In Search of Lost Time (51 page)

Certainly, he had forgotten he was ‘young Swann' for too long not to feel, when he became that person again briefly, a keener pleasure than those he might have felt at other times and which had palled; and if the friendliness of the bourgeoisie, for whom he had remained that
person more than anything else, was less keen than that of the aristocracy (but in fact more flattering, for with them at least it is always inseparable from respect), a letter from a royal personage, whatever princely entertainment it offered, could never be as pleasant to him as a letter asking him to be a witness, or merely to be present, at a wedding in the family of old friends of his parents, some of whom had continued to see him – like my grandfather, who, the year before, had invited him to my mother's wedding – while certain others barely knew him personally but believed they were obligated to be polite to the son, to the worthy successor, of the late M. Swann.

But, because of the already long-standing close ties he had among them, the nobility, to a certain extent, were also part of his house, his household and his family. He felt, when contemplating his distinguished friendships, the same external support, the same comfort, as when looking at the beautiful lands, the beautiful silverware, the beautiful table linen, that had come to him from his own people. And the thought that if he were to collapse at home from the effects of a sudden illness it would quite naturally be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duke of Luxembourg and the Baron de Charlus whom his valet would run off to find, brought him the same consolation as to our old Françoise the knowledge that she would be wrapped in a shroud of her own fine sheets, marked, not mended (or so finely that it gave only a loftier idea of the care of the seamstress), a shroud from the frequent image of which in her mind's eye she derived a certain satisfactory sense, if not of material well-being, at least of self-respect. But most importantly, since in every one of his actions and thoughts that referred to Odette, Swann was constantly governed and directed by the unavowed feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but less welcome to her than anyone else, than the most boring faithful of the Verdurins – when he returned to a world in which he was the highest example of excellence, whom one would do anything to attract, whom one was sorry not to see, he began to believe again in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite for it, as an invalid may feel who has been bedridden for months, on a strict diet, and who sees in a newspaper the menu for an official luncheon or an advertisement for a cruise to Sicily.

If he was obliged to give his excuses to the society people for not visiting them, it was precisely for his visits to her that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He even paid for them (asking himself at the end of the month, supposing he had abused her patience somewhat and gone to see her many times, if it was enough to send her four thousand francs), and for each one found a pretext, a present to bring her, a piece of information she needed, M. de Charlus, whom he had met going to her house and who had demanded that he accompany him. And lacking one, he would ask M. de Charlus if he would please run over to her house, remark to her as though spontaneously, in the course of the conversation, that he remembered he had something to say to Swann, would she kindly send for him to come to her house right away; but most often Swann would wait in vain and M. de Charlus would tell him in the evening that his plan had not succeeded. So that if she was often away from Paris now, even when she stayed there she saw very little of him, and she who, when she was in love with him, used to say: ‘I'm always free' and ‘What do I care what others think?', now, each time he wanted to see her, would invoke social conventions or plead other engagements. When he mentioned that he might be going to some charity ball, opening, première where she would be, she would tell him that he was trying to flaunt their affair, that he was treating her like a prostitute. It reached such a point that, in order to try not to be debarred from meeting her anywhere, Swann, knowing that she was acquainted with and had considerable affection for my Great-uncle Adolphe and having once been a friend of his himself, went to see him one day in his little apartment in the rue de Bellechasse to ask him to use his influence with Odette. Since she always adopted poetical airs when speaking to Swann of my uncle, saying: ‘Ah, yes, he's not like you, his friendship with me is a lovely thing, so grand, so handsome! He would never think so little of me as to want to show himself with me in every public place,' Swann was perplexed and did not know quite how lofty his tone ought to be in talking about her to my uncle. He posited first Odette's a priori excellence, her axiomatic and seraphic superhumanity, the revealed truth of her virtues, which could neither be demonstrated nor derived from experience. ‘I must talk to you. You know that Odette is a
woman superior to all other women, an adorable creature, an angel. But you know what life in Paris is like. Not everyone sees Odette in the same light as you and I. And so there are people who think the role I'm playing is rather ridiculous; she can't even allow me to meet her outside, at the theatre. She has such confidence in you – couldn't you say a few words to her for me, assure her that she's exaggerating the harm I would do her by greeting her in public?'

