sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then felt, for which Odette's
presence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a specific
which in the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the
disease, but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it
would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her
house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return,
into whose stillness and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there,
all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed
spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she
would not; he must return home; he forced himself, on the way, to form
various plans, ceased to think of Odette; he even reached the stage,
while he undressed, of turning over all sorts of happy ideas in his
mind: it was with a light heart, buoyed with the anticipation of going
to see some favourite work of art on the morrow, that he jumped into
bed and turned out the light; but no sooner had he made himself ready
to sleep, relaxing a self-control of which he was not even conscious,
so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed his body and he
burst into sobs. He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying
with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic." After
which he could not save himself from utter exhaustion at the thought
that, next day, he must begin afresh his attempt to find out what Odette
had been doing, must use all his influence to contrive to see her. This
compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without
result, was so cruel a scourge that one day, noticing a swelling over
his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a
tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with
anything further, that it was his malady which was going to govern his
life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed,
at this period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even
to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so
much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his
struggle.
And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no
longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when
at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone
to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of
Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was
in love with some one else would distract his mind from the question
of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new
developments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little
time to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even
days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was
cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place
the same pain, a sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were,
diluted in the torrent of different impressions. But it had not stirred
from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had
awakened him.
Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important
matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he had lived
long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything
else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the
effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he would
pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might have
wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There
emerged, however, from this unexplored tract, certain occupations which
reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some
obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as
they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning
as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the
necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which
she referred, from time to time, to "the day when I go with my friend
to the Hippodrome," if, when he felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps
Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that
it was one of those very days, he would correct himself with an "Oh,
no! It's not worth while asking her to come; I should have thought of it
before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the Hippodrome.
We must confine ourselves to what is possible; no use wasting our time
in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in
advance." And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to the
Hippodrome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely
ineluctable in itself; but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed
to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely
connected with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the
salute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann's jealousy, she replied
to his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or
three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him; if, for
instance, she said: "That's a gentleman who was in my friend's box the
other day; the one I go to the Hippodrome with," that explanation would
set Swann's suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that
this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the
Hippodrome, but he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any
coherent impression of them. Oh! how he would have loved to know her,
that friend who went to the Hippodrome, how he would have loved her to
invite him there with Odette. How readily he would have sacrificed
all his acquaintance for no matter what person who was in the habit of
seeing Odette, were she but a manicurist or a girl out of a shop. He
would have taken more trouble, incurred more expense for them than for
queens. Would they not have supplied him, out of what was contained in
their knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one potent anodyne for
his pain? With what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with
one or other of those humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly
relations, either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity
of nature. How willingly would he have fixed his abode for ever in the
attics of some sordid but enviable house, where Odette went but never
took him, and where, if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker,
whose lover he would readily have pretended to be, he would have been
visited by Odette almost daily. In those regions, that were almost
slums, what a modest existence, abject, if you please, but delightful,
nourished by tranquillity and happiness, he would have consented to lead
indefinitely.
It sometimes happened, again, that, when, after meeting Swann, she saw
some man approaching whom he did not know, he could distinguish upon
Odette's face that look of sorrow which she had worn on the day when he
had come to her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for, on
the days when, in spite of all that she had to do, and of her dread
of what people would think, she did actually manage to see Swann, the
predominant quality in her attitude, now, was self-assurance; a striking
contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge for, perhaps a natural reaction
from the timorous emotion which, in the early days of their friendship,
she had felt in his presence, and even in his absence, when she began a
letter to him with the words: "My dear, my hand trembles so that I can
scarcely write." (So, at least, she pretended, and a little of that
emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have been anxious to
enlarge and emphasise it.) So Swann had been pleasing to her then. Our
hands do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.
