time, while he went in one
direction, he sent in the other his coachman Rémi (Rizzo's Doge Loredan)
for whom he presently--after a fruitless search--found himself waiting
at the spot where the carriage was to meet him. It did not appear, and
Swann tantalised himself with alternate pictures of the approaching
moment, as one in which Rémi would say to him: "Sir, the lady is there,"
or as one in which Rémi would say to him: "Sir, the lady was not in
any of the cafés." And so he saw himself faced by the close of his
evening--a thing uniform, and yet bifurcated by the intervening accident
which would either put an end to his agony by discovering Odette, or
would oblige him to abandon any hope of finding her that night, to
accept the necessity of returning home without having seen her.
The coachman returned; but, as he drew up opposite him, Swann asked,
not "Did you find the lady?" but "Remind me, to-morrow, to order in
some more firewood. I am sure we must be running short." Perhaps he had
persuaded himself that, if Rémi had at last found Odette in some café,
where she was waiting for him still, then his night of misery was
already obliterated by the realisation, begun already in his mind, of a
night of joy, and that there was no need for him to hasten towards the
attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place,
which would not escape his grasp again. But it was also by the force of
inertia; there was in his soul that want of adaptability which can be
seen in the bodies of certain people who, when the moment comes to avoid
a collision, to snatch their clothes out of reach of a flame, or to
perform any other such necessary movement, take their time (as the
saying is), begin by remaining for a moment in their original position,
as though seeking to find in it a starting-point, a source of strength
and motion. And probably, if the coachman had interrupted him with,
"I have found the lady," he would have answered, "Oh, yes, of course;
that's what I told you to do. I had quite forgotten," and would have
continued to discuss his supply of firewood, so as to hide from his
servant the emotion that he had felt, and to give himself time to break
away from the thraldom of his anxieties and abandon himself to pleasure.
The coachman came back, however, with the report that he could not find
her anywhere, and added the advice, as an old and privileged servant, "I
think, sir, that all we can do now is to go home."
But the air of indifference which Swann could so lightly assume when
Rémi uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a
cast-off cloak when he saw Rémi attempt to make him abandon hope and
retire from the quest.
"Certainly not!" he exclaimed. "We must find the lady. It is most
important. She would be extremely put out--it's a business matter--and
vexed with me if she didn't see me."
"But I do not see how the lady can be vexed, sir," answered Rémi, "since
it was she that went away without waiting for you, sir, and said she was
going to Prévost's, and then wasn't there."
Meanwhile the restaurants were closing, and their lights began to go
out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people
strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness.
Now and then the ghost of a woman glided up to Swann, murmured a few
words in his ear, asked him to take her home, and left him shuddering.
Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though
among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been
searching for a lost Eurydice.
Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the
agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious
as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the
human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking
amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided,
that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not
necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or
even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her
should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as--in
the moment when she has failed to meet us--for the pleasure which
we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly
substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature
herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised
society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage--the
insensate, agonising desire to possess her.
Swann made Rémi drive him to such restaurants as were still open; it was
the sole hypothesis, now, of that happiness which he had contemplated
so calmly; he no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon
their meeting, and promised, in case of success, to reward his coachman,
as though, by inspiring in him a will to triumph which would reinforce
his own, he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette--assuming
that she had long since gone home to bed,--might yet be found seated in
some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the quest as far as the
Maison Dorée, burst twice into Tortoni's and, still without catching
sight of her, was emerging from the Café Anglais, striding with haggard
gaze towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of
the Boulevard des Italiens, when he collided with a person coming in the
opposite direction; it was Odette; she explained, later, that there had
been no room at Prévost's, that she had gone, instead, to sup at the
Maison Dorée, and had been sitting there in an alcove where he must have
overlooked her, and that she was now looking for her carriage.
She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As
for him, he had ransacked the streets of Paris, not that he supposed
it possible that he should find her, but because he would have suffered
even more cruelly by abandoning the attempt. But now the joy (which, his
reason had never ceased to assure him, was not, that evening at least,
to be realised) was suddenly apparent, and more real than ever
before; for he himself had contributed nothing to it by anticipating
probabilities,--it remained integral and external to himself; there
was no need for him to draw on his own resources to endow it with
truth--'twas from itself that there emanated, 'twas itself that
projected towards him that truth whose glorious rays melted and
scattered like the cloud of a dream the sense of loneliness which had
lowered over him, that truth upon which he had supported, nay founded,
albeit unconsciously, his vision of bliss. So will a traveller, who has
come down, on a day of glorious weather, to the Mediterranean shore, and
is doubtful whether they still exist, those lands which he has left, let
his eyes be dazzled, rather than cast a backward glance, by the radiance
streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure at his feet.
He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept waiting, and
ordered his own to follow.