time when I was loved," which he had often used until then, and without
much suffering, for his intelligence had not embodied in them anything
of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the
reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the
peculiar, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all;
the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed
after him into his carriage, which he had kept pressed to his lips, the
address 'Maison Dorée,' embossed on the note-paper on which he had read
"My hand trembles so as I write to you," the frowning contraction of her
eyebrows when she said pleadingly: "You won't let it be very long before
you send for me?"; he could smell the heated iron of the barber whom he
used to have in to singe his hair while Loredan went to fetch the little
working girl; could feel the torrents of rain which fell so often that
spring, the ice-cold homeward drive in his victoria, by moonlight; all
the network of mental habits, of seasonable impressions, of sensory
reactions, which had extended over a series of weeks its uniform meshes,
by which his body now found itself inextricably held. At that time he
had been satisfying a sensual curiosity to know what were the pleasures
of those people who lived for love alone. He had supposed that he could
stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also;
how small a thing the actual charm of Odette was now in comparison with
that formidable terror which extended it like a cloudy halo all around
her, that enormous anguish of not knowing at every hour of the day and
night what she had been doing, of not possessing her wholly, at all
times and in all places! Alas, he recalled the accents in which she had
exclaimed: "But I can see you at any time; I am always free!"--she, who
was never free now; the interest, the curiosity that she had shewn in
his life, her passionate desire that he should do her the favour--of
which it was he who, then, had felt suspicious, as of a possibly tedious
waste of his time and disturbance of his arrangements--of granting her
access to his study; how she had been obliged to beg that he would let
her take him to the Verdurins'; and, when he did allow her to come to
him once a month, how she had first, before he would let himself be
swayed, had to repeat what a joy it would be to her, that custom of
their seeing each other daily, for which she had longed at a time when
to him it had seemed only a tiresome distraction, for which, since that
time, she had conceived a distaste and had definitely broken herself
of it, while it had become for him so insatiable, so dolorous a need.
Little had he suspected how truly he spoke when, on their third meeting,
as she repeated: "But why don't you let me come to you oftener?" he had
told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for fear of
forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times that
she wrote to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a
printed address, but printed in letters of fire that seared his heart.
"Written from the Hôtel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone
there for? With whom? What happened there?" He remembered the gas-jets
that were being extinguished along the Boulevard des Italiens when he
had met her, when all hope was gone among the errant shades upon that
night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which now (that
night of a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would
be annoying her by looking for her and by finding her, so certain was he
that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take
her home) belonged indeed to a mysterious world to which one never may
return again once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish,
standing, motionless, before that scene of happiness in which it lived
again, a wretched figure which filled him with such pity, because he
did not at first recognise who it was, that he must lower his head,
lest anyone should observe that his eyes were filled with tears. It was
himself.
When he had realised this, his pity ceased; he was jealous, now, of that
other self whom she had loved, he was jealous of those men of whom he
had so often said, without much suffering: "Perhaps she's in love with
them," now that he had exchanged the vague idea of loving, in
which there is no love, for the petals of the chrysanthemum and the
'letter-heading' of the Maison d'Or; for they were full of love.
And then, his anguish becoming too keen, he passed his hand over his
forehead, let the monocle drop from his eye, and wiped its glass. And
doubtless, if he had caught sight of himself at that moment, he would
have added to the collection of the monocles which he had already
identified, this one which he removed, like an importunate, worrying
thought, from his head, while from its misty surface, with his
handkerchief, he sought to obliterate his cares.
There are in the music of the violin--if one does not see the instrument
itself, and so cannot relate what one hears to its form, which modifies
the fullness of the sound--accents which are so closely akin to those
of certain contralto voices, that one has the illusion that a singer has
taken her place amid the orchestra. One raises one's eyes; one sees only
the wooden case, magical as a Chinese box; but, at moments, one is
still tricked by the deceiving appeal of the Siren; at times, too, one
believes that one is listening to a captive spirit, struggling in the
darkness of its masterful box, a box quivering with enchantment, like a
devil immersed in a stoup of holy water; sometimes, again, it is in the
air, at large, like a pure and supernatural creature that reveals to the
ear, as it passes, its invisible message.
As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little
phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would
consent to appear, as proceeding to utter the incantations necessary
to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its
apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had
belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something
like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness
with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it
was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so
as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to
speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And
as she passed him, light, soothing, as softly murmured as the perfume
of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which
he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made
involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him,
the harmonious, fleeting form.
