Swann's Way
nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the
flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.
Passing by (on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way
above the street, was the ground floor of the house) Odette's bedroom,
which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel
with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between
dark painted walls, from which hung Oriental draperies, strings of
Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord
from the ceiling (which last, however, so that her visitors should not
have to complain of the want of any of the latest comforts of
Western civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two
drawing-rooms, large and small. These were entered through a narrow
lobby, the wall of which, chequered with the lozenges of a wooden
trellis such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from
end to end by a long rectangular box in which bloomed, as though in a
hothouse, a row of large chrysanthemums, at that time still
uncommon, though by no means so large as the mammoth blossoms which
horticulturists have since succeeded in making grow. Swann was
irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been
'the rage' in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this
occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby shot with rays of pink
and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars,
which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter
afternoons. Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which
left her neck and arms bare. She had made him sit down beside her in one
of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the
various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palmtrees growing
out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by screens upon which were fastened
photographs and fans and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, "You're
not comfortable there; wait a minute, I'll arrange things for you," and
with a titter of laughter, the complacency of which implied that
some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she
had installed behind his head and beneath his feet great cushions of
Japanese silk, which she pummelled and buffeted as though determined to
lavish on him all her riches, and regardless of their value. But when
her footman began to come into the room, bringing, one after another,
the innumerable lamps which (contained, mostly, in porcelain vases)
burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon
so many altars, rekindling in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of
this winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate,
more human--filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of
some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a
standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted
windows at once revealed and screened from sight--she had kept an eye
sharply fixed on the servant, to see whether he set each of the lamps
down in the place appointed it. She felt that, if he were to put
even one of them where it ought not to be, the general effect of her
drawing-room would be destroyed, and that her portrait, which rested
upon a sloping easel draped with plush, would not catch the light. And
so, with feverish impatience, she followed the man's clumsy movements,
scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of beaupots,
which she made a point of always tidying herself, in case the plants
should be knocked over--and went across to them now to make sure that he
had not broken off any of the flowers. She found something 'quaint' in
the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the
cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite
flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least
like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk
or satin. "It looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining
of my cloak," she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of
respect in her voice for so 'smart' a flower, for this distinguished,
unexpected sister whom nature had suddenly bestowed upon her, so far
removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so
refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to
her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued
dragons painted upon a bowl or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a
fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silver-work with
ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved
in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the
monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency
of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across
and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling them 'darlings.' And these
affectations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of some of her
attitudes, notably her devotion to Our Lady of the Laghetto who had
once, when Odette was living at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and
whose medal, in gold, she always carried on her person, attributing
to it unlimited powers. She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon
or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," went on, smiling, "A
cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you
like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to
her, something precious, and love is so far obliged to find some
justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration in pleasures
which, on the contrary, would have no existence apart from love and must
cease with its passing, that when he left her, at seven o'clock, to go
and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in
his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon's
adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself: "What fun
it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could
always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding,
a really good cup of tea." An hour or so later he received a note from
Odette, and at once recognised that florid handwriting, in which an
affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its
shapeless characters, significant, perhaps, to less intimate eyes
than his, of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of
sincerity and decision. Swann had left his cigarette-case at her house.
"Why," she wrote, "did you not forget your heart also? I should never
have let you have that back."
More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her, a little
later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to
meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind; and the necessity, if he
was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and
rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of
those cheeks which were so often languorous and sallow, except when
they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute
depression, as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and
one's actual happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which
she had asked to see. She was not very well; she received him, wearing
a wrapper of mauve _crêpe de Chine_, which draped her bosom, like a
mantle, with a richly embroidered web. As she stood there beside him,
brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one
knee in what was almost a dancer's pose, so that she could lean without
tiring herself over the picture, at which she was gazing, with bended
head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when
there was nothing to animate her, Swann was struck by her resemblance to
the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's Daughter, which is to be seen in one
of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination
in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general
characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but
rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual
features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in a bust
of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the prominent cheekbones, the
slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman
Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de Palancy; in a
portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an
outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen
eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted,
in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of
life, had talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find
a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his
perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had
admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give
those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness
to life; a modern, almost a topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far
succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he
felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious
and refreshing allusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and
repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had
retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine
satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the
abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern
original, whom it was not intended to represent. However that might be,
and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he, for some time
past, had been receiving--though, indeed, they had come to him rather
through the channel of his appreciation of music--had enriched his
appetite for painting as well, it was with an unusual intensity
of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his
character and conduct, that Swann remarked Odette's resemblance to the
Zipporah of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom one shrinks from giving
his more popular surname, now that 'Botticelli' suggests not so much the
actual work of the Master as that false and banal conception of it which
has of late obtained common currency. He no longer based his estimate
of the merit of Odette's face on the more or less good quality of her
cheeks, and the softness and sweetness--as of carnation-petals--which,
he supposed, would greet his lips there, should he ever hazard an
embrace, but regarded it rather as a skein of subtle and lovely silken
threads, which his gazing eyes collected and wound together, following
the curving line from the skein to the ball, where he mingled the
cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her
eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself, in which her type was
made clearly intelligible.
He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in
her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to
recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was only thinking
of her in her absence; and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine
masterpiece was probably based upon his discovery that it had been
reproduced in her, the similarity enhanced her beauty also, and rendered
her more precious in his sight. Swann reproached himself with his
failure, hitherto, to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the
great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his