My uncle advised Swann to let a little time go by without seeing Odette, who would only love him the more for it, and Odette to allow Swann to meet her wherever he liked. A few days later, Odette told Swann she had just had the disappointment of discovering that my uncle was the same as every other man: he had just tried to take her by force. She quieted Swann when at first he wanted to go off and challenge my uncle, but he refused to shake his hand the next time he met him. He regretted this quarrel with my Uncle Adolphe all the more since he had hoped, had he seen him again from time to time and been able to chat with him in complete confidence, to try to shed some light on certain rumours relating to the life Odette had once led in Nice. For my Uncle Adolphe spent his winters there. And Swann thought that perhaps it was even there that he had met Odette. The little that had been let slip by someone in his presence, relating to a man who was said to have been Odette's lover, had greatly disturbed Swann. But the things he would have regarded, before knowing them, as the most frightful to learn and the most impossible to believe, once he knew them were incorporated for ever after into his sadness, he accepted them, he would no longer have been able to understand that they did not exist. Only each one indelibly revised the idea he was forming of his mistress. He was even given to understand, at one point, that this laxness in Odette's morals, which he would not have suspected, was fairly well known, and that in Baden and in Nice, when she used to spend a few months there, she had had a sort of amorous notoriety. He sought out certain womanizers in order to question them; but they were aware that he knew Odette; and besides, he was afraid of reminding them of her, of putting them on her track. But he to whom before then nothing could have appeared as tedious as anything relating to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or Nice, learning
that Odette had perhaps led a rather riotous life in those pleasure towns, though he could never manage to find out if it had been only to satisfy a need for money which thanks to him she no longer had, or from some capricious desire which might return, now leaned with an impotent, blind and dizzying anguish over the bottomless abyss that had swallowed up those early years of the Septennate
⁸⁴
during which one spent winters on the Promenade des Anglais, summers under the limes of Baden, and in them he saw a painful but magnificent profundity such as a poet might have lent them; and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of the petty events of the chronicle of the Côte d'Azur of that time, if that chronicle could have helped him understand something of Odette's smile or the look in her eyes – honest and simple though they were – more passion than an aesthete examining the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to try to penetrate farther into the soul of Botticelli's Primavera, bella Vanna or Venus.
⁸⁵
Often, without saying anything to her, he would gaze at her, he would day-dream; she would say to him: ‘How sad you look!' It was not as yet very long since he had moved on from the idea that she was a good person, comparable to the best he had ever known, to the idea that she was a kept woman; inversely he had sometimes since then returned from Odette de Crécy, perhaps too well known among the fast crowd, among ladies'-men, to this face whose expression was at times so gentle, to this nature so human. He would say to himself: ‘What does it matter that at Nice everyone knows Odette de Crécy? Reputations of this sort, even if true, are created out of other people's ideas'; he would reflect that this legend – even if it was authentic – lay outside Odette, was not inside her like an irreducible and baneful personality; that the creature who might have been led to do wrong was a woman with kind eyes, a heart full of pity for suffering, a docile body which he had held, which he had clasped in his arms and handled, a woman whom one day he might come to possess entirely, if he succeeded in making himself indispensable to her. She was there, often tired, her face emptied for a moment of that feverish, joyful preoccupation with the unknown things that made Swann suffer; she would push back her hair with her hands; her forehead, her face would appear broader; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some
