In Search of Lost Time (48 page)

– I swear, he said to her a few moments before she left for the theatre, that in asking you not to go out, my every wish, if I were selfish, would be for you to refuse me, because I have a thousand things to do this evening and I will find that I myself am trapped and thus quite annoyed if against all expectations you answer me that you won't go. But my own occupations, my own pleasures, aren't everything, I have to think of you. There may come a day when,
seeing me gone from you for ever, you will be justified in reproaching me for not having warned you in those crucial moments when I felt I was going to pass judgment on you, make one of those severe criticisms which do such damage to feelings of love. You see,
Une Nuit de Cléopatre
(what a title!) doesn't really matter. What I must know is whether you are really one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality, and even of charm, the sort of despicable creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasure. Now, if this is what you are, how could anyone love you, for you're not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible? You're only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope it finds, a fish without a memory, without a thought in its head, living in its aquarium, mistaking the glass for water and bumping against it a hundred times a day. Do you realize that your answer will have the effect – I won't say of making me stop loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realize that you're not a person, that you're lower than all other things, that I can't place you above any of them? Obviously I would have preferred to ask you as a thing of no importance to give up
Une Nuit de Cléopatre
(since you oblige me to soil my lips with that despicable name) in hopes that you would go anyway. But since I've decided to tally the account, to draw such inferences from your answer, I thought it would be more honest to let you know.

For some time, Odette had shown signs of agitation and uncertainty. Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of ‘scoldings' and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not make such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, that they would be only more in love afterwards. And so she would have listened to Swann with the utmost calm if she had not seen that time was passing and that if he talked much longer, she would, as she told him with a smile that was tender, obstinate and abashed, ‘end by missing the Overture!'

On other occasions he told her that the one thing that was more
likely than anything else to make him stop loving her was that she would not give up lying. ‘Even simply from the point of view of your desire to be attractive, he told her, don't you understand how much of your charm you lose when you stoop to lying? With one confession, think how many faults you could redeem! Really you are much less intelligent than I thought!' But it was in vain that Swann expounded for her thus all the reasons she had for not lying; they might have undermined some general and systematic approach to lying; but Odette had none; she merely contented herself, whenever she wanted Swann not to know about something she had done, with not telling him about it. And so lying was for her an expedient of a particular order; and the only thing that could decide whether she ought to make use of it or confess the truth was a reason of a particular order too, the greater or lesser likelihood that Swann might discover she had not told the truth.

Physically, she was going through a bad phase: she was growing stout; and the expressive and doleful charm, the surprised and dreamy glances she had once had seemed to have disappeared with her first youth. So that she had become so dear to Swann at the moment, as it were, when he found her in fact much less pretty. He would look at her for a long time trying to recover the charm he had once seen in her, and he would not find it. But knowing that under the new chrysalis, what lived on was still Odette, still the same will, evanescent, elusive and guileful, was enough to make Swann continue to put the same passion into trying to capture her. Then he would look at a photograph from two years before, he would remember how exquisite she had been. And that would console him a little for taking such pains over her.

When the Verdurins carried her off to Saint-Germain, Chatou, Meulan, often, if it was the warm season, they would propose, on the spot, staying there to sleep and not coming back until the next day. Mme Verdurin would try to quiet the scruples of the pianist, whose aunt had remained in Paris.

– She'll be delighted to be rid of you for a day. And how could she worry, she knows you're with us; anyway, she can put the blame on me.

But if she was not successful, M. Verdurin would spring into action,
find a telegraph office or a messenger and inquire as to which of the faithful had someone they needed to inform. But Odette would thank him and say that she did not need to send anyone a telegram, because she had told Swann once and for all that by sending him one in front of everybody, she would be compromising herself. Sometimes she would be gone for several days, the Verdurins would take her to see the tombs at Dreux, or, on the advice of the painter, to Compiègne to admire sunsets as viewed from inside a forest, and then they would push on as far as the Château de Pierrefonds.
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– To think she could visit real historic buildings with me. I've studied architecture for ten years and I'm forever being implored to take people of very high standing to Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud
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and would only do it for her, and instead she goes with the lowest of simpletons to wax ecstatic first over the dejecta of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! It seems to me you don't need to be an artist for that and even without a particularly delicate nose, you don't choose to go holiday-making in latrines in order to be closer to the smell of excrement.

