Odette at the Verdurins', or rather at one of the open-air restaurants
which they liked to frequent in the Bois and especially at Saint-Cloud,
he would go to dine in one of those fashionable houses in which, at one
time, he had been a constant guest. He did not wish to lose touch with
people who, for all that he knew, might be of use, some day, to Odette,
and thanks to whom he was often, in the meantime, able to procure for
her some privilege or pleasure. Besides, he had been used for so long to
the refinement and comfort of good society that, side by side with his
contempt, there had grown up also a desperate need for it, with the
result that, when he had reached the point after which the humblest
lodgings appeared to him as precisely on a par with the most princely
mansions, his senses were so thoroughly accustomed to the latter that he
could not enter the former without a feeling of acute discomfort. He
had the same regard--to a degree of identity which they would never have
suspected--for the little families with small incomes who asked him to
dances in their flats ("straight upstairs to the fifth floor, and the
door on the left") as for the Princesse de Parme, who gave the most
splendid parties in Paris; but he had not the feeling of being actually
'at the ball' when he found himself herded with the fathers of families
in the bedroom of the lady of the house, while the spectacle of
wash-hand-stands covered over with towels, and of beds converted into
cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats and great-coats sprawling over their
counterpanes, gave him the same stifling sensation that, nowadays,
people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive
from a smoking lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were
dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven; while he
changed his clothes, he would be wondering, all the time, about Odette,
and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette
gave to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar
charm as to those in which she was at his side. He would get into his
carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in
after him and had settled down upon his knee, like a pet animal which
he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table,
unobserved by his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm
himself with it, and, as a feeling of languor swept over him, would
give way to a slight shuddering movement which contracted his throat
and nostrils--a new experience, this,--as he fastened the bunch of
columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither
well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the
Verdurins', and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in
the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even
for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the
finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a
city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what
was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray,
where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed,
thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise,
he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an
arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed
with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner,
trained and twined by the gardener's skilful hand, there ran all about
his table currant-bush and rose.
After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at
Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so
abruptly--especially if it threatened to rain, and so to scatter the
'faithful' before their normal time--that on one occasion the Princesse
des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left
before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the
Bois) observed:
"Really, if Swann were thirty years older, and had diabetes, there might
be some excuse for his running away like that. He seems to look upon us
all as a joke."
He persuaded himself that the spring-time charm, which he could not go
down to Combray to enjoy, he would find at least on the Ile des Cygnes
or at Saint-Cloud. But as he could think only of Odette, he would
return home not knowing even if he had tasted the fragrance of the young
leaves, or if the moon had been shining. He would be welcomed by the
little phrase from the sonata, played in the garden on the restaurant
piano. If there was none in the garden, the Verdurins would have taken
immense pains to have a piano brought out either from a private room
or from the restaurant itself; not because Swann was now restored to
favour; far from it. But the idea of arranging an ingenious form of
entertainment for some one, even for some one whom they disliked, would
stimulate them, during the time spent in its preparation, to a momentary
sense of cordiality and affection. Now and then he would remind himself
that another fine spring evening was drawing to a close, and would force
himself to notice the trees and the sky. But the state of excitement
into which Odette's presence never failed to throw him, added to a
feverish ailment which, for some time now, had scarcely left him,
robbed him of that sense of quiet and comfort which is an indispensable
background to the impressions that we derive from nature.
One evening, when Swann had consented to dine with the Verdurins, and
had mentioned during dinner that he had to attend, next day, the annual
banquet of an old comrades' association, Odette had at once exclaimed
across the table, in front of everyone, in front of Forcheville, who was
now one of the 'faithful,' in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:
"Yes, I know, you have your banquet to-morrow; I sha'n't see you, then,
till I get home; don't be too late."
And although Swann had never yet taken offence, at all seriously,
at Odette's demonstrations of friendship for one or other of the
'faithful,' he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow,
before them all, with that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each
other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her house, and
her own preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had
often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman; and in
the supremacy which he wielded over a creature so distinctly inferior to
himself there was nothing that especially flattered him when he heard
it proclaimed to all the 'faithful'; but since he had observed that,
to several other men than himself, Odette seemed a fascinating and
desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused
a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest
particles of her heart. And he had begun to attach an incalculable value
to those moments passed in her house in the evenings, when he held her
upon his knee, made her tell him what she thought about this or that,
and counted over that treasure to which, alone of all his earthly
possessions, he still clung. And so, after this dinner, drawing her
aside, he took care to thank her effusively, seeking to indicate to
her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of
the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme
pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should
last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.
When he came away from his banquet, the next evening, it was pouring
rain, and he had nothing but his victoria. A friend offered to take
him home in a closed carriage, and as Odette, by the fact of her having
invited him to come, had given him an assurance that she was expecting
no one else, he could, with a quiet mind and an untroubled heart, rather
than set off thus in the rain, have gone home and to bed. But perhaps,
if she saw that he seemed not to adhere to his resolution to end every
evening, without exception, in her company, she might grow careless, and
fail to keep free for him just the one evening on which he particularly
desired it.