He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she, who
addressed herself to him, spoke to him in a whisper of Odette. For he
had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were not
known to the little phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their
joys? True that, as often, it had warned him of their frailty. And
indeed, whereas, in that distant time, he had divined an element of
suffering in its smile, in its limpid and disillusioned intonation,
to-night he found there rather the charm of a resignation that was
almost gay. Of those sorrows, of which the little phrase had spoken
to him then, which he had seen it--without his being touched by them
himself--carry past him, smiling, on its sinuous and rapid course, of
those sorrows which were now become his own, without his having any hope
of being, ever, delivered from them, it seemed to say to him, as once
it had said of his happiness: "What does all that matter; it is all
nothing." And Swann's thoughts were borne for the first time on a wave
of pity and tenderness towards that Vinteuil, towards that unknown,
exalted brother who also must have suffered so greatly; what could his
life have been? From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have
drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?
When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his
sufferings, Swann found a sweetness in that very wisdom which, but a
little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought that
he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard
his love as a digression that was without importance. 'Twas because the
little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short
duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as
everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but,
on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy
of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow,
'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and
even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and
in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them,
the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible. So much so that it
made their value be confessed, their divine sweetness be tasted by
all those same onlookers--provided only that they were in any sense
musical--who, the next moment, would ignore, would disown them in real
life, in every individual love that came into being beneath their eyes.
Doubtless the form in which it had codified those graces could not be
analysed into any logical elements. But ever since, more than a year
before, discovering to him many of the riches of his own soul, the love
of music had been born, and for a time at least had dwelt in him, Swann
had regarded musical _motifs_ as actual ideas, of another world, of
another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by
the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one from
another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance. When,
after that first evening at the Verdurins', he had had the little
phrase played over to him again, and had sought to disentangle from his
confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress,
it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the
closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and
to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression
of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he
was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon
certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind's convenience) for the
mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before ever he knew the
Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time he had heard
the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still
further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field
open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an
immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which,
here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored
tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of
passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing
from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been
discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they
awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have
found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to
us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration,
of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and
waste and void. Vinteuil had been one of those musicians. In his little
phrase, albeit it presented to the mind's eye a clouded surface, there
was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which
the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once
heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of
their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and
happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was
peculiar as he would know of the _Princesse de Clèves_, or of _René_,
should either of those titles occur to him. Even when he was not
thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the
same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such
as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the
rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned.
Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we
return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no
more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known
them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for
example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in
view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has
vanished even the memory of the darkness. In that way Vinteuil's phrase,
like some theme, say, in _Tristan_, which represents to us also a
certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had
endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was
linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one
of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being
that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence;
but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these
conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.
We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who
shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something
less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.
So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata
did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it
belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we
have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim
with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one
forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access
to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what
Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer
had been content (with the musical instruments at his disposal) to
draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its
outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure,
that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a
shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some
more bold projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he
believed in the real existence of this phrase, was that anyone with an
ear at all delicate for music would at once have detected the imposture
had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms,
sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own
invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.
The phrase had disappeared. Swann knew that it would come again at the
end of the last movement, after a long passage which Mme. Verdurin's
pianist always 'skipped.' There were in this passage some admirable
ideas which Swann had not distinguished on first hearing the sonata, and
which he now perceived, as if they had, in the cloakroom of his memory,
divested themselves of their uniform disguise of novelty. Swann listened
to all the scattered themes which entered into the composition of
the phrase, as its premises enter into the inevitable conclusion of a
syllogism; he was assisting at the mystery of its birth. "Audacity,"
he exclaimed to himself, "as inspired, perhaps, as a Lavoisier's or an
Ampere's, the audacity of a Vinteuil making experiment, discovering
the secret laws that govern an unknown force, driving across a region
unexplored towards the one possible goal the invisible team in which he
has placed his trust and which he never may discern!" How charming
the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the
beginning of the last passage. The suppression of human speech, so far
from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought),
had eliminated it altogether. Never was spoken language of such
inflexible necessity, never had it known questions so pertinent, such
obvious replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird
deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a
neighbouring tree. It was as at the first beginning of the world, as