When they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful, how easy,
how bold do we become in their presence! In speaking to him, in writing
to him now, she no longer employed those words by which she had
sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating
opportunities for saying "my" and "mine" when she referred to him: "You
are all that I have in the world; it is the perfume of our friendship, I
shall keep it," nor spoke to him of the future, of death itself, as of
a single adventure which they would have to share. In those early days,
whatever he might say to her, she would answer admiringly: "You know,
you will never be like other people!"--she would gaze at his long,
slightly bald head, of which people who know only of his successes
used to think: "He's not regularly good-looking, if you like, but he is
smart; that tuft, that eyeglass, that smile!" and, with more curiosity
perhaps to know him as he really was than desire to become his mistress,
she would sigh:
"I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of yours!"
But, now, whatever he might say, she would answer, in a tone sometimes
of irritation, sometimes indulgent: "Ah! so you never will be like other
people!"
She would gaze at his head, which was hardly aged at all by his recent
anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process
which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music
of which one has read the programme, or the 'likenesses' in a child
whose family one has known: "He's not positively ugly, if you like,
but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that smile!"
realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the invisible
boundary which divides, at a few months' interval, the head of an ardent
lover from a cuckold's), and would say:
"Oh, I do wish I could change you; put some sense into that head of
yours."
Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if it was only
Odette's way of behaving to him that left room for doubt, he would fling
himself greedily upon her words: "You can if you like," he would tell
her.
And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to control him, to
make him work would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women
asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though
it is only fair to add that in those other women's hands the noble
task would have seemed to Swann nothing more than an indiscreet and
intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action. "If she didn't love me,
just a little," he told himself, "she would not wish to have me altered.
To alter me, she will have to see me more often." And so he was able to
trace, in these faults which she found in him, a proof at least of
her interest, perhaps even of her love; and, in fact, she gave him so
little, now, of the last, that he was obliged to regard as proofs of
her interest in him the various things which, every now and then, she
forbade him to do. One day she announced that she did not care for his
coachman, who, she thought, was perhaps setting Swann against her, and,
anyhow, did not shew that promptness and deference to Swann's orders
which she would have liked to see. She felt that he wanted to hear her
say: "Don't have him again when you come to me," just as he might have
wanted her to kiss him. So, being in a good temper, she said it; and he
was deeply moved. That evening, when talking to M. de Charlus, with whom
he had the satisfaction of being able to speak of her openly (for the
most trivial remarks that he uttered now, even to people who had never
heard of her, had always some sort of reference to Odette), he said to
him:
"I believe, all the same, that she loves me; she is so nice to me now,
and she certainly takes an interest in what I do."
And if, when he was starting off for her house, getting into his
carriage with a friend whom he was to drop somewhere on the way,
his friend said: "Hullo! that isn't Loredan on the box?" with what
melancholy joy would Swann answer him:
"Oh! Good heavens, no! I can tell you, I daren't take Loredan when I
go to the Rue La Pérouse; Odette doesn't like me to have Loredan, she
thinks he doesn't suit me. What on earth is one to do? Women, you know,
women. My dear fellow, she would be furious. Oh, lord, yes; I've only to
take Rémi there; I should never hear the last of it!"
These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which Odette now
adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him suffer; but he did not realise
how much he suffered; since it had been with a regular progression, day
after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly
contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he
could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. Now
this change was his deep, his secret wound, which pained him day and
night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it,
he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made
to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a vague way: "There
was a time when Odette loved me more," but he never formed any definite
picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he
contrived never to look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever
he entered or left the room, because in one of its drawers he had locked
away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first
evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in
which she said: "Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never
have let you have that back," and "At whatever hour of the day or night
you may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please,"
so there was a place in his heart to which he would never allow his
thoughts to trespass too near, forcing them, if need be, to evade it by
a long course of reasoning so that they should not have to pass within
reach of it; the place in which lingered his memories of happy days.
But his so meticulous prudence was defeated one evening when he had gone
out to a party.