It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology
for having been unable to come away earlier, she complained that it was
indeed very late; the storm had made her unwell, her head ached, and
she warned him that she would not let him stay longer than half an hour,
that at midnight she would send him away; a little while later she felt
tired and wished to sleep.
"No cattleya, then, to-night?" he asked, "and I've been looking forward
so to a nice little cattleya."
But she was irresponsive; saying nervously: "No, dear, no cattleya
tonight. Can't you see, I'm not well?"
"It might have done you good, but I won't bother you."
She begged him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains
close round her bed and left her. But, when he was in his own house
again, the idea suddenly struck him that, perhaps, Odette was expecting
some one else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired,
that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should
suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left
the house she had lighted it again, and had reopened her door to the
stranger who was to be her guest for the night. He looked at his watch.
It was about an hour and a half since he had left her; he went out, took
a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at
right angles to that other street, which lay at the back of her house,
and along which he used to go, sometimes, to tap upon her bedroom
window, for her to let him in. He left his cab; the streets were all
deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite
her house. Amid the glimmering blackness of all the row of windows, the
lights in which had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one,
from which overflowed, between the slats of its shutters, dosed like a
wine-press over its mysterious golden juice, the light that filled the
room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it,
far off, as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its
message: "She is there--expecting you," and now tortured him with: "She
is there with the man she was expecting." He must know who; he tiptoed
along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting
bars of the shutters he could see nothing; he could hear, only, in the
silence of the night, the murmur of conversation. What agony he suffered
as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were moving, behind
the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that
murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his
own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at
that moment tasting with the stranger.
And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced
him to leave his own house had lost its sharpness when it lost its
uncertainty, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, at that
first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost
within his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room into which,
when he would, he might force his way to surprise and seize it; or
rather he would tap upon the shutters, as he had often done when he had
come there very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn
that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices; while
he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing at him,
as sharing with that other the knowledge of how effectively he had been
tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in
their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they
believed to be a mile away, but who was there, in person, there with a
plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to
tap upon the shutter. And, perhaps, what he felt (almost an agreeable
feeling) at that moment was something more than relief at the solution
of a doubt, at the soothing of a pain; was an intellectual pleasure.
If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the
delicate attraction that they had had for him long ago--though only when
a light was shed upon them by a thought, a memory of Odette--now it was
another of the faculties, prominent in the studious days of his youth,
that Odette had quickened with new life, the passion for truth, but for
a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress,
receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the
sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost
impersonal in its absolute beauty) was Odette--Odette in her activities,
her environment, her projects, and her past. At every other period in
his life, the little everyday words and actions of another person had
always seemed wholly valueless to Swann; if gossip about such things
were repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he
listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his
mind that was interested; at such moments he felt utterly dull and
uninspired. But in this strange phase of love the personality of another
person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which
he could now feel aroused in himself, to know the least details of a
woman's daily occupation, was the same thirst for knowledge with which
he had once studied history. And all manner of actions, from which,
until now, he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, to-night,
outside a window, to-morrow, for all he knew, putting adroitly
provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening
at doors, seemed to him, now, to be precisely on a level with the
deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation
of old monuments, that was to say, so many different methods of
scientific investigation, each one having a definite intellectual value
and being legitimately employable in the search for truth.
As his hand stole out towards the shutters he felt a pang of shame at
the thought that Odette would now know that he had suspected her, that
he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window. She
had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who
spied. What he was going to do would be extremely awkward, and she would
detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as
he refrained from knocking, perhaps even in the act of infidelity, she
loved him still. How often is not the prospect of future happiness
thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate
gratification. But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed
to him nobler than his desire for her. He knew that the true story
of certain events, which he would have given his life to be able to
reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read within that window,
streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of
one of those precious manuscripts, by whose wealth of artistic treasures
the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved. He yearned for
the satisfaction of knowing the truth which so impassioned him in that
brief, fleeting, precious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm,
so beautiful. And besides, the advantage which he felt--which he so
desperately wanted to feel--that he had over them, lay perhaps not so
much in knowing as in being able to shew them that he knew. He drew
himself up on tiptoe. He knocked. They had not heard; he knocked again;
louder; their conversation ceased. A man's voice--he strained his ears
to distinguish whose, among such of Odette's friends as he knew, the
voice could be--asked:
"Who's that?"
He could not be certain of the voice. He knocked once again. The window
first, then the shutters were thrown open. It was too late, now, to
retire, and since she must know all, so as not to seem too contemptible,
too jealous and inquisitive, he called out in a careless, hearty,
welcoming tone:
"Please don't bother; I just happened to be passing, and saw the light.
I wanted to know if you were feeling better."
