thought that, if left to herself, Odette might perhaps produce some
falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth; she
spoke; he did not interrupt her, he gathered up, with an eager and
sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly
feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that,
like the veil of a sanctuary, they kept a vague imprint, traced a
faint outline of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable
truth;--what she had been doing, that afternoon, at three o'clock, when
he had called,--a truth of which he would never possess any more than
these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, a truth which would
exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this creature, who
would contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value, but would never
yield it up to him. It was true that he had, now and then, a strong
suspicion that Odette's daily activities were not in themselves
passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with
other men did not exhale, naturally, in a universal sense, or for every
rational being, a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with
fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised, at such moments, that that
interest, that gloom, existed in him only as a malady might exist, and
that, once he was cured of the malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses
that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as
those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful
curiosity with which Swann now studied them had its origin only in
himself was not enough to make him decide that it was unreasonable to
regard that curiosity as important, and to take every possible step
to satisfy it. Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of
which--supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as
well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life,
the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, in which one's
intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's
disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable was to be
discovered, except the individual tastes of each of its members--is no
longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the
philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspirations upon external
objects, endeavour to separate from the accumulation of the years
already spent a definite residue of habits and passions which they
can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will
deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence
which they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed
it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived
from not knowing what Odette had done, just as he made allowance for the
impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate
in his budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring, with
regard to the daily occupations of Odette, information the lack of
which would make him unhappy, just as he reserved a margin for the
gratification of other tastes from which he knew that pleasure was to be
expected (at least, before he had fallen in love) such as his taste for
collecting things, or for good cooking.
When he proposed to take leave of Odette, and to return home, she begged
him to stay a little longer, and even detained him forcibly, seizing him
by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he gave no thought to
that, for, among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little
incidents which go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we
should pass (without noticing anything that arouses our interest) by
those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching,
whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed.
She kept on saying: "What a dreadful pity; you never by any chance come
in the afternoon, and the one time you do come then I miss you." He knew
very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so
keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but as she was a
good-natured woman, anxious to give him pleasure, and often sorry when
she had done anything that annoyed him, he found it quite natural that
she should be sorry, on this occasion, that she had deprived him of that
pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great a
pleasure, if not to herself, at any rate to him. All the same, it was a
matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began
at length to bewilder him. She reminded him, even more than was
usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of
the Primavera.' She had, at that moment, their downcast, heartbroken
expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief
too heavy to be borne, when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to
play with a pomegranate, or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He
had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could
no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered it; it was when Odette had
lied, in apologising to Mme. Verdurin on the evening after the dinner
from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so
that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most
scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent
a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and
served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most
terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when
she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for
her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer
exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She
knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the
man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at
his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and
culpable in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant,
social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it
recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent
with a consciousness of wrongdoing.
What depressing lie was she now concocting for Swann's benefit, to give
her that pained expression, that plaintive voice, which seemed to falter
beneath the effort that she was forcing herself to make, and to plead
for pardon? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what
had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him,
but something more immediate, something, possibly, which had not yet
happened, but might happen now at any time, and, when it did, would
throw a light upon that earlier event. At that moment, he heard the
front-door bell ring. Odette never stopped speaking, but her words
dwindled into an inarticulate moan. Her regret at not having seen Swann
that afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had melted into a
universal despair.
He could hear the gate being closed, and the sound of a carriage, as
though some one were going away--probably the person whom Swann must on
no account meet--after being told that Odette was not at home. And then,
when he reflected that, merely by coming at an hour when he was not in
the habit of coming, he had managed to disturb so many arrangements of
which she did not wish him to know, he had a feeling of discouragement
that amounted, almost, to distress. But since he was in love with
Odette, since he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts towards
her, the pity with which he might have been inspired for himself he felt
for her only, and murmured: "Poor darling!" When finally he left her,
she took up several letters which were lying on the table, and asked him
if he would be so good as to post them for her. He walked along to the
post-office, took the letters from his pocket, and, before dropping each
of them into the box, scanned its address. They were all to tradesmen,
except the last, which was to Forcheville. He kept it in his hand. "If
I saw what was in this," he argued, "I should know what she calls him,
what she says to him, whether there really is anything between them.
Perhaps, if I don't look inside, I shall be lacking in delicacy towards
Odette, since in this way alone I can rid myself of a suspicion which
is, perhaps, a calumny on her, which must, in any case, cause her
suffering, and which can never possibly be set at rest, once the letter
is posted."