But when she had left for Dreux or Pierrefonds – without, alas, allowing him to go too, as though by chance, on his own account, because ‘that would make a deplorable impression', she said – he would plunge into the most intoxicating of romances, the railway time-table, which would show him all the ways he might join her, in the afternoon, in the evening, that same morning! Not only the ways, but even more, almost: the permission. Because after all, the time-table and the trains themselves were not meant for dogs. If one informed the public, via printed matter, that at eight o'clock in the morning a train left which arrived in Pierrefonds at ten o'clock, it was because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette was superfluous; and it was also an act that could have a motive completely different from the desire to meet Odette, since people who did not know her performed it each day, in large enough numbers for it to be worth the trouble of stoking the locomotives.

So she really couldn't stop him from going to Pierrefonds if he wanted to! Now, in fact, he felt that he did want to, and that, if he had not known Odette, he certainly would have gone. For a long time
now he had wanted to form a clearer idea for himself of Viollet-le-Duc's restoration work. And in this weather, he was moved by an imperious desire for a walk in the forest of Compiègne.

It was truly hard luck that she was forbidding him the only spot that tempted him today. Today! If he went despite her prohibition, he might see her
today
! But whereas, if at Pierrefonds she had met someone who did not matter, she would have said joyfully: ‘Imagine finding you here!', and would have asked him to come to see her at the hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if she met him, Swann, there, she would be offended, she would say to herself that she was being followed, she would love him less, perhaps she would turn away angrily when she saw him. ‘So, I no longer have the right to travel!' she would say to him when they returned, whereas really he was the one who no longer had the right to travel!

For a while he had had the idea, so as to be able to go to Compiègne and Pierrefonds without appearing to be doing it in order to meet Odette, of contriving to be taken there by one of his friends, the Marquis de Forestelle, who had a château in the vicinity. The Marquis, to whom he had communicated his plan without letting him know the reason for it, was beside himself with joy and marvelled that Swann, for the first time in fifteen years, was at last consenting to come to see his estate and, since he did not want to stay there, as he had told him, at least promised to take walks and go on excursions with him for a few days. Swann pictured himself already down there with M. de Forestelle. Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her there, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance: in the courtyard of the château, now beautiful to him because it was for her sake that he had gone to see it; in every street of the town, which seemed to him romantic; on every road in the forest, rosy in the deep and tender sunset; – numberless and alternative asylums, where, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his multiplied heart simultaneously came to take refuge, happy and vagabond. ‘Whatever we do, he would say to M. de Forestelle, let's take care we don't stumble on Odette and the Verdurins; I've just
learned they're in Pierrefonds today, in fact. There's time enough for us to see one another in Paris, it wouldn't be worth the trouble of leaving Paris if they couldn't take a step without me or I without them.' And his friend would not understand why, once he was there, he would change a plan twenty times, inspect the dining-rooms of all the hotels in Compiègne without making up his mind to sit down in any of them even though not a trace of the Verdurins had been seen, looking as though he were searching for the very thing he had said he wanted to avoid and then avoiding it as soon as he found it, because if he had encountered the little group, he would pointedly have gone off, glad he had seen Odette and that she had seen him, especially that she had seen him not bothering about her. But no, she would certainly guess that it was for her sake that he was there. And when M. de Forestelle came to pick him up so that they could leave, he said to him: ‘Alas, no, I can't go to Pierrefonds today, Odette is there, as it turns out.' And Swann was happy despite everything to feel that, if alone of all mortals that day he was not allowed to go to Pierrefonds, it was because for Odette he was in fact someone different from the others, her lover, and that this restriction which was applied in his case alone to the universal right to freedom of movement was merely one of the forms of that slavery, of that love which was so dear to him. Decidedly it was better not to risk quarrelling with her, to be patient, to wait for her to come back. He spent his days bent over a map of the Compiègne forest as if it were the Map of Love,
⁷⁵
and surrounded himself with photographs of the château at Pierrefonds. As soon as the day arrived on which it was possible that she would be coming back, he opened the time-table again, calculated which train she must have taken and, if she had been delayed, those that were still available for her. He did not go out for fear of missing a telegram, did not go to bed in case, having returned on the last train, she wanted to surprise him by coming to see him in the middle of the night. In fact he heard the bell at the carriage gate, it seemed to him they were slow opening it, he wanted to wake up the concierge, went to the window to call out to Odette if it was she, for despite the instructions he had gone downstairs to give the servants himself more than ten times, they were still capable of telling her he was not there. It was a servant coming
home. He noticed the incessant stream of the passing carriages, to which he had never paid attention in the past. He listened to each one come from far off, draw near, pass his gate without stopping and go on into the distance bearing a message that was not for him. He waited all night, quite uselessly, for the Verdurins had decided to return early, and Odette had been in Paris since noon; it had not occurred to her to tell him; not knowing what to do, she had gone and spent her evening alone at the theatre and long ago, by now, she had returned home to bed and gone to sleep.

