the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers
fastened to a swansdown plume. She was wearing, under her cloak, a
flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a
large triangular patch of her white silk skirt, with an 'insertion,'
also of white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were
fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock
which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the
horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats; she
uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.
"It's all right," he assured her, "don't be frightened." And he slipped
his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then
went on: "Whatever you do, don't utter a word; just make a sign, yes
or no, or you'll be out of breath again. You won't mind if I put the
flowers straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I'm afraid
of their dropping out; I'm just going to fasten them a little more
securely."
She was not used to being treated with so much formality by men, and
smiled as she answered: "No, not at all; I don't mind in the least."
But he, chilled a little by her answer, perhaps, also, to bear out the
pretence that he had been sincere in adopting the stratagem, or even
because he was already beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed:
"No, no; you mustn't speak. You will be out of breath again. You can
easily answer in signs; I shall understand. Really and truly now, you
don't mind my doing this? Look, there is a little--I think it must be
pollen, spilt over your dress,--may I brush it off with my hand? That's
not too hard; I'm not hurting you, am I? I'm tickling you, perhaps, a
little; but I don't want to touch the velvet in case I rub it the wrong
way. But, don't you see, I really had to fasten the flowers; they would
have fallen out if I hadn't. Like that, now; if I just push them a
little farther down.... Seriously, I'm not annoying you, am I? And if
I just sniff them to see whether they've really lost all their scent? I
don't believe I ever smelt any before; may I? Tell the truth, now."
Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who
should say, "You're quite mad; you know very well that I like it."
He slipped his other hand upwards along Odette's cheek; she fixed her
eyes on him with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women
of the old Florentine's paintings, in whose faces he had found the type
of hers; swimming at the brink of her fringed lids, her brilliant eyes,
large and finely drawn as theirs, seemed on the verge of breaking from
her face and rolling down her cheeks like two great tears. She bent her
neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as
well as in the scriptural. And although her attitude was, doubtless,
habitual and instinctive, one which she knew to be appropriate to such
moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all
her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force
were drawing it down towards Swann's. And Swann it was who, before she
allowed her face, as though despite her efforts, to fall upon his lips,
held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance between his
hands. He had intended to leave time for her mind to overtake her body's
movements, to recognise the dream which she had so long cherished and to
assist at its realisation, like a mother invited as a spectator when
a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps,
moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not
yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for
the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his
departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view
of a country to which he may never return.
But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which
had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete
surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or from reluctance to
appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked
the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which
could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first
occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If
she had any cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: "It is most
unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've
not been disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that
this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than
the others?" Or else, if she had none: "Oh! no cattleyas this evening;
then there's nothing for me to arrange." So that for some time there
was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first
evening, when he had started by touching her throat, with his fingers
first and then with his lips, but their caresses began invariably with
this modest exploration. And long afterwards, when the arrangement (or,
rather, the ritual pretence of an arrangement) of her cattleyas had
quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted
into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its
original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical
possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing),
survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long forgotten custom
from which it sprang. And yet possibly this particular manner of saying
"to make love" had not the precise significance of its synonyms.
However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard
the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable
and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be
described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure
if the women concerned be--or be thought to be--so difficult as to
oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our
relations with them, as was originally for Swann the arrangement of the
cattleyas. He trembled as he hoped, that evening, (but Odette, he told
himself, if she were deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his
intention) that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge
for him from their large and richly coloured petals; and the pleasure
which he already felt, and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps
only because she was not yet aware of it herself, seemed to him for that
reason--as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid
the flowers of the earthly paradise--a pleasure which had never before
existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure--and the
special name which he was to give to it preserved its identity--entirely
individual and new.
