only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase
of stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these
crises through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed
of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only
to what she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always
identical termination. An imperfect idea (though possibly all the more
profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of
view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered that Odette failed
to understand him, just as a morphinomaniac or a consumptive, each
persuaded that he has been thrown back, one by some outside event,
at the moment when he was just going to shake himself free from his
inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the
moment when he was just going to be finally cured, feels himself to be
misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance
to these pretended contingencies, mere disguises, according to him,
assumed, so as to be perceptible by his patients, by the vice of one
and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased
to weigh heavily and incurably upon them while they were nursing their
dreams of normality and health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann's
love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of
certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether
to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still
reasonable, or indeed possible.
Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge.
When he sought to measure it, it happened sometimes that he found it
diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate
liking, amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was
in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded
complexion, returned on certain days. "Really, I am making distinct
headway," he would tell himself on the morrow, "when I come to think it
over carefully, I find out that I got hardly any pleasure, last night,
out of being in bed with her; it's an odd thing, but I actually thought
her ugly." And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long
way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette's person, indeed,
no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the
photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he
had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the
pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his
mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, "It is she!" as
when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one
of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are
suffering. "She?"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it
is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague
conceptions of maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in
question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape
our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was
Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all
his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it
away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case
was past operation.
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests
that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding
himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting
(although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate
of its worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's
eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his
love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by
seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would
feel there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and
among people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure
as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were
depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used
to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the
smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the
soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in
Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of
daily life at Versailles, what Mme. de Maintenon ate and drank, or the
shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And in the small extent to which
this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which
Swann was tasting was that he could emigrate for a moment into those few
and distant parts of himself which had remained almost foreign to his
love and to his pain. In this respect the personality, with which my
great-aunt endowed him, of 'young Swann,' as distinct from the more
individual personality of Charles Swann, was that in which he now most
delighted. Once when, because it was the birthday of the Princesse de
Parme (and because she could often be of use, indirectly, to Odette,
by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and all that sort of
thing), he had decided to send her a basket of fruit, and was not quite
sure where or how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of
his mother who, delighted to be doing a commission for him, had written
to him, laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit
at the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they
were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always
had the best, am soon, "every fruit visited and examined, one by one,
by myself." And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the
Princess thanked him, he had been able to judge of the flavour of the
strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that
"every fruit visited and examined one by one, by myself" had brought
balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he
rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich
and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from
generation to generation the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art
of ordering things from shops.
Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was 'young Swann' not to
feel, when he assumed that part again for a moment, a keener pleasure
than he was capable of feeling at other times--when, indeed, he was
grown sick of pleasure; and if the friendliness of the middle-class
people, for whom he had never been anything else than 'young Swann,' was
less animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flattering, for
all that, since in the middle-class mind friendship is inseparable from
respect), no letter from a Royal Personage, offering him some princely
entertainment, could ever be so attractive to Swann as the letter which
asked him to be a witness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the
family of some old friends of his parents; some of whom had 'kept up'
with him, like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had
invited him to my mother's wedding, while others barely knew him by
sight, but were, they thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the
son, to the worthy successor of the late M. Swann.
But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of
them, the people of fashion, in a certain sense, were also a part of his
house, his service, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon
his brilliant connections, the same external support, the same solid
comfort as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the
fine table-linen which had come down to him from his forebears. And the
thought that, if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the
house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would
be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg
and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old
Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would, one day, be buried
in her own fine clothes, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so
exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and
patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which
in her mind's eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually
of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of
all,--since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference
to Odette, Swann was constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed
feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but at least less welcome
to her than anyone, even the most wearisome of the Verdurins'
'faithful,'--when he betook himself to a world in which he was the
paramount example of taste, a man whom no pains were spared to attract,
whom people were genuinely sorry not to see, he began once again to
believe in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite
for it, as an invalid may feel who has been in bed for months and on a
strict diet, when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an
official banquet or the advertisement of a cruise round Sicily.