It was at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's, on the last, for that season,
of the evenings on which she invited people to listen to the musicians
who would serve, later on, for her charity concerts. Swann, who had
intended to go to each of the previous evenings in turn, but had never
been able to make up his mind, received, while he was dressing for this
party, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who came with an offer to
go with him to the Marquise's, if his company could be of any use in
helping Swann not to feel quite so bored when he got there, to be a
little less unhappy. But Swann had thanked him with:
"You can't conceive how glad I should be of your company. But the
greatest pleasure that you can give me will be if you will go instead
to see Odette. You know what a splendid influence you have over her. I
don't suppose she'll be going anywhere this evening, unless she goes to
see her old dressmaker, and I'm sure she would be delighted if you went
with her there. In any case, you'll find her at home before then. Try
to keep her amused, and also to give her a little sound advice. If you
could arrange something for to-morrow which would please her, something
that we could all three do together. Try to put out a feeler, too, for
the summer; see if there's anything she wants to do, a cruise that we
might all three take; anything you can think of. I don't count upon
seeing her to-night, myself; still if she would like me to come, or
if you find a loophole, you've only to send me a line at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's up till midnight; after that I shall be here. Ever so
many thanks for all you are doing for me--you know what I feel about
you!"
His friend promised to go and do as Swann wished as soon as he had
deposited him at the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where he arrived
soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening
in the Rue La Pérouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to
everything that did not involve Odette, and in particular to the details
of fashionable life, a state which invested them with the charm that is
to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire,
appears to us in its own guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the
foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which
hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions,
and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and
setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of
Balzac's 'tigers'--now 'grooms'--. who normally followed their mistress
when she walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out
of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the
stables, as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of
their several flower-beds. The peculiar tendency which he had always
had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits
in galleries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more
general form; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached
from it, which presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the
cloak-room, into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of
fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to emerge from it in
evening dress, but without any impression of what had occurred there,
his mind having been, during the minute or two that he had spent in
it, either still at the party which he had just left, or already at the
party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for
the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest,
the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous footmen
who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until,
pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their feet
and gathered in a circle round about him.
One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the
headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions,
tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take
his 'things.' But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by
the softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he approached
Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his
person and the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to
which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost
over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching
by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of
his satellites, a novice and timid, who was expressing the panic that
overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and
displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of
its captivity.
A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing,
motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior
whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in
dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
by some one of the Master's Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer's Saxons.
And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
if in its creator's purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses, can
suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of
hyacinths and a serpent's writhing back. Others again, no less colossal,
were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase which, by their
decorative presence and marmorean immobility, was made worthy to be
named, like that god-crowned ascent in the Palace of the Doges, the
'Staircase of the Giants,' and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by
the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy would
he, on the other hand, have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck
flights to the little dressmaker's, in whose attic he would so gladly
have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to
spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the
privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in
the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who, on that account,
seemed to keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his
mistress more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything
that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential, enviable staircase to
the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the
building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed
milk-can set out, in readiness for the morning round, upon the door-mat;
on the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann was at that moment
climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each
anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or
the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor
service which they controlled, and doing homage for them to the guests,
a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest
of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by
themselves like small shopkeepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the
plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate),
scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had
been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant
livery which they wore only at long intervals, and in which they did not
feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway,
their splendid pomp tempered by a democratic good-fellowship, like
saints in their niches, and a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard
fashion, like the beadle in a church, struck the pavement with his staff
as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up
which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and
a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's
sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in
which the lackeys, seated like notaries before their massive registers,
rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a
little hall which--just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners
to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they
take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else
besides--displayed to him as he entered it, like some priceless effigy
by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young footman, his body
slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more
crimson face, from which seemed to burst forth torrents of fire,
timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced the Aubusson tapestries that
screened the door of the room in which the music was being given with
his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared, with a soldierly
impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of alarums,
incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot--to be looking out,
angel or sentinel, from the tower of dungeon or cathedral, for the
approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to
enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an
usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering
to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house
in which at that very moment he might have been, if Odette had but
permitted, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a
door-mat wrung his heart.