He looked up. Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window, one
of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into
the room, a room that he had never seen before. Having fallen into the
habit, when he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by
the fact that it was the only one still lighted in a row of windows
otherwise all alike, he had been misled, this time, by the light, and
had knocked at the window beyond hers, in the adjoining house. He made
what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction
of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having
feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference,
he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof
of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and
finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other
enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he ceased even to
think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering
course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would
startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness,
and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain. As though this had
been a bodily pain, Swann's mind was powerless to alleviate it; in the
case of bodily pain, however, since it is independent of the mind, the
mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has
momentarily ceased. But with this mental pain, the mind, merely by
recalling it, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was but
to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation
with his friends, he forgot his sufferings, suddenly a word casually
uttered would make him change countenance as a wounded man does when a
clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette,
he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle
mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was
all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which
she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as
though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first
evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay
nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her
shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.
But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love,
presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile
with which she had greeted him that very evening,--with which, now,
perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to
another--of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other
lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection
that she had shewn to him. And all these voluptuous memories which he
bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches,
rough plans, like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to
one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes,
aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for
others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he
tasted in her company, every new caress that he invented (and had been
so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), every fresh
charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they
would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret
torture-chamber.
A fresh turn was given to the screw when Swann recalled a sudden
expression which he had intercepted, a few days earlier, and for the
first time, in Odette's eyes. It was after dinner at the Verdurins'.
Whether it was because Forcheville, aware that Saniette, his
brother-in-law, was not in favour with them, had decided to make a butt
of him, and to shine at his expense, or because he had been annoyed
by some awkward remark which Saniette had made to him, although it had
passed unnoticed by the rest of the party who knew nothing of whatever
tactless allusion it might conceal, or possibly because he had been for
some time looking out for an opportunity of securing the expulsion from
the house of a fellow-guest who knew rather too much about him, and
whom he knew to be so nice-minded that he himself could not help feeling
embarrassed at times merely by his presence in the room, Forcheville
replied to Saniette's tactless utterance with such a volley of abuse,
going out of his way to insult him, emboldened, the louder he shouted,
by the fear, the pain, the entreaties of his victim, that the poor
creature, after asking Mme. Verdurin whether he should stay and
receiving no answer, had left the house in stammering confusion and with
tears in his eyes. Odette had looked on, impassive, at this scene; but
when the door had closed behind Saniette, she had forced the normal
expression of her face down, as the saying is, by several pegs, so as to
bring herself on to the same level of vulgarity as Forcheville; her eyes
had sparkled with a malicious smile of congratulation upon his audacity,
of ironical pity for the poor wretch who had been its victim; she
had darted at him a look of complicity in the crime, which so clearly
implied: "That's finished him off, or I'm very much mistaken. Did you
see what a fool he looked? He was actually crying," that Forcheville,
when his eyes met hers, sobered in a moment from the anger, or pretended
anger with which he was still flushed, smiled as he explained: "He need
only have made himself pleasant and he'd have been here still; a good
scolding does a man no harm, at any time."
One day when Swann had gone out early in the afternoon to pay a call,
and had failed to find the person at home whom he wished to see, it
occurred to him to go, instead, to Odette, at an hour when, although he
never went to her house then as a rule, he knew that she was always at
home, resting or writing letters until tea-time, and would enjoy seeing
her for a moment, if it did not disturb her. The porter told him that he
believed Odette to be in; Swann rang the bell, thought that he heard a
sound, that he heard footsteps, but no one came to the door. Anxious and
annoyed, he went round to the other little street, at the back of her
house, and stood beneath her bedroom window; the curtains were drawn and
he could see nothing; he knocked loudly upon the pane, he shouted; still
no one came. He could see that the neighbours were staring at him. He
turned away, thinking that, after all, he had perhaps been mistaken in
believing that he heard footsteps; but he remained so preoccupied with
the suspicion that he could turn his mind to nothing else. After waiting
for an hour, he returned. He found her at home; she told him that she
had been in the house when he rang, but had been asleep; the bell had
awakened her; she had guessed that it must be Swann, and had run out
to meet him, but he had already gone. She had, of course, heard him
knocking at the window. Swann could at once detect in this story one of
those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise,
console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood
which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated,
and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. It was true
that, when Odette had just done something which she did not wish to
disclose, she would take pains to conceal it in a secret place in her
heart. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to
whom she was obliged to lie, she became uneasy, all her ideas melted
like wax before a flame, her inventive and her reasoning faculties
were paralysed, she might ransack her brain but would find only a void;
still, she must say something, and there lay within her reach precisely
the fact which she had wished to conceal, which, being the truth, was
the one thing that had remained. She broke off from it a tiny fragment,
of no importance in itself, assuring herself that, after all, it was
the best thing to do, since it was a detail of the truth, and less
dangerous, therefore, than a falsehood. "At any rate, this is true,"
she said to herself; "that's always something to the good; he may make
inquiries; he will see that this is true; it won't be this, anyhow, that
will give me away." But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she
had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth
had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those
contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily
detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she
might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and
by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was
elsewhere.
"She admits that she heard me ring, and then knock, that she knew it was
myself, that she wanted to see me," Swann thought to himself. "But that
doesn't correspond with the fact that she did not let me in."