If he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not
paying them visits, it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her
that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He still paid them (asking
himself at the end of each month whether, seeing that he had perhaps
exhausted her patience, and had certainly gone rather often to see her,
it would be enough if he sent her four thousand francs), and for each
visit he found a pretext, a present that he had to bring her, some
information which she required, M. de Charlus, whom he had met actually
going to her house, and who had insisted upon Swann's accompanying him.
And, failing any excuse, he would beg M. de Charlus to go to her
at once, and to tell her, as though spontaneously, in the course of
conversation, that he had just remembered something that he had to say
to Swann, and would she please send a message to Swann's house asking
him to come to her then and there; but as a rule Swann waited at home
in vain, and M. de Charlus informed him, later in the evening, that his
device had not proved successful. With the result that, if she was now
frequently away from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her;
that she who, when she was in love with him, used to say, "I am always
free" and "What can it matter to me, what other people think?" now,
whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded
some engagement. When he spoke of going to a charity entertainment, or a
private view, or a first-night at which she was to be present, she would
expostulate that he wished to advertise their relations in public, that
he was treating her like a woman off the streets. Things came to such a
pitch that, in an effort to save himself from being altogether forbidden
to meet her anywhere, Swann, remembering that she knew and was deeply
attached to my great-uncle Adolphe, whose friend he himself also
had been, went one day to see him in his little flat in the Rue
de Bellechasse, to ask him to use his influence with Odette. As it
happened, she invariably adopted, when she spoke to Swann about my
uncle, a poetical tone, saying: "Ah, he! He is not in the least
like you; it is an exquisite thing, a great, a beautiful thing, his
friendship for me. He's not the sort of man who would have so little
consideration for me as to let himself be seen with me everywhere in
public." This was embarrassing for Swann, who did not know quite to what
rhetorical pitch he should screw himself up in speaking of Odette to my
uncle. He began by alluding to her excellence, _a priori_, the axiom
of her seraphic super-humanity, the revelation of her inexpressible
virtues, no conception of which could possibly be formed. "I should
like to speak to you about her," he went on, "you, who know what a woman
supreme above all women, what an adorable being, what an angel Odette
is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris. Everyone doesn't see
Odette in the light in which you and I have been privileged to see her.
And so there are people who think that I am behaving rather foolishly;
she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors, at the theatre. Now
you, in whom she has such enormous confidence, couldn't you say a few
words for me to her, just to assure her that she exaggerates the harm
which my bowing to her in the street might do her?"
My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she
would love him all the more; he advised Odette to let Swann meet her
everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told
Swann that she had just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that
my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by assault.
She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my
uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met
again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if
he had met my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk
things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to
throw a light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had
led, in the old days, at Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the
winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there,
perhaps, that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one
had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been
Odette's lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which he
would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to
learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them,
incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted
them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only,
each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the
picture that he had formed of his mistress. At one time indeed he felt
that he could understand that this moral 'lightness,' of which he would
never have suspected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden
or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several months in
one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety.
