In Search of Lost Time (50 page)

He returned to this point of view – which was opposed to that of his love and his jealousy, and in which he placed himself sometimes through a sort of intellectual equity in order to allow for the various probabilities – from which he tried to judge Odette as if he had never loved her, as if to him she were a woman like any other, as if Odette's life had not been, as soon as he was no longer there, different, contrived in hiding from him, plotted against him.

Why should he believe that there, she would enjoy with Forcheville or with other men intoxicating pleasures which she had never experienced with him and which his jealousy alone had fabricated out of nothing? In Bayreuth as in Paris, if Forcheville happened to think of him, it might be merely as of someone who mattered a great deal in Odette's life, to whom he was obliged to yield his place, when they met at her house. If Forcheville and she gloated over being there despite him, it was he who would be to blame for it by trying uselessly to prevent her from going, whereas if he had approved of her plan, which was in fact defensible, she would have appeared to be there on his recommendation, she would feel she had been sent there, housed there by him, and for the pleasure she felt in entertaining those people who had entertained her so often, it was to Swann that she would have been grateful.

And – instead of letting her go off on bad terms with him, without having seen him again – if he sent her this money, if he encouraged her to take this trip and went out of his way to make it pleasant for her, she would come running to him, happy, grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her, a joy which he had not experienced for almost a week and which nothing could replace. Because as soon as Swann could picture her without horror, as soon as he again saw kindness in her smile, and as soon as the desire to take her out of reach of all other men was not added by jealousy to his love, that love again
became above all a predilection for the sensations that Odette's person gave him, for the pleasure he took in admiring like a spectacle or questioning like a phenomenon the dawn of one of her glances, the evolution of one of her smiles, the emission of an intonation of her voice. And this pleasure, different from all the others, had ended by creating in him a need for her that she alone could satisfy by her presence or her letters, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse, as another need that characterized this new period in Swann's life, in which the dryness, the depression of earlier years had been succeeded by a sort of spiritual over-fullness, without his knowing to what it was that he owed this unhoped-for enrichment of his inner life any more than does a person of delicate health who at a certain moment begins to grow stronger, stouter, and seems for some time to be on the path to a complete recovery: that other need which was also developing apart from the real world was the need to hear, and to know, music.

And so, with the very chemistry of his disease, after he had created jealousy with his love, he began again to manufacture affection, pity for Odette. She had turned back into the Odette who was charming and good. He felt remorse at having been severe towards her. He wanted her to come to him, and, before that, he wanted to procure her some sort of pleasure, so as to see gratitude mould her face and shape her smile.

And Odette, sure of seeing him come after a few days, as tender and submissive as before, to ask her for a reconciliation, acquired the habit of no longer being afraid of displeasing him or even provoking him and she refused him, when it was convenient for her, the favours he valued most.

Perhaps she did not realize how sincere he had been with her during the quarrel, when he had told her he would not send her any money and would try to hurt her. Perhaps she also did not realize how sincere he was, if not with her, at least with himself, on other occasions when for the sake of the future of their relationship, so as to show Odette he was capable of doing without her, that a break was always possible, he decided to let some time pass without going to see her.

Sometimes this was after several days during which she had not
given him any new reason to worry; and since, from the next few visits he would make to her, he knew he would not derive any very great joy but more probably some vexation that would put an end to his present state of calm, he would write to her that since he was very busy he would not be able to see her on any of the days on which he had said he would. Then a letter from her, crossing his, would ask him to change one of those very meetings. He would wonder why; his suspicions, his anguish would take hold of him again. He would no longer be able to abide, in the new state of agitation in which he found himself, by the commitment he had made in his earlier state of relative calm, he would hurry to her house and demand to see her on all the following days. And even if she had not written to him first, if she merely answered, with an acquiescence, his request for a brief separation, this would be enough to make him unable to go on without seeing her. For, contrary to Swann's calculations, Odette's consent had entirely changed his attitude. Like all those who enjoy the possession of a thing, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it he had removed that thing from his mind, leaving everything else in the same state as when the thing was there. But the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.

But there were other occasions – Odette was about to go off on a trip – when, after some little dispute for which he had chosen the pretext, he would resolve not to write to her and not to see her again before she returned, thus giving the appearance, and expecting the reward, of a more serious quarrel, which she would perhaps believe was final, to a separation the greater part of which was unavoidable because of the trip and which he was merely allowing to begin a little earlier. Already he imagined Odette uneasy, distressed at having received neither visit nor letter, and this image, by calming his jealousy, made it easy for him to break himself of the habit of seeing her. No doubt, at times, at the far end of his mind where his resolution had thrust her because of the entire interposed length of the three weeks of separation he had accepted, it was with pleasure that he contemplated the idea that he would see Odette again when she returned; but it was
also with so little impatience that he began to ask himself if he would not readily double the duration of an abstinence that was so easy. It had lasted as yet only three days, a period of time much shorter than he had often spent without seeing Odette and without having as now planned it in advance. And yet at this point a slight irritation or physical discomfort – by inciting him to consider the present moment as an exceptional moment, outside the rules, one in which even common wisdom would agree that he could accept the appeasement afforded by a pleasure and allow his will, until it might be useful to resume the effort, to rest – would suspend the action of the latter, which would cease to exert its compression; or, less than that, the memory of something he had forgotten to ask Odette, whether she had decided which colour she wanted to have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to a certain investment, whether it was ordinary or preferred shares that she wanted to buy (it was all very well to show her that he could live without seeing her, but if, after that, the painting had to be done all over again or the shares paid no dividends, a lot of good it would have done him), and like a stretched rubber band that is let go or the air in a pneumatic machine that is opened, the idea of seeing her again would spring back from the far distance where it had been kept into the field of the present as an immediate possibility.