He left the post-office and went home, but he had kept the last letter
in his pocket. He lighted a candle, and held up close to its flame the
envelope which he had not dared to open. At first he could distinguish
nothing, but the envelope was thin, and by pressing it down on to the
stiff card which it enclosed he was able, through the transparent paper,
to read the concluding words. They were a coldly formal signature. If,
instead of its being himself who was looking at a letter addressed to
Forcheville, it had been Forcheville who had read a letter addressed
to Swann, he might have found words in it of another, a far more tender
kind! He took a firm hold of the card, which was sliding to and fro, the
envelope being too large for it and then, by moving it with his finger
and thumb, brought one line after another beneath the part of the
envelope where the paper was not doubled, through which alone it was
possible to read.
In spite of all these manoeuvres he could not make it out clearly. Not
that it mattered, for he had seen enough to assure himself that the
letter was about some trifling incident of no importance, and had
nothing at all to do with love; it was something to do with Odette's
uncle. Swann had read quite plainly at the beginning of the line "I
was right," but did not understand what Odette had been right in doing,
until suddenly a word which he had not been able, at first, to decipher,
came to light and made the whole sentence intelligible: "I was right to
open the door; it was my uncle." To open the door! Then Forcheville had
been there when Swann rang the bell, and she had sent him away; hence
the sound that Swann had heard.
After that he read the whole letter; at the end she apologised for
having treated Forcheville with so little ceremony, and reminded him
that he had left his cigarette-case at her house, precisely what she
had written to Swann after one of his first visits. But to Swann she had
added: "Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let
you have that back." To Forcheville nothing of that sort; no allusion
that could suggest any intrigue between them. And, really, he was
obliged to admit that in all this business Forcheville had been worse
treated than himself, since Odette was writing to him to make him
believe that her visitor had been an uncle. From which it followed that
he, Swann, was the man to whom she attached importance, and for whose
sake she had sent the other away. And yet, if there had been nothing
between Odette and Forcheville, why not have opened the door at once,
why have said, "I was right to open the door; it was my uncle." Right?
if she was doing nothing wrong at that moment how could Forcheville
possibly have accounted for her not opening the door? For a time Swann
stood still there, heartbroken, bewildered, and yet happy; gazing at
this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a scruple, so
absolute was her trust in his honour; through its transparent window
there had been disclosed to him, with the secret history of an incident
which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of the
life of Odette, seen as through a narrow, luminous incision, cut into
its surface without her knowledge. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the
discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence,
fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its
vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself. Now it had food in
store, and Swann could begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening, over
the visits that Odette had received about five o'clock, and could
seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann's
affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on
it, from the beginning, by his ignorance of the occupations in which she
passed her days, as well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him
from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at
first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those moments only in which
an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose
that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus
which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle,
fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in
the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was
incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the
perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.
From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He
decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a
few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every
male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so
he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new
people and crowded places, might now be seen fleeing savagely from human
society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have
turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for
Odette? Thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, passionate
desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter Swann's
character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the
outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.
A month after the evening on which he had intercepted and read Odette's
letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were
giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of
whispered discussions between Mme. Verdurin and several of her guests,
and thought that he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to
a party at Chatou; now he, Swann, had not been invited to any party.
The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the
painter, perhaps without thinking, shouted out: "There must be no lights
of any sort, and he must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark, for us
to see by."
Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that
expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and
to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the
listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching
signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence,
an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder,
the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who
have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have
been made. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had
decided not to struggle any longer against the crushing difficulties of
life, and Swann was anxiously counting the minutes that still separated
him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he
drove her home, he would be able to ask for an explanation, to make her
promise, either that she would not go to Chatou next day, or that she
would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her
arms the anguish that still tormented him. At last the carriages were
ordered. Mme. Verdurin said to Swann:
"Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope," trying, by the
friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent
him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have
until then:
"To-morrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after." M. and Mme.
Verdurin made Forcheville get into their carriage; Swann's was drawn up
behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into
his own.
"Odette, we'll take you," said Mme. Verdurin, "we've kept a little
corner specially for you, beside M. de Forcheville."
"Yes, Mme. Verdurin," said Odette meekly.
"What! I thought I was to take you home," cried Swann, flinging
discretion to the winds, for the carriage-door hung open, time was
precious, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.
"But Mme. Verdurin has asked me..."
"That's all right, you can quite well go home alone; we've left you like
this dozens of times," said Mme. Verdurin.
"But I had something important to tell Mme. de Crécy."
