several of the 'faithful' spoke of accompanying him; the Verdurins
could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris, so first of
all hired, and finally purchased a yacht; thus Odette was constantly
going on a cruise. Whenever she had been away for any length of time,
Swann would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her, but,
as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical
distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to
Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, when they had gone
away, as everyone thought, for a month only, either they succumbed to a
series of temptations, or else M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged
everything beforehand, to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to
the 'faithful' only as time went on; anyhow, from Algiers they flitted
to Tunis; then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had
been absent for nearly a year, and Swann felt perfectly at ease and
almost happy. Albeit M. Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the
pianist and Dr. Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no
need of them, and that, in any event, it was most rash to allow Mme.
Cottard to return to Paris, where, Mme. Verdurin assured him, a
revolution had just broken out, he was obliged to grant them their
liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One
day, shortly after the return of these four travellers, Swann, seeing
an omnibus approach him, labelled 'Luxembourg,' and having some
business there, had jumped on to it and had found himself sitting
opposite Mme. Cottard, who was paying a round of visits to people whose
'day' it was, in full review order, with a plume in her hat, a silk
dress, a muff, an umbrella (which would do for a parasol if the rain
kept off), a card-case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the
cleaners. Wearing these badges of rank, she would, in fine weather, go
on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when
she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a
transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the
natural courtesy of the woman broke through the starched surface of the
doctor's-wife, not being certain, either, whether she ought to mention
the Verdurins before Swann, she produced, quite naturally, in her slow
and awkward, but not unattractive voice, which, every now and then, was
completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, topics selected from
those which she had picked up and would repeat in each of the score of
houses up the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an
afternoon.
"I needn't ask you, M. Swann, whether a man so much in the movement as
yourself has been to the Mirlitons, to see the portrait by Machard that
the whole of Paris is running after. Well, and what do you think of it?
Whose camp are you in, those who bless or those who curse? It's the
same in every house in Paris now, no one will speak of anything else but
Machard's portrait; you aren't smart, you aren't really cultured, you
aren't up-to-date unless you give an opinion on Machard's portrait."
Swann having replied that he had not seen this portrait, Mme. Cottard
was afraid that she might have hurt his feelings by obliging him to
confess the omission.
"Oh, that's quite all right! At least you have the courage to be quite
frank about it. You don't consider yourself disgraced because you
haven't seen Machard's portrait. I do think that so nice of you. Well
now, I have seen it; opinion is divided, you know, there are some people
who find it rather laboured, like whipped cream, they say; but I think
it's just ideal. Of course, she's not a bit like the blue and yellow
ladies that our friend Biche paints. That's quite clear. But I must tell
you, perfectly frankly (you'll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, but I
always say just what I think), that I don't understand his work. I can
quite see the good points there are in his portrait of my husband; oh,
dear me, yes; and it's certainly less odd than most of what he does,
but even then he had to give the poor man a blue moustache! But Machard!
Just listen to this now, the husband of my friend, I am on my way to see
at this very moment (which has given me the very great pleasure of your
company), has promised her that, if he is elected to the Academy (he
is one of the Doctor's colleagues), he will get Machard to paint her
portrait. So she's got something to look forward to! I have another
friend who insists that she'd rather have Leloir. I'm only a wretched
Philistine, and I've no doubt Leloir has perhaps more knowledge of
painting even than Machard. But I do think that the most important
thing about a portrait, especially when it's going to cost ten thousand
francs, is that it should be like, and a pleasant likeness, if you know
what I mean."
Having exhausted this topic, to which she had been inspired by the
loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card-case, the little number
inked inside each of her gloves by the cleaner, and the difficulty of
speaking to Swann about the Verdurins, Mme. Cottard, seeing that they
had still a long way to go before they would reach the corner of the
Rue Bonaparte, where the conductor was to set her down, listened to the
promptings of her heart, which counselled other words than these.
"Your ears must have been burning," she ventured, "while we were on the
yacht with Mme. Verdurin. We were talking about you all the time."
Swann was genuinely astonished, for he supposed that his name was never
uttered in the Verdurins' presence.
"You see," Mme. Cottard went on, "Mme. de Crécy was there; need I say
more? When Odette is anywhere it's never long before she begins talking
about you. And you know quite well, it isn't nasty things she says.