It came back without encountering any further resistance, and was in fact so irresistible that Swann had had much less difficulty feeling the approach one by one of the fifteen days he was going to be separated from Odette than he had waiting the ten minutes which his coachman took to harness the carriage that was going to take him to her house and which he spent in transports of impatience and joy, seizing over and over a thousand times, in order to lavish his tenderness on it, the idea of meeting her again, which, by so abrupt a return, at the moment when he thought it was so far away, was once again with him in his closest consciousness. For this thought no longer encountered the obstacle of Swann's desire to attempt forthwith to resist it, a desire which had ceased to have any place in Swann's mind since, having proved to himself – at least this was what he believed – that he was so easily capable of it, he no longer saw any disadvantage in deferring an attempt at separation that he was now certain he could
put into execution whenever he wished. And, too, this idea of seeing her again returned to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, endowed with a virulence which habit had dulled, but which had been retempered in that privation not of three days but of fifteen (for a period of renunciation must be calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted what had been until then an expected pleasure which could easily be sacrificed into an unhoped-for happiness which he was powerless to resist. Finally, the idea returned to Swann embellished by his ignorance of what Odette might have thought, perhaps done, seeing that he had given her no sign of life, so that what he was now going to find was the impassioning revelation of an Odette almost unknown to him.

But just as she had believed that his refusal of the money was only a sham, she saw nothing but a pretext in the information that Swann came to ask of her about the carriage to be repainted or the shares to be purchased. For she could not reconstruct the various phases of these crises through which he was passing and, in the notion she had formed of them, she did not understand the mechanism by which they worked, and looked only to what she knew beforehand, to their necessary, infallible and always identical termination. A notion that was incomplete – and therefore all the more profound, perhaps – if one judged it from the point of view of Swann, who would no doubt have thought he was misunderstood by Odette, just as a morphine addict or a consumptive, persuaded that they have been prevented, one by an outside event just when he was about to free himself of his inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition just when he was about to be restored to health at last, feel misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance they do to these alleged contingencies, mere disguises according to him, assumed, so as to make themselves perceptible again to his patients, by the vice and the morbid condition which, in reality, have not ceased to burden them incurably while they were feeding their dreams of reformation or recovery. And in fact, Swann's love had reached the stage where the doctor and, in certain affections, even the boldest surgeon, ask themselves if ridding a patient of his vice or relieving him of his disease is still reasonable or even possible.

Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct awareness. When he tried to measure it, it sometimes seemed to him diminished, reduced to almost nothing; for example, the lack of pleasure, the displeasure, almost, inspired in him, before he loved Odette, by her expressive features, her faded complexion, came back to him on certain days. ‘Really, I'm making some progress, he would say to himself the next day; when I think about it carefully, I hardly enjoyed myself at all yesterday when I was in bed with her: it's odd, I actually found her ugly.' And of course, he was sincere, but his love extended well beyond the realms of physical desire. Odette's body itself no longer had a large place in it. When his eyes fell upon Odette's photograph on the table, or when she came to see him, he had trouble identifying the figure of flesh or cardboard with the painful and constant disturbance that inhabited him. He would say to himself almost with surprise: ‘It's she!' as if suddenly we were shown in a separate, external form one of our own diseases and found that it did not resemble what we were suffering. ‘She' – he tried to ask himself what that was; for what love and death have in common, more than those vague qualities that people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality. And this disease which was Swann's love had so proliferated, it was so closely entangled with all Swann's habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that, when by chance he reappeared in society telling himself that his connections, like an elegant setting that she would not in fact have been able to appreciate with much accuracy, could restore a little of his value in Odette's eyes (and this would perhaps indeed have been true had these connections not been lowered in value by that love itself, which for Odette depreciated all the things it touched by seeming to proclaim them less precious), what he experienced there, along with the distress of being in places and among people whom she did not know, was the disinterested pleasure he would have taken in a novel
or a painting which depicted the amusements of a leisured class, just as, in his own house, he enjoyed contemplating the functioning of his domestic life, the elegance of his wardrobe and livery, the proper placement of his stocks, in the same way that he enjoyed reading in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, about the ‘mechanics' of Mme de Maintenon's daily life,
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her meals, about the shrewd avarice and grand style of Lully.
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And to the small extent that this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure that Swann was enjoying was that he could emigrate for a while into the rare parts of himself that had remained almost foreign to his love and to his pain. In this respect the personality which my great-aunt attributed to him, of ‘young Swann', distinct from his more individual personality of Charles Swann, was the one in which he was now happiest. One day when, for the birthday of the Princess of Parma (and because she could often please Odette indirectly by making it possible for her to have seats at galas, jubilees, and other occasions), he had wanted to send her some fruit and was not sure how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother's, a lady who, delighted to do an errand for him, had written to him, when sending him the account, that she had not got all the fruit at the same place, but the grapes at Crapote's, whose specialty they were, the strawberries at Jauret's, the pears at Chevet's, where they were the loveliest, etc., ‘each piece of fruit inspected and examined individually by me'. And indeed, from the Princess's thanks, he had been able to judge the flavour of the strawberries and the mellowness of the pears. But more importantly, that ‘each piece of fruit inspected and examined individually by me' had soothed his pain, by taking his consciousness away into a region where he rarely went, even though it was his by right as the heir to a rich and solid bourgeois family in which had been preserved by heredity, quite ready to be put at his service whenever he wished, a knowledge of the ‘best addresses' and the art of placing a proper order.