The ice once broken, every evening, when he had taken her home, he must
follow her into the house; and often she would come out again in her
dressing-gown, and escort him to his carriage, and would kiss him before
the eyes of his coachman, saying: "What on earth does it matter what
people see?" And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins' (which
happened occasionally, now that he had opportunities of meeting Odette
elsewhere), when--more and more rarely--he went into society, she would
beg him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. The
season was spring, the nights clear and frosty. He would come away from
an evening party, jump into his victoria, spread a rug over his knees,
tell the friends who were leaving at the same time, and who insisted on
his going home with them, that he could not, that he was not going
in their direction; then the coachman would start off at a fast trot
without further orders, knowing quite well where he had to go. His
friends would be left marvelling, and, as a matter of fact, Swann was
no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now
demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention
to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to
be met. In a restaurant, or in the country, his manner was deliberately
and directly the opposite of that by which, only a few days earlier,
his friends would have recognised him, that manner which had seemed
permanently and unalterably his own. To such an extent does passion
manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not
only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates
the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible. On the
other hand, there was one thing that was, now, invariable, namely that
wherever Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on
afterwards to Odette. The interval of space separating her from him
was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an
irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank,
as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have
preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way,
and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his
putting himself to such inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to
visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were
saying to one another: "He is tied hand and foot; there must certainly
be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all hours,"
made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose
existence is coloured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual
sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of their practical
interests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he may not
consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she
was waiting for him, that she was not anywhere or with anyone else, that
he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish,
forgotten, it is true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which
he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins' before
his arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which was so agreeable
that it might even be called a state of happiness. Perhaps it was to
that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which
Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so
immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the
power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person
seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with
poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on
which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann
could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him
in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his
victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early spring, and saw the
dazzling moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he
would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the
moon's, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and since
then had shed upon the world that mysterious light in which he saw it
bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants
to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden,
he would go round first into the other street, over which, at the
ground-level, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened) of
the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room.
He would rap upon the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer,
before running to meet him at the gate. He would find, lying open on the
piano, some of her favourite music, the _Valse des Roses_, the _Pauvre
Fou_ of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her
will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead,
to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. It was true that
Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in
our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble
of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The
little phrase was associated still, in Swann's mind, with his love for
Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were
no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by
any but himself; he realised, too, that Odette's qualities were not such
as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in
her company. And often, when the cold government of reason stood
unchallenged, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his
intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the
little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate
in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of
Swann's soul were altered; a margin was left for a form of enjoyment
which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external
object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely
individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior to that
of other concrete things. This thirst for an untasted charm, the little
phrase would stimulate it anew in him, but without bringing him any
definite gratification to assuage it. With the result that those parts
of Swann's soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all care
for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men
alike, were left bare by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to
inscribe the name of Odette. Moreover, where Odette's affection might
seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would
come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence.
Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have
said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe
more deeply. And the pleasure which the music gave him, which was
shortly to create in him a real longing, was in fact closely akin,
at such moments, to the pleasure which he would have derived from
experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contract with a world
for which we men were not created, which appears to lack form because
our eyes cannot perceive it, to lack significance because it escapes
our intelligence, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. Deep
repose, mysterious refreshment for Swann,--for him whose eyes, although
delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute
observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the
barrenness of his life,--to feel himself transformed into a creature
foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost
a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world
through his two ears alone. And as, notwithstanding, he sought in the
little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend,
with what a strange frenzy of intoxication must he strip bare his
innermost soul of the whole armour of reason, and make it pass,
unattended, through the straining vessel, down into the dark filter of
sound. He began to reckon up how much that was painful, perhaps even how
much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase;
and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase
repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong!
He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he felt it
stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened
his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play him the phrase
again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she
must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those
earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How
closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until
lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour,
as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to
stop, saying: "How do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me?
I can't do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want; am I to
play the phrase or do you want to play with me?" Then he would become
annoyed, and she would burst out with a laugh which was transformed, as
it left her lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else
she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy
to figure in Botticelli's 'Life of Moses,' he would place it there,
giving to Odette's neck the necessary inclination; and when he had
finished her portrait in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the
wall of the Sixtine, the idea that she was, none the less, in the room
with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed
and won, the idea of her material existence, of her being alive, would
sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting
from his head and jaws that parted as though to devour her, he would
fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.