What! you don't believe me!" she went on, noticing that Svrann looked
sceptical. And, carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, without
putting any evil meaning into the word, which she used purely in the
sense in which one employs it to speak of the affection that unites a
pair of friends: "Why, she _adores_ you! No, indeed; I'm sure it would
never do to say anything against you when she was about; one would soon
be taught one's place! Whatever we might be doing, if we were looking at
a picture, for instance, she would say, 'If only we had him here, he's
the man who could tell us whether it's genuine or not. There's no one
like him for that.' And all day long she would be saying, 'What can
he be doing just now? I do hope, he's doing a little work! It's too
dreadful that a fellow with such gifts as he has should be so lazy.'
(Forgive me, won't you.) 'I can see him this very moment; he's thinking
of us, he's wondering where we are.' Indeed, she used an expression
which I thought very pretty at the time. M. Verdurin asked her, 'How in
the world can you see what he's doing, when he's a thousand miles away?'
And Odette answered, 'Nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend.'
"No, I assure you, I'm not saying it just to flatter you; you have a
true friend in her, such as one doesn't often find. I can tell you,
besides, in case you don't know it, that you're the only one. Mme.
Verdurin told me as much herself on our last day with them (one talks
more freely, don't you know, before a parting), 'I don't say that Odette
isn't fond of us, but anything that we may say to her counts for very
little beside what Swann might say.' Oh, mercy, there's the conductor
stopping for me; here have I been chatting away to you, and would have
gone right past the Rue Bonaparte, and never noticed... Will you be so
very kind as to tell me whether my plume is straight?"
And Mme. Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a
white-gloved hand from which there floated, with a transfer-ticket, an
atmosphere of fashionable life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with
the harsher fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself
overflowing with gratitude to her, as well as to Mme. Verdurin (and
almost to Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her was
no longer tinged with pain, was scarcely even to be described, now,
as love), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with
loving eyes, as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte,
her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she
clasped her umbrella and her card-case, so that its monogram could be
seen, her muff dancing in the air before her as she went.
To compete with and so to stimulate the moribund feelings that Swann had
for Odette, Mme. Cottard, a wiser physician, in this case, than ever
her husband would have been, had grafted among them others more normal,
feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann's mind were to make
Odette seem again more human (more like other women, since other women
could inspire the same feelings in him), were to hasten her final
transformation back into that Odette, loved with an undisturbed
affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the
painter's, to drink orangeade with Forcheville, that Odette with whom
Swann had calculated that he might live in happiness.
In former times, having often thought with terror that a day must come
when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to
keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to
escape him, to cling tightly to it and to hold it back. But now, to the
faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in
his desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change, that is to say
become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the
self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name, if it caught
his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been
Odette's lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very slight, and,
inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from
that period in which he had so keenly suffered--though in it he had also
known a way of feeling so intensely happy--and that the accidents of his
course might still enable him to catch an occasional glimpse, stealthily
and at a distance, of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything,
an agreeable thrill, as to the sad Parisian, when he has left Venice
behind him and must return to France, a last mosquito proves that
Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this
particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made
an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain, while still he
might, an uninterrupted view of it, he discovered that already it was
too late; he would have looked back to distinguish, as it might be
a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had
departed, but it is so difficult to enter into a state of complete
duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling
which one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering
in his brain, he could see nothing, he would abandon the attempt, would
take the glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that
he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough
later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity,
with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over
his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing
him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has
lived for so long, and which he vowed that he would not allow to slip
away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed,
like the same traveller, if he does not awake until he has crossed the
frontier and is again in France, when Swann happened to alight, close
at hand, upon something which proved that Forcheville had been Odette's
lover, he discovered that it caused him no pain, that love was now
utterly remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the
moment in which he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before
kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his
memory the face that for so long had been familiar, before it was
altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have
wished--in thought at least--to have been in a position to bid farewell,
while she still existed, to that Odette who had inspired love in him and
jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to suffer, and whom now
he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see
her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the
twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard,
a young man in a fez whom he failed to identify, the painter, Odette,
Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path which followed the line
of the coast, and overhung the sea, now at a great height, now by a few
feet only, so that they were continually going up and down; those of the
party who had reached the downward slope were no longer visible to those
who were still climbing; what little daylight yet remained was failing,
and it seemed as though a black night was immediately to fall on them.
