In Search of Lost Time (47 page)

But outside, everything brought him more suffering. He wanted to separate Odette from Forcheville, take her to spend a few days in the south. But he believed all the men who happened to be in the hotel desired her and that she desired them. And so he who in former days, when travelling, had sought out new people, large groups, now appeared unsociable, appeared to be fleeing the company of men as if it had cruelly wounded him. And how could he not be misanthropic, when he saw every man as a possible lover of Odette's? And so his jealousy, even more than the sensuous and light-hearted feeling he had at first had for Odette, altered Swann's character and changed entirely, in the eyes of other people, the very appearance of the external signs by which that character was manifested.

A month after the day on which he had read the letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were giving in the Bois. At the moment when they were preparing to leave, he noticed some confabulations between Mme Verdurin and several of the guests and thought he heard them reminding the pianist to come to a party at Chatou
⁶⁷
the next day; yet, he, Swann, had not been invited.

The Verdurins had spoken in low voices and in vague terms, but the painter, probably inattentive, exclaimed:

– There must be no lights, and have him play the ‘Moonlight' Sonata in the dark so we can watch how the light comes up.

Mme Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing, neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim. Odette suddenly had the desperate look of one who has given up fighting the crushing difficulties of life, and Swann anxiously counted the minutes that separated him from the time when, after leaving the restaurant, during the drive home with her, he would be able to ask her for an explanation, persuade her not to go to Chatou the next day or to see that he was invited, and to soothe in her arms the anguish he was feeling. At last the carriages were sent for. Mme Verdurin said to Swann:

– Well now, good-bye, we'll see you soon, I trust? attempting by the amiableness of her gaze and the constraint of her smile to keep him from realizing that she was not saying to him, as she had always done until now: ‘Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, the day after at my house.'

M. and Mme Verdurin made Forcheville get in with them, Swann's carriage had pulled up behind theirs and he was waiting for theirs to leave so that he could help Odette into his.

– Odette, we're taking you home, said Mme Verdurin, we have a little spot for you here next to M. de Forcheville.

– All right, Madame, answered Odette.

– What? I thought I was driving you home, cried Swann, saying what had to be said without dissembling, because the carriage door was open, the seconds were numbered, and he could not go home without her in his present state.

– But Mme Verdurin asked me…

– Now, you can certainly go home alone, we've let you have her to yourself often enough, said Mme Verdurin.

– But I had something important to say to Madame.

– Well, you can write it to her in a letter…

– Good-bye, Odette said, holding out her hand.

He tried to smile but looked utterly crushed.

– Did you see the way Swann permits himself to act with us now? said Mme Verdurin to her husband when they were back at home. I thought he was going to eat me alive, because we were taking Odette with us. It's quite unseemly, really! Let him just say right out that we're running a house of assignation! I don't understand how Odette can tolerate such behavior. He absolutely seems to be saying: you belong to me. I'm going to tell Odette what I think, I hope she'll understand.

And she also added, a moment later, angrily:

– No, really, the filthy creature! using, without realizing it, and perhaps responding to the same obscure need to justify herself – like Françoise at Combray when the chicken did not want to die – the same words which the last twitches of an inoffensive animal in its death-throes wring from the countryman who is killing it.

And when Mme Verdurin's carriage had left and Swann's came forward, his coachman looked at him and asked if he was not ill or if there had been an accident.

Swann sent him away, he wanted to walk, and he returned home on foot through the Bois. He talked to himself out loud, in the same slightly artificial tone he had always used when he enumerated the charms of the little clan and extolled the magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles, the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found them sweet, if they were addressed to another man, in the same way, the Verdurins' salon, which only recently had still seemed to him amusing, inspired with a real enthusiasm for art and even a sort of moral nobility, now that a man other than himself was the one Odette was going there to meet, to love without restraint, exhibited to him its absurdities, its foolishness, its ignominy.

He pictured to himself with disgust the next day's soirée at Chatou.
‘The idea of going to Chatou anyway! Like drapers after shutting up shop! These people really are sublimely bourgeois, they can't really exist, they must have come out of a Labiche comedy!'
⁶⁸

The Cottards would be there, maybe Brichot. ‘It's quite grotesque, the lives of these nonentities, always in each other's pockets like this. They would feel utterly lost, I swear, if they didn't all meet up again tomorrow
at Chatou
!' Alas! the painter would be there too, the painter who enjoyed ‘matchmaking', who would invite Forcheville to come to his studio with Odette. He could see Odette in clothes far too formal for this country outing, ‘because she's so vulgar and worst of all, poor little thing, such a fool!!!'

He could hear the jokes that Mme Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the bore might be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he saw Odette laughing, laughing with him, almost inside him. Now he felt that perhaps they would be making Odette laugh at him. ‘What fetid humour! he said, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so powerful that he felt the muscular sensation of his grimace even in his neck, flung back against the collar of his shirt. And how can a creature whose face is made in the image of God find anything to laugh about in those nauseating jokes? Any nose of any delicacy at all would turn away with horror so as not to allow itself to be offended by such musty odours. It's really incredible to think that a human being could fail to understand that, by permitting herself to smile at the expense of a fellow human being who has loyally reached out his hand to her, she is sinking down into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I live too many leagues above the swamp in which these vermin are gabbling and wallowing to be splattered by the jokes of a Verdurin, he cried, lifting his head, proudly throwing back his shoulders. As God is my witness, I have honestly tried to pull Odette up out of there, and lift her into a nobler and purer atmosphere. But every human being has only so much patience, and mine is exhausted,' he said to himself, as if this mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasm dated from farther back than the last few minutes and as if he had not taken it upon himself only when he thought perhaps these sarcasms
were aimed at him and were attempting to separate Odette from him.

