Swann's Way
our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the
opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for
us to remember all that follows. And if she begin in the middle, where
it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only, we are
well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow
our partner, without hesitation, at the first pause in her voice.
Odette de Crécy came again to see Swann; her visits grew more frequent,
and doubtless each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he
felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in
the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite
of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to
him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he
spontaneously admired. It must be remarked that Odette's face appeared
thinner and more prominent than it actually was, because her forehead
and the upper part of her cheeks, a single and almost plane surface,
were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period,
drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray
locks over her ears; while as for her figure, and she was admirably
built, it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of
the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the
best-dressed women in Paris) for the corset, jetting forwards in an
arch, as though over an imaginary stomach, and ending in a sharp point,
beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, gave a woman,
that year, the appearance of being composed of different sections badly
fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the
inner bodice follow, in complete independence, controlled only by the
fancy of their designer or the rigidity of their material, the line
which led them to the knots of ribbon, falls of lace, fringes of
vertically hanging jet, or carried them along the bust, but nowhere
attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the
architecture of their fripperies drew them towards or away from her
own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely
buried.
But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her
telling him how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again;
he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him
that it might not be very long, and the way in which she had looked at
him then, fixing upon him her fearful and imploring gaze, which gave her
a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in
the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with strings of black
velvet. "And won't you," she had ventured, "come just once and take tea
with me?" He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay--which, in reality,
he had abandoned years ago--on Vermeer of Delft. "I know that I am quite
useless," she had replied, "a little wild thing like me beside a learned
great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I
should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun
it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of
old papers!" she had gone on, with that self-satisfied air which a smart
woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to give herself
up, without fear of soiling her fingers, to some unclean task, such as
cooking the dinner, with her "hands right in the dish itself." "You will
only laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me," she
meant Vermeer, "I have never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I
see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some idea of what is going
on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head which I feel
sure is always puzzling away about things; just to be able to say
'There, that's what he's thinking about!' What a dream it would be to be
able to help you with your work."
He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new friendships, which he
gallantly described as his fear of a hopeless passion. "You are afraid
of falling in love? How funny that is, when I go about seeking nothing
else, and would give my soul just to find a little love somewhere!" she
had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had
been genuinely touched. "Some woman must have made you suffer. And you
think that the rest are all like her. She can't have understood you: you
are so utterly different from ordinary men. That's what I liked about
you when I first saw you; I felt at once that you weren't like everybody
else."
"And then, besides, there's yourself----" he had continued, "I know what
women are; you must have a whole heap of things to do, and never any
time to spare."
"I? Why, I have never anything to do. I am always free, and I always
will be free if you want me. At whatever hour of the day or night it may
suit you to see me, just send for me, and I shall be only too delighted
to come. Will you do that? Do you know what I should really like--to
introduce you to Mme. Verdurin, where I go every evening. Just fancy my
finding you there, and thinking that it was a little for my sake that
you had gone."
No doubt, in thus remembering their conversations, in thinking about her
thus when he was alone, he did no more than call her image into being
among those of countless other women in his romantic dreams; but if,
thanks to some accidental circumstance (or even perhaps without that
assistance, for the circumstance which presents itself at the moment
when a mental state, hitherto latent, makes itself felt, may well have
had no influence whatsoever upon that state), the image of Odette de
Crécy came to absorb the whole of his dreams, if from those dreams
the memory of her could no longer be eliminated, then her bodily
imperfections would no longer be of the least importance, nor would the
conformity of her body, more or less than any other, to the requirements
of Swann's taste; since, having become the body of her whom he loved, it
must henceforth be the only one capable of causing him joy or anguish.
It so happened that my grandfather had known--which was more than could
be said of any other actual acquaintance--the family of these Verdurins.
But he had entirely severed his connection with what he called "young
Verdurin," taking a general view of him as one who had fallen--though
without losing hold of his millions--among the riff-raff of Bohemia. One
day he received a letter from Swann asking whether my grandfather could
put him in touch with the Verdurins. "On guard! on guard!" he exclaimed
as he read it, "I am not at all surprised; Swann was bound to finish up
like this. A nice lot of people! I cannot do what he asks, because, in
the first place, I no longer know the gentleman in question. Besides,
there must be a woman in it somewhere, and I don't mix myself up in such
matters. Ah, well, we shall see some fun if Swann begins running after
the little Verdurins."
And on my grandfather's refusal to act as sponsor, it was Odette herself
who had taken Swann to the house.
The Verdurins had had dining with them, on the day when Swann made his
first appearance, Dr. and Mme. Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt,
and the painter then in favour, while these were joined, in the course
of the evening, by several more of the 'faithful.'
Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to
reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or
in earnest. And so in any event he would embellish all his facial
expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose
expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a
simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been
facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he
never dared to allow this smile a definite expression on his features,
and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which
you might decipher the question that he never dared to ask: "Do you
really mean that?" He was no more confident of the manner in which he
ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally,
than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by,
carriages, and anything that occurred with a malicious smile which
absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved,
if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware
of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of
his own.
On all those points, however, where a plain question appeared to him to
be permissible, the Doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate
the wilderness of his ignorance and uncertainty and so to complete his
education.
So it was that, following the advice given him by a wise mother on his
first coming up to the capital from his provincial home, he would never
let pass either a figure of speech or a proper name that was new to him
without an effort to secure the fullest information upon it.
As regards figures of speech, he was insatiable in his thirst for
knowledge, for often imagining them to have a more definite meaning than
was actually the case, he would want to know what, exactly, was intended
by those which he most frequently heard used: 'devilish pretty,' 'blue
blood,' 'a cat and dog life,' 'a day of reckoning,' 'a queen of fashion,
'to give a free hand,' 'to be at a deadlock,' and so forth; and in
what particular circumstances he himself might make use of them in
conversation. Failing these, he would adorn it with puns and other
'plays upon words' which he had learned by rote. As for the names of
strangers which were uttered in his hearing, he used merely to repeat
them to himself in a questioning tone, which, he thought, would suffice
to furnish him with explanations for which he would not ostensibly seek.
As the critical faculty, on the universal application of which he prided
himself, was, in reality, completely lacking, that refinement of good
breeding which consists in assuring some one whom you are obliging in
any way, without expecting to be believed, that it is really yourself
that is obliged to him, was wasted on Cottard, who took everything that
he heard in its literal sense. However blind she may have been to his
faults, Mme. Verdurin was genuinely annoyed, though she still continued
to regard him as brilliantly clever, when, after she had invited him to
see and hear Sarah Bernhardt from a stage box, and had said politely:
"It is very good of you to have come, Doctor, especially as I'm sure
you must often have heard Sarah Bernhardt; and besides, I'm afraid we're
rather too near the stage," the Doctor, who had come into the box with a
smile which waited before settling upon or vanishing from his face
until some one in authority should enlighten him as to the merits of the
spectacle, replied: "To be sure, we are far too near the stage, and
one is getting sick of Sarah Bernhardt. But you expressed a wish that
I should come. For me, your wish is a command. I am only too glad to be
able to do you this little service. What would one not do to please you,
you are so good." And he went on, "Sarah Bernhardt; that's what they
call the Voice of God, ain't it? You see, often, too, that she 'sets the
boards on fire.' That's an odd expression, ain't it?" in the hope of an
enlightening commentary, which, however, was not forthcoming.
"D'you know," Mme. Verdurin had said to her husband, "I believe we are
going the wrong way to work when we depreciate anything we offer the
Doctor. He is a scientist who lives quite apart from our everyday
existence; he knows nothing himself of what things are worth, and he
accepts everything that we say as gospel."