"Very well, you can write it to her instead."
"Good-bye," said Odette, holding out her hand.
He tried hard to smile, but could only succeed in looking utterly
dejected.
"What do you think of the airs that Swann is pleased to put on with
us?" Mme. Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. "I was
afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette
back. It really is too bad, that sort of thing. Why doesn't he say,
straight out, that we keep a disorderly house? I can't conceive how
Odette can stand such manners. He positively seems to be saying, all the
time, 'You belong to me!' I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about
it all, and I hope she will have the sense to understand me." A moment
later she added, inarticulate with rage: "No, but, don't you see, the
filthy creature..." using unconsciously, and perhaps in satisfaction of
the same obscure need to justify herself--like Françoise at Combray when
the chicken refused to die--the very words which the last convulsions of
an inoffensive animal in its death agony wring from the peasant who is
engaged in taking its life. And when Mme. Verdurin's carriage had moved
on, and Swann's took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his
face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard bad news.
Swann sent him away; he preferred to walk, and it was on foot, through
the Bois, that he came home. He talked to himself, aloud, and in
the same slightly affected tone which he had been used to adopt
when describing the charms of the 'little nucleus' and extolling the
magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles,
the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found
them charming, if they were diverted to others than himself, so the
Verdurins' drawing-room, which, not an hour before, had still seemed
to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with
a sort of moral aristocracy, now that it was another than himself whom
Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint, laid
bare to him all its absurdities, its stupidity, its shame.
He drew a fanciful picture, at which he shuddered in disgust, of the
party next evening at Chatou. "Imagine going to Chatou, of all places!
Like a lot of drapers after closing time! Upon my word, these people are
sublime in their smugness; they can't really exist; they must all have
come out of one of Labiche's plays!"
The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. "Could anything be more
grotesque than the lives of these little creatures, hanging on to one
another like that. They'd imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul
they would, if they didn't all meet again to-morrow at _Chatou_!"
Alas! there would be the painter there also, the painter who enjoyed
match-making, who would invite Forcheville to come with Odette to his
studio. He could see Odette, in a dress far too smart for the country,
"for she is so vulgar in that way, and, poor little thing, she is such a
fool!"
He could hear the jokes that Mme. Verdurin would make after dinner,
jokes which, whoever the 'bore' might be at whom they were aimed,
had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them,
laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that
it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. "What a fetid
form of humour!" he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of
disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen
against his collar. "How, in God's name, can a creature made in His
image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The
least sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale
exhalations. It is really impossible to believe that any human being is
incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at
the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand
to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be
impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell
so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin
sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot
possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried,
tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows
that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to
teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has
its limits, and mine is at an end," he concluded, as though this sacred
mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from
longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only
since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be
directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from
him.
He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and
the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin, in terrified anticipation of the wrecking
of her nerves by Beethoven's music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted, "and a
creature like that imagines that she's fond of _Art_!" She would say to
Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville,
as she had so often done for himself: "You can make room for M. de
Forcheville there, can't you, Odette?"... '"In the dark!' Codfish!
Pander!"... 'Pander' was the name he applied also to the music which
would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze in each
other's eyes, to feel for each other's hands. He felt that there was
much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorous attitude towards
the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of
education in France.
In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins', which he had so
often described as 'genuine,' seemed to him now the worst possible form
of life, and their 'little nucleus' the most degraded class of society.
"It really is," he repeated, "beneath the lowest rung of the social
ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. Beyond a doubt, the august words
of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When one comes to think of it,
surely people 'in society' (and, though one may find fault with them now
and then, still, after all they are a very different matter from that
gang of blackmailers) shew a profound sagacity in refusing to know
them, or even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound
intuition there is in that '_Noli me tangere_' motto of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain."
He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, he had
almost reached his own house, and still, for he had not yet thrown off
the intoxication of grief, or his whim of insincerity, but was ever more
and more exhilarated by the false intonation, the artificial sonority
of his own voice, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the
night: "People 'in society' have their failings, as no one knows better
than I; but, after all, they are people to whom some things, at least,
are impossible. So-and-so" (a fashionable woman whom he had known)
"was far from being perfect, but, after all, one did find in her a
fundamental delicacy, a loyalty in her conduct which made her, whatever
happened, incapable of a felony, which fixes a vast gulf between her and
an old hag like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, there's something
complete about them, something almost fine in their trueness to type;
they're the most perfect specimens of their disgusting class! Thank God,
it was high time that I stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse
with such infamy, such dung."