Now and then the waves dashed against the cliff, and Swann could feel on
his cheek a shower of freezing spray. Odette told him to wipe this off,
but he could not, and felt confused and helpless in her company, as well
as because he was in his nightshirt. He hoped that, in the darkness,
this might pass unnoticed; Mme. Verdurin, however, fixed her astonished
gaze upon him for an endless moment, in which he saw her face change
its shape, her nose grow longer, while beneath it there sprouted a heavy
moustache. He turned away to examine Odette; her cheeks were pale, with
little fiery spots, her features drawn and ringed with shadows; but she
looked back at him with eyes welling with affection, ready to detach
themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt that he
loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him
at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist, glanced at a tiny watch,
and said: "I must go." She took leave of everyone, in the same formal
manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling him where they were
to meet that evening, or next day. He dared not ask, he would have liked
to follow her, he was obliged, without turning back in her direction,
to answer with a smile some question by Mme. Verdurin; but his heart was
frantically beating, he felt that he now hated Odette, he would gladly
have crushed those eyes which, a moment ago, he had loved so dearly,
have torn the blood into those lifeless cheeks. He continued to climb
with Mme. Verdurin, that is to say that each step took him farther from
Odette, who was going downhill, and in the other direction. A second
passed and it was many hours since she had left him. The painter
remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had eclipsed himself immediately
after Odette. "They had obviously arranged it between them," he added;
"they must have agreed to meet at the foot of the cliff, but they
wouldn't say good-bye together; it might have looked odd. She is his
mistress." The strange young man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to
console him. "After all, she is quite right," he said to the young man,
drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more
at ease. "I've advised her to do that, myself, a dozen times. Why be
so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her." So Swann
reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at
first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had
distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the
'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped
with a fez.
As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association
of ideas, then a certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy,
and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast,
had made Swann give that name; but actually, and in everything that the
person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was
indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images,
Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying, at the same time,
such creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple
act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he
felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he
thought that he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of
which he was not yet conscious, he brought about sudden vicissitudes
which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at definite
points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to
startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; an alarum
rang, the inhabitants ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses;
he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own
heart, which, with equal violence, was anxiously beating in his breast.
Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt a pain, a
nausea that were inexplicable; a peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at
him as he passed: "Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night
with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him
everything. It was they that started the fire." It was his valet, come
to awaken him, and saying:--
"Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to
call again in an hour."
But these words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which
Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing
that refraction which turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of
water, into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of
the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the
clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile
the scenery of his dream-stage scattered in dust, he opened his eyes,
heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, grown very
distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he could feel the
sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose,
and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he was going,
that afternoon, to Combray, having learned that Mme. de Cambremer--Mlle.
Legrandin that had been--was spending a few days there. The association
in his memory of her young and charming face with a place in the country
which he had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction
which had made him decide at last to leave Paris for a while. As the
different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain
other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we
are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before
love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest
appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us
pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as
an indication, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann
had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in
the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of ever
seeing her again--and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de Froberville to
Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life that it is
not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness
which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations
of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no doubt, that might
have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's. Who,
indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening,
somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to
him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable? But what
did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place,
and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact
that he had at last decided to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that
evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention
that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any
length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be
wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he
had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected,
which were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance between
which was too difficult to establish--were linked by a sort of
concatenation of necessity.
But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions
to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become
disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he
saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid
complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all
the things which--in the course of those successive bursts of affection
which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the
first impression that he had formed of her--he had ceased to observe
after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless,
while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of
those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared
in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time,
the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think
that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that
the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did
not please me, who was not in my style!"
PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME
Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during
my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more
utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an
atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than
my room in the Grand Hôtel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which,
washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in
which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure,
azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted
with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration
in different rooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set
against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases
with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law
of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was
reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so
that the walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only
by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was
this that the whole room had the appearance of one of those model
bedrooms which you see nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated with
works of art which are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes
of whoever may ultimately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being
kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the
houses for which the rooms are planned.
And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real
Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy
days, when the wind was so strong that Françoise, as she took me to
the Champs-Elysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the
street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and
would recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and
shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing
more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as
a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there
were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be
not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and
unalterable,--the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was
not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed
to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of
shewing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force
or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself,
without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice,
reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a
man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm
would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the
Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine,
that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an
embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by
all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite
thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind. The less she
bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my
heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which
Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the very midst
of "that funereal coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed,
for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the
waves.