if there were not yet but these twain upon the earth, or rather in this
world closed against all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its
creator that in it there should never be any but themselves; the world
of this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul, not yet made perfect, of
the little phrase, was it a fairy, invisibly somewhere lamenting, whose
plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden
that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they
came. Marvellous bird! The violinist seemed to wish to charm, to tame,
to woo, to win it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the
little phrase which it evoked shook like a medium's the body of the
violinist, 'possessed' indeed. Swann knew that the phrase was going to
speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that
the strain of waiting for the imminent moment when he would find himself
face to face, once more, with the phrase, convulsed him in one of those
sobs which a fine line of poetry or a piece of alarming news will wring
from us, not when we are alone, but when we repeat one or the other to
a friend, in whom we see ourselves reflected, like a third person, whose
probable emotion softens him. It reappeared, but this time to remain
poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though
immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the
precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an
iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow, when
its brightness fades, seems to subside, then soars again and, before it
is extinguished, is glorified with greater splendour than it has ever
shewn; so to the two colours which the phrase had hitherto allowed to
appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and
made them sing. Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all
the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest
movement might embarrass the magic presence, supernatural, delicious,
frail, that would so easily vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed
of speaking. The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent,
perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive),
breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to
arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on
which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on
which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. It followed that, when
the phrase at last was finished, and only its fragmentary echoes floated
among the subsequent themes which had already taken its place, if Swann
at first was annoyed to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed for her
imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide in him her impressions,
before even the sonata had come to an end; he could not refrain from
smiling, and perhaps also found an underlying sense, which she was
incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used. Dazzled by the
virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: "It's
astonishing! I have never seen anything to beat it..." But a scrupulous
regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she added
the reservation: "anything to beat it... since the table-turning!"
From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had
once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would
not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had
once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him
any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of
a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and
sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when
they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady,
relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went
through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we
had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to
enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet
to-morrow,"--although they themselves know that these things are
meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. No doubt Swann was
assured that if he had now been living at a distance from Odette he
would gradually have lost all interest in her, so that he would have
been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have
had the courage to remain there; but he had not the courage to go.
He had often thought of going. Now that he was once again at work upon
his essay on Vermeer, he wanted to return, for a few days at least, to
The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was certain that a 'Toilet of
Diana' which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt
sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have
liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, so as to strengthen
his conviction. But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when
she was not there--for in strange places where our sensations have not
been numbed by habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain--was for him so
cruel a project that he felt himself to be capable of entertaining it
incessantly in his mind only because he knew himself to be resolute in
his determination never to put it into effect. But it would happen
that, while he was asleep, the intention to travel would reawaken in him
(without his remembering that this particular tour was impossible) and
would be realised. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a
year; leaning from the window of the train towards a young man on the
platform who wept as he bade him farewell, he was seeking to persuade
this young man to come away also. The train began to move; he awoke
in alarm, and remembered that he was not going away, that he would see
Odette that evening, and next day and almost every day. And then, being
still deeply moved by his dream, he would thank heaven for those special
circumstances which made him independent, thanks to which he could
remain in Odette's vicinity, and could even succeed in making her allow
him to see her sometimes; and, counting over the list of his advantages:
his social position--his fortune, from which she stood too often in
need of assistance not to shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture
(having even, so people said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry
her)--his friendship with M. de Charlus, which, it must be confessed,
had never won him any very great favour from Odette, but which gave him
the pleasant feeling that she was always hearing complimentary things
said about him by this common friend for whom she had so great an
esteem--and even his own intelligence, the whole of which he employed in
weaving, every day, a fresh plot which would make his presence, if not
agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette--he thought of what might
have happened to him if all these advantages had been lacking, he
thought that, if he had been, like so many other men, poor and humble,
without resources, forced to undertake any task that might be offered to
him, or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might have been obliged
to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of which was still so
recent, might well have been true; and he said to himself: "People don't
know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they
are." But he reflected that this existence had lasted already for
several years, that all that he could now hope for was that it should
last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his
friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expectation of a
meeting which, when it occurred, would bring him no happiness; and he
asked himself whether he was not mistaken, whether the circumstances
that had favoured their relations and had prevented a final rupture had
not done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be
desired was not that as to which he rejoiced that it happened only in
dreams--his own departure; and he said to himself that people did not
know when they were unhappy, that they were never so happy as they
supposed.
Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she
who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares,
from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he
marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which
was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that
environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret
desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the
soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its
career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very
cordial sympathy with that Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he
admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of
his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly
relates, to recover his spiritual freedom. Then he would be ashamed
of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to
deserve no pity now that he himself was disposing so cheaply of Odette's
very life.