He could see the pianist preparing to play the ‘Moonlight' Sonata and the faces Mme Verdurin would make as she grew dismayed at the harm that Beethoven's music was going to do to her nerves: ‘Idiot, liar! he exclaimed. And the woman pretends to love
Art
!' She would tell Odette, after having adroitly insinuated a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for him: ‘Make a little room next to you for M. de Forcheville.' ‘In the dark! The pimp, the procuress!' ‘Procuress' was also the name he applied to the music that would invite them to be quiet, to dream together, to look at each other, to take each other by the hand. He found there was some good to be said for the severity towards the arts displayed by Plato, by Bossuet,
⁶⁹
and by the old school of French education.

In fact, the life one led at the Verdurins' and which he had so often called ‘real life' seemed to him the worst of all, and their little clan the lowest of social circles. ‘It really is, he said, the lowest thing on the social ladder, Dante's last circle.
⁷⁰
No doubt about it, the venerable text refers to the Verdurins! Really, the fashionable folk, whom one may vilify, but who all the same are different from these gangs of yobs, show a most profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them! What sound intuition there is in that
Noli me tangere
⁷¹
of the Faubourg Saint-Germain!' He had long since left the avenues of the Bois, he had nearly reached his house, and still, not yet sobered from his pain and from the insincere exuberance with which the deceitful intonations, the artificial sonority of his own voice, pouring into him more abundantly every minute, had intoxicated him, he continued to perorate out loud in the silence of the night: ‘Society people have their faults, as no one knows better than I do, but all the same really these are people for whom certain things are out of the question. I can think of one fashionable woman who was far from perfect, but all the same really she had a basic decency, a sense of honour in her dealings that would have made her incapable, whatever might happen, of any sort of treachery and which is quite sufficient to put a vast gulf between her and a vixen like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, one may truly say they are the ultimate, they are perfect specimens of their kind! Thank God – it was
high time I stopped condescending to mix in utter promiscuousness with such infamy, such excrement.'

But, just as the virtues which he had attributed that same afternoon to the Verdurins would not have been enough, had they even really possessed them but had not encouraged and protected his love, to provoke in Swann that intoxication in which he was moved by their magnanimity and which, even if it was propagated through other people, could only come to him from Odette – in the same way, the immorality that he now saw in the Verdurins, had it been real, would have been powerless, if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to unleash his indignation and cause him to vilify ‘their infamy'. And no doubt Swann's voice was more perceptive than he was himself, when it refused to pronounce these words filled with disgust for the Verdurin social circle and joy at being done with it, otherwise than in an artificial tone and as if they were chosen rather to appease his anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact, while he was indulging in these invectives, were probably, without his noticing it, occupied with a completely different object, for once he reached home, scarcely had he closed the carriage gate behind him, than suddenly he struck himself on the forehead, and, opening it again, went out again exclaiming in a natural voice this time: ‘I think I've found a way of getting invited to the dinner at Chatou tomorrow!' But the way must have been bad, for Swann was not invited: Doctor Cottard, who, summoned to the country on a serious case, had not seen the Verdurins for several days and had not been able to go to Chatou, said, the day after that dinner, as he sat down to the table at their house:

– Why, won't we be seeing M. Swann this evening? He is certainly what you call a personal friend of…

– Why, I should hope not! cried Mme Verdurin. May the Lord preserve us from him, he is deadly dull, stupid and ill-mannered.

At these words Cottard showed surprise and submission at the same time, as though confronted with a truth contrary to everything he had believed up to then, but irresistibly obvious; and, lowering his nose nervously and timidly into his plate, he confined himself to answering: ‘Ah! -ah! -ah! -ah! -ah!', traversing along a descending scale, in his
forced but orderly retreat into the depths of himself, the entire register of his voice. And Swann was never mentioned again at the Verdurins'.

So the salon which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle to their meetings. She no longer said to him as she had in the early days of their love: ‘We'll see each other tomorrow night anyway, there's a supper at the Verdurins',' but: ‘We won't be able to see each other tomorrow night, there's a supper at the Verdurins'.' Or else the Verdurins were to take her to the Opéra-Comique to see
Une Nuit de Cléopatre
⁷²
and Swann would read in Odette's eyes that fear of his asking her not to go, which once upon a time he would not have been able to keep himself from kissing as it passed over his mistress's face, and which now exasperated him. ‘It's not anger, however, he said to himself, that I feel when I see that she wants to go and scratch about in that excremental music. It's sorrow, not for myself certainly, but for her; sorrow at seeing that after more than six months of living in daily contact with me, she has not managed to change enough to eliminate Victor Massé spontaneously! Especially for not having come to understand that there are evenings when a person of any subtlety at all must know how to give up a pleasure, when one asks it of her. She ought to know how to say “I won't go,” if only by using her intelligence, since it is on the basis of her answer that one will rate once and for all the quality of her soul.' And having persuaded himself that it really was only in order to be able to pass a more favourable judgment on Odette's spiritual value that he wanted her to stay with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he presented her with the same reasoning, with the same degree of insincerity as he had presented it to himself, and even with one degree more, for now he was also responding to a desire to capture her through her self-love.