In Search of Lost Time (33 page)

Apart from the doctor's young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively that year (even though Mme Verdurin herself was virtuous and from a respectable bourgeois family, an extremely rich and entirely obscure one with which she had by degrees and of her own accord ceased to have any contact) to a person almost of the
demi-monde
, Mme de Crécy, whom Mme Verdurin called by her first name, Odette, and declared to be ‘a love', and to the pianist's aunt, who must once have been employed as a caretaker; both of them being women ignorant of the world whom, in their naïvety, it had been so easy to delude into believing that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes
were obliged to pay certain poor wretches in order to have any guests at their dinners, that if you had offered to get them invitations to the homes of these two great ladies, the former concierge and the cocotte would disdainfully have refused.

The Verdurins did not invite you to dinner: you had, at their house, a ‘place set for you'. For the soirée there was no programme. The young pianist would play, but only if ‘he fancied', because they did not force anyone and, as M. Verdurin said: ‘Anything for our friends, long live our pals!' If the pianist wanted to play the ride from
The Valkyrie
or the prelude from
Tristan
,
⁴
Mme Verdurin would protest, not because she did not like that music, but on the contrary because it made too strong an impression on her. ‘So you want me to have one of my migraines? You know perfectly well the same thing happens every time he plays that. I can count on it! Tomorrow when I try to get up – that's it, not possible!' If he did not play, people would chat, and one of the friends, most often their favourite painter at the time, would ‘spin', as M. Verdurin said, ‘a damn funny tale that would make 'em all shriek with laughter', especially Mme Verdurin, for such was her habit of taking literally the figurative expressions for the emotions she was feeling that Doctor Cottard (a young novice at the time) would one day have to set her jaw after she dislocated it from laughing too much.

Evening clothes were forbidden because one was ‘among friends' and also so as not to look like the ‘bores' whom they avoided like the plague and invited only to the larger soirées, given as rarely as possible and only if it might amuse the painter or help to promote the musician. The rest of the time, they were content to play charades, have supper in fancy dress, but only among themselves, not mixing any strangers in with the little ‘clan'.

But as the ‘pals' had assumed more of a place in Mme Verdurin's life, the ‘bores', the ‘pariahs' were anything that kept the friends away from her, anything that now and then kept them from being free, whether it was the mother of one, the profession of another, the country house or the bad health of a third. If Doctor Cottard thought he ought to leave just after he got up from the table in order to return to a patient who was dangerously ill, ‘Who knows, Mme Verdurin
would say to him, he might be better off if you don't go disturbing him again this evening; without you, he'll have a good night; tomorrow morning early you'll go there and find him quite recovered.' At the beginning of December, she would be sick at the thought that the faithful would ‘let them down' on Christmas Day and the 1st of January. The pianist's aunt insisted that he come to dinner with the family that day at her mother's home:

– You seem to think your mother might die, Mme Verdurin exclaimed harshly, if you don't have dinner with her on New Year's Day the way they do
in the provinces
!

Her worries revived during Holy Week:

– Doctor, since you're such a scholar and free-thinker, may I assume you will be coming on Good Friday just as you would on any other day? she said confidently to Cottard the first year, as if she was sure what the answer would be. But she trembled as she waited for him to utter it, because if he did not come, she might find herself alone.

– I will come on Good Friday… to say good-bye to you, because we're going to be spending the Easter holiday in Auvergne.

– In Auvergne? You'll be eaten alive by fleas and other such vermin! Much good may it do you!

And after a silence:

– If only you had told us, we would have tried to organize something; we could have made the trip together in comfort.

Likewise, if one of the ‘faithful' had a friend or if one of the ladies had a beau who might make them ‘desert' occasionally, the Verdurins, who were not afraid of a woman having a lover provided she had him at their house, loved him in their midst and did not prefer his company to theirs, would say: ‘Well, bring your friend along!' And they would engage him on trial, to see if he was capable of having no secrets from Mme Verdurin, if he was worthy of being enrolled in the ‘little clan'. If he was not, the ‘regular' who had introduced him would be taken aside and helped to break with his friend or his mistress. In the opposite case, the ‘newcomer' would in his turn become one of the faithful. And so when, that year, the
demi-mondaine
told M. Verdurin she had made the acquaintance of a charming man, M. Swann, and insinuated that he would be very pleased to be received at their home, M. Verdurin
transmitted the request to his wife then and there. (He never formed an opinion until she had formed hers, his particular role being to carry out her wishes, along with those of the faithful, with great and resourceful ingenuity.)

– My dear, Mme de Crécy has something to ask you. She would like to introduce one of her friends to you, a M. Swann. What do you think?

– Well, now, who could refuse anything to a little angel like that? Quiet, no one asked your opinion. I tell you you're an angel.

– Well, if you say so, answered Odette in a mincing tone, and she added: you know I'm not
fishing for compliments
.
⁵

– All right! Bring your friend, if he's nice.