The fact was that she had not even thought of him. And occasions such as this when she forgot Swann's very existence were more useful to Odette, did more to attach Swann to her, than all her coquetry. Because in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had already been powerful enough to make his love blossom on the night when he had not found Odette at the Verdurins' and had searched for her all evening. And he did not have, as I had at Combray in my childhood, happy days during which to forget the sufferings that will return at night. Swann spent his days without Odette; and now and then he said to himself that to allow such a pretty woman to go out alone in Paris like that was as imprudent as to put a case full of jewels in the middle of the street. Then he would become indignant at all the people passing by as at so many thieves. But their faces, formless, collective, escaped the grasp of his imagination and did not feed his jealousy. Swann's mind would become exhausted, until, passing his hand over his eyes, he would exclaim: ‘We must trust in God,' like those who, after having persisted in embracing the problem of the reality of the external world or the immortality of the soul, grant their tired brains the relief of an act of faith. But always the thought of the absent woman was indissolubly mingled with the simplest actions of Swann's life – having lunch, receiving his mail, leaving the house, going to bed – by the very sadness he felt over performing them without her, like the initials of Philibert le Beau, which, in the church at Brou,
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because of the longing she felt for him, Margaret of Austria intertwined everywhere with her own. On certain days, instead of staying at home, he would go and have his lunch in a restaurant not far from his house whose good cooking he had appreciated once upon
a time and to which he now went only for one of those reasons, at once mystical and preposterous, that we call romantic; the fact was that this restaurant (which still exists) bore the same name as the street in which Odette lived:
Lapérouse
.
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Sometimes, when she had gone away briefly, it was only after several days that she thought of letting him know she had returned to Paris. And she would say to him quite simply, no longer taking the precaution as she once had of covering herself, just in case, with a little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just returned that moment by the morning train. These words were mendacious; at least for Odette they were mendacious, insubstantial, not having, as they would have had if they had been true, a basis in her memory of her arrival at the station; in fact, she was even kept from picturing them to herself at the moment she uttered them, by the contradictory image of what she had been doing that was quite different at the moment she was claiming she had got off the train. But in Swann's mind it was just the opposite, these words, encountering no obstacle, encrusted themselves and assumed the immobility of a truth so indubitable that if a friend told him he had come by that train and had not seen Odette Swann would be convinced it was the friend who was mistaken about the day or the hour, since his account did not agree with what Odette had said. Her words would have seemed to him false only if he had suspected beforehand that they were. For him to believe she was lying, a previous suspicion was a necessary condition. In fact it was also a sufficient condition. Then everything Odette said to him would appear suspect. If he heard her mention a name, it was certainly the name of one of her lovers; the supposition once forged, he would spend weeks grieving; he even had an interview once with a private investigation agency in order to find out the address and the daily routine of the stranger who would not let him breathe easily except when he went off on a trip, and who, he learned in the end, was an uncle of Odette's dead for the past twenty years.