good feeling such as may be found in all individuals when in a moment of rest or reclusion they are left to themselves, would spring from her eyes like a beam of yellow sunlight. And immediately her whole face would brighten like a grey countryside covered with clouds which suddenly part, transfiguring it, at the moment the sun goes down. The life that was in Odette at that moment, even the future she seemed so dreamily to be watching, Swann could have shared with her; no evil disturbance seemed to have left its residue there. Rare though they became, these moments were not entirely useless. In memory Swann joined these fragments together, eliminated the intervals, cast, as though in gold, an Odette formed of goodness and calm for whom (as will be seen in the second part of this story) he later made sacrifices which the other Odette would never have won from him. But these moments were so rare, and he saw her so little now! Even in the case of their evening meeting, she told him only at the last minute if she could grant it to him, for, since she could count on his always being free, she first wanted to be certain that no one else would suggest coming around. She maintained that she had to wait for an answer of the greatest importance, and if after she had sent for Swann friends asked Odette, when the evening had already begun, to meet them at the theatre or at supper, she would give a joyful leap into the air and dress quickly. As she progressed in her preparations, each movement she made would bring Swann closer to the moment when he would have to leave her, when she would fly off with an irresistible force; and when ready at last, plunging into her mirror a final glance strained and brightened by attention, she put a little more red on her lips, settled a lock of hair on her forehead and asked for her sky-blue evening cloak with gold tassels, Swann looked so sad that she could not suppress a gesture of impatience and said: ‘So that's how you thank me for letting you stay here till the last minute. And I thought I was doing something nice. I'll know better next time!' Now and then, at the risk of angering her, he would promise himself to try to find out where she had gone, he would dream of an alliance with Forcheville, who would perhaps have been able to enlighten him. In any case, when he knew who it was she had spent the evening with, it was very seldom that he could not discover among all his own acquaintance
someone who knew, if only indirectly, the man with whom she had gone out and could easily obtain this or that information about him. And while he was writing to one of his friends to ask him to try to clear up this or that point, he would feel how restful it was to stop asking himself his unanswerable questions and to be transferring to someone else the fatigue of interrogation. True, Swann was scarcely better off when he had certain information. Knowing a thing does not always mean preventing a thing, but at least the things we know, we hold, if not in our hands, at least in our minds where we can arrange them as we like, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them. He was happy each time M. de Charlus was with Odette. Between M. de Charlus and her, Swann knew that nothing could happen, that when M. de Charlus went out with her it was for the sake of his friendship with Swann and he would have no reluctance about telling him what she had done. Sometimes she had declared so categorically to Swann that it was impossible for her to see him on a certain evening, she seemed so keen on going out, that Swann attached real importance to M. de Charlus's being free to go with her. The next day, though he did not dare ask many questions of M. de Charlus, he would compel him, by appearing not quite to understand his first answers, to give him further answers, after each of which he would feel more relieved, because he very soon learned that Odette had occupied her evening with pleasures that were most innocent. ‘But what do you mean, my dear Mémé? I don't quite understand… You didn't go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? You had gone somewhere else first. No? Oh! How funny! You don't know how much you amuse me, my dear Mémé. But what a funny idea of hers to go on to the Chat Noir afterwards, that's certainly her sort of idea… No? It was you? How strange. But in fact it's not such a bad idea; she must have known a good many people there? No? She spoke to no one? That's extraordinary. So you stayed there like that just the two of you all by yourselves? I can just picture it. You are kind, my dear Mémé, I'm very fond of you.' Swann felt relieved. For him, to whom it had occasionally happened, when chatting casually with people to whom he was barely listening, that he sometimes heard certain remarks (as, for example: ‘I saw Mme de Crécy yesterday; she
was with a gentleman I don't know'), remarks which, as soon as they entered Swann's heart, solidified, hardened like an encrustation, cut into him, never moved from there again, how sweet by contrast were these words: ‘She knew no one, she spoke to no one,' how they circulated comfortably in him, how fluid they were, easy, breathable! And yet after a moment he would say to himself that Odette must find him quite tiresome if these were the pleasures she preferred to his company. And their insignificance, though it reassured him, nevertheless pained him like a betrayal.