And then, as soon as he had left the house, not without returning to
kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to take away with him, in
memory, some detail of her fragrance or of her features, while he drove
home in his victoria, blessing the name of Odette who allowed him to pay
her these daily visits, which, although they could not, he felt, bring
any great happiness to her, still, by keeping him immune from the fever
of jealousy--by removing from him every possibility of a fresh outbreak
of the heart-sickness which had manifested itself in him that evening,
when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins'--might help him to
arrive, without any recurrence of those crises, of which the first had
been so distressing that it must also be the last, at the termination of
this strange series of hours in his life, hours almost enchanted, in the
same manner as these other, following hours, in which he drove through a
deserted Paris by the light of the moon: noticing as he drove home that
the satellite had now changed its position, relatively to his own,
and was almost touching the horizon; feeling that his love, also, was
obedient to these immutable laws of nature, he asked himself whether
this period, upon which he had entered, was to last much longer, whether
presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that dear countenance,
save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of
ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm. For Swann was finding
in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had
found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with
this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette
alone. He could feel reawakening in himself the inspirations of his
boyhood, which had been dissipated among the frivolities of his later
life, but they all bore, now, the reflection, the stamp of a particular
being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure
in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit, he became
gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.
He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent
her time during the day, any more than he knew of her past; so little,
indeed, that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing
us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
And so he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life
had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years
earlier, when he still did not know her, some one had spoken to him of a
woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette,
as of a 'tart,' a 'kept' woman, one of those women to whom he still
attributed (having lived but little in their company) the entire set of
characteristics, fundamentally perverse, with which they had been, for
many years, endowed by the imagination of certain novelists. He would
say to himself that one has, as often as not, only to take the exact
counterpart of the reputation created by the world in order to judge a
person fairly, when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette,
so good, so simple, so enthusiastic in the pursuit of ideals, so nearly
incapable of not telling the truth that, when he had once begged her, so
that they might dine together alone, to write to Mme. Verdurin, saying
that she was unwell, the next day he had seen her, face to face
with Mme. Verdurin, who asked whether she had recovered, blushing,
stammering, and, in spite of herself, revealing in every feature how
painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie; and, while in her
answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imaginary illness,
seeming to ask pardon, by her suppliant look and her stricken accents,
for the obvious falsehood of her words.
On certain days, however, though these came seldom, she would call upon
him in the afternoon, to interrupt his musings or the essay on Vermeer
to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that
Mme. de Crécy was in the small drawing-room. He would go in search of
her, and, when he opened the door, on Odette's blushing countenance, as
soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear--changing the curve
of her lips, the look in her eyes, the moulding of her cheeks--an
all-absorbing smile. Once he was left alone he would see again that
smile, and her smile of the day before, another with which she had
greeted him sometime else, the smile which had been her answer, in the
carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his
rearranging her cattleyas; and the life of Odette at all other times,
since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him upon a neutral and
colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon
which one sees, here and there, in every corner and in all directions,
traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But,
once in a while, illuminating a chink of that existence which Swann
still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was
not so, because he was unable to imagine anything that might occupy it,
some friend who knew them both, and suspecting that they were in love,
had not dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least
importance, would describe Odette's figure, as he had seen her, that
very morning, going on foot up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed
with skunks, wearing a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her
bosom. This simple outline reduced Swann to utter confusion by enabling
him suddenly to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not
wholly subordinated to his own; he burned to know whom she had been
seeking to fascinate by this costume in which he had never seen her; he
registered a vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going
at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless life--a
life almost nonexistent, since she was then invisible to him--of his
mistress, there had been but a single incident apart from all those
smiles directed towards himself; namely, her walking abroad beneath a
Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of violets in her bosom.