He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch again with
certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette,
and, besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their
heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom,
up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that
pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that
he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those
pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been
solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no
longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any
moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and
dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had
been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's _Septennat_,
in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer
beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but
splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he
would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant
details that made up the daily round on the Côte d'Azur in those days,
if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled
him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does
the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century
Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the
Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit,
often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming;
and she would comment: "You do look sad!" It was not very long since,
from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best
women that he had known, he had passed to that of her being 'kept'; and
yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de
Crécy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-makers, to the 'ladies'
men' of Nice and Baden, to this face, the expression on which was so
often gentle, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself:
"What does it mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who
Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they're true,
are always based upon other people's ideas"; he would reflect that this
legend--even if it were authentic--was something external to Odette,
was not inherent in her like a mischievous and ineradicable personality;
that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank
eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a docile body
which he had pressed tightly in his arms and explored with his fingers,
a woman of whom he might one day come into absolute possession if he
succeeded in making himself indispensable to her. There she was,
often tired, her face left blank for the nonce by that eager, feverish
preoccupation with the unknown things which made Swann suffer; she would
push back her hair with both hands; her forehead, her whole face would
seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some
worthy sentiment such as is to be found in all creatures when, in a
moment of rest or meditation, they are free to express themselves, would
flash out from her eyes like a ray of gold. And immediately the whole of
her face would light up like a grey landscape, swathed in clouds which,
suddenly, are swept away and the dull scene transfigured, at the moment
of the sun's setting. The life which occupied Odette at such times, even
the future which she seemed to be dreamily regarding, Swann could have
shared with her. No evil disturbance seemed to have left any effect on
them. Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the
process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the
intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette
compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on
(as we shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the
other Odette would never have won from him. But how rare those moments
were, and how seldom he now saw her! Even in regard to their evening
meetings, she would never tell him until the last minute whether she
would be able to see him, for, reckoning on his being always free, she
wished first to be certain that no one else would offer to come to her.
She would plead that she was obliged to wait for an answer which was of
the very greatest importance, and if, even after she had made Swann
come to her house, any of her friends asked her, half-way through the
evening, to join them at some theatre, or at supper afterwards, she
would jump for joy and dress herself with all speed. As her toilet
progressed, every movement that she made brought Swann nearer to the
moment when he would have to part from her, when she would fly off with
irresistible force; and when at length she was ready, and, plunging into
her mirror a last glance strained and brightened by her anxiety to look
well, smeared a little salve on her lips, fixed a stray loci of hair
over her brow, and called for her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden
tassels, Swann would be looking so wretched that she would be unable to
restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him: "So that is how
you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute! And I thought
I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall know better another time!"
Sometimes, at the risk of annoying her, he made up his mind that he
would find out where she had gone, and even dreamed of a defensive
alliance with Forcheville, who might perhaps have been able to tell him.
But anyhow, when he knew with whom she was spending the evening, it
was very seldom that he could not discover, among all his innumerable
acquaintance, some one who knew--if only indirectly--the man with
whom she had gone out, and could easily obtain this or that piece of
information about him. And while he was writing to one of his friends,
asking him to try to get a little light thrown upon some point or other,
he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to vex himself with questions
to which there was no answer and transferring to some one else the
strain of interrogation. It is true that Swann was little the wiser for
such information as he did receive. To know a thing does not enable us,
always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know
we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can
dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of
power to control them. He was quite happy whenever M. de Charlus was
with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus and her nothing untoward
could ever happen, that when M. de Charlus went anywhere with her, it
was out of friendship for himself, and that he would make no difficulty
about telling him everything that she had done. Sometimes she had
declared so emphatically to Swann that it was impossible for him to see
her on a particular evening, she seemed to be looking forward so keenly
to some outing, that Swann attached a very real importance to the fact
that M. de Charlus was free to accompany her. Next day, without daring
to put many questions to M. de Charlus, he would force him, by appearing
not quite to understand his first answers, to give him more, after each
of which he would feel himself increasingly relieved, for he very
soon learned that Odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of
dissipations.
"But what do you mean, my dear Mémé, I don't quite understand.... You
didn't go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? Surely you went
somewhere else first? No? That is very odd! You don't know how amusing
you are, my dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the Chat
Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours? That's strange.
After all, it wasn't a bad idea; she must have known dozens of people
there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat
there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I can picture you,
sitting there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Mémé; I'm exceedingly
fond of you."
Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so often happened, when
talking to friends who knew nothing of his love, friends to whom he
hardly listened, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance,
"I saw Mme. de Crécy yesterday; she was with a man I didn't know."),
sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid
state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay
there irremovable,--how charming, by way of contrast, were the words:
"She didn't know a soul; she never spoke to a soul." How freely they
coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to
breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette
must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred
to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him,
pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.