Of course the ‘little clan' had no connection to the society in which Swann moved, and true men of fashion would have felt there was little point in enjoying, as he did, an exceptional position only to end up with an introduction to the Verdurins. But Swann was so fond of women that once he had come to know more or less all the women in aristocratic circles and they had nothing more to teach him, he had ceased to regard those naturalization papers, almost a patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon him, except as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no value in itself but which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in some little provincial hole or obscure circle of Paris where the daughter of a squire or clerk had struck him as pretty. For at such times desire or love would revive in him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday life (although it was doubtless this feeling that had originally pointed him towards the career as man of fashion in which he had wasted his intellectual gifts in frivolous pleasures and allowed his erudition in matters of art to be used to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses), and which made him want to shine, in the eyes of any unknown woman with whom he was infatuated, with an elegance which the name Swann in itself did not imply. He wanted this most especially if the unknown woman was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by another man of intelligence that an intelligent man will be afraid of being thought stupid, so it is not by a great lord but by a country bumpkin that a
man of fashion will be afraid of seeing his elegance go unappreciated. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the lies told out of vanity that have been squandered since the world began by people who in doing so merely diminish themselves have been squandered on inferiors. And though Swann was unaffected and casual with a duchess, he trembled at being scorned by a chambermaid, and posed in front of her.

He was not like so many people who, either from laziness or from a resigned sense of the obligation created by their social grandeur to remain attached to a certain mooring, abstain from the pleasures that life offers them outside the worldly situation in which they remain confined until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for lack of any better, once they have managed to become used to them, the mediocre amusements or bearable tedium it contains. Swann never tried to convince himself that the women with whom he spent his time were pretty, but tried instead to spend his time with women he already knew were pretty. And these were often women of rather vulgar beauty, for the physical qualities that he looked for without realizing it were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women sculpted or painted by the masters he preferred. Depth of expression, melancholy would freeze his senses, which needed only, in order to be awakened, flesh that was healthy, buxom and pink.

If in his travels he met a family whom it would have been more distinguished not to seek to know, but among whom he saw one woman adorned with a charm which he had never experienced before, to ‘stand on his dignity' and cheat the desire she had inspired, to substitute a different pleasure for the pleasure he might have known with her, by writing to a former mistress to come and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication before life, as stupid a renunciation of a new happiness as if, instead of touring the region, he had shut himself up in his room looking at pictures of Paris. He did not shut himself up in the edifice of his relationships, but had transformed that edifice, in order to be able to raise it again on the spot wherever he found a woman who pleased him, into one of those collapsible tents of the kind explorers carry with them. As for what was not transportable or exchangeable for a new pleasure, he would
have given it away for nothing, however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit with a duchess, built up from the desire she had been accumulating over the years to do something kind for him without having found the occasion, been spent all at once by his sending her an indiscreet message asking for a recommendation by telegraph that would put him in touch, immediately, with one of her stewards whose daughter he had noticed in the country, just as a starving man would barter a diamond for a piece of bread! He had even, after the fact, been amused by it, for there existed in him, compensated for by uncommon refinements, a certain boorishness. Then, too, he belonged to that category of intelligent men who have lived idle lives and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the idea that this idleness offers their intelligence objects just as worthy of interest as art or scholarship could offer, that ‘Life' contains situations more interesting, more novelistic than any novel. So he declared, at least, and easily convinced even the sharpest of his society friends, in particular the Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to entertain with tales of the racy adventures he had had, such as when he had met a woman on the railway train and afterwards taken her back home with him, and then discovered that she was the sister of a monarch who at that time held in his hands all the mingled threads of European politics, thus finding he was kept abreast of them in a most agreeable way, or when, through a complex play of circumstances, the choice about to be made by the conclave
⁶
was going to determine whether or not he succeeded in sleeping with somebody's cook.

And it was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals and academicians with whom he was particularly close, whom Swann compelled with such cynicism to serve him as go-betweens. All his friends were used to receiving periodic letters from him in which a word of recommendation or introduction was asked of them with a diplomatic skill that, persisting as it did through his successive love affairs and varying pretexts, revealed, more than moments of indiscretion would have done, a permanent disposition and an identical quest. I often asked to hear, many years later when I began to take an interest in his character because of the resemblances it offered to my own in completely different respects, how when he wrote to my
grandfather (who was not my grandfather yet, for it was about the time of my birth that Swann's great love affair began, and it interrupted these habits for a long time), the latter, recognizing his friend's handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim: ‘It's Swann, about to ask for something: on guard!' And either from mistrust, or from the unconsciously diabolical spirit that incites us to offer a thing only to the people who do not want it, my grandparents would issue a blunt refusal to the most easily satisfied requests he addressed to them, as for instance to introduce him to a girl who dined at the house every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, each time Swann mentioned it to them again, to pretend they were no longer seeing, whereas all week long they would wonder who in the world they could invite with her, often finding no one in the end, because they would not ask the one who would have been so happy to come.

Sometimes a certain couple, friends of my grandparents who until then had complained of never seeing Swann, would announce to them with satisfaction and perhaps a little desire to arouse their envy that he had become as charming as could be, that he was never out of their house. My grandfather did not want to cloud their pleasure but would look at my grandmother and hum:

Quel est donc ce mystère?
Je n'y puis rien comprendre.
⁷

or:

Vision fugitive…
⁸

or:

Dans ces affaires
Le mieux est de ne rien voir.
⁹

A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann's new friend: ‘And Swann – do you still see as much of him as ever?' the face of the man he was talking to would grow long: ‘Never mention his name to
me again! – But I thought you were so close…' For several months he had, for instance, been intimate friends with cousins of my grandmother's, dining almost every day at their house. Suddenly, and without letting them know, he stopped coming. They thought he was ill, and my grandmother's cousin was about to send word asking for news of him, when in the pantry she found a letter from him left inadvertently in the cook's account book. In it he told the woman he was leaving Paris, that he would not be able to continue seeing her. She was his mistress, and when he broke it off with her, she was the only one he thought he needed to tell.