Swann's Way
pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own
system of aesthetic. He told himself that, in choosing the thought of
Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not,
as he had until then supposed, falling back, merely, upon an expedient
of doubtful and certainly inadequate value, since she contained in
herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He
failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring
Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply
because his desires had always run counter to his aesthetic taste. The
words 'Florentine painting' were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him
(gave him, as it were, a legal title) to introduce the image of Odette
into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been
debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. And
whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his
misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her
beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, those misgivings were swept
away and that love confirmed now that he could re-erect his estimate of
her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles; while the kiss,
the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and but moderately
attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered
flesh and sluggish blood, coming, as now they came, to crown his
adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as
exquisite as they would be supernatural.
And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done
nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was
not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an
inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different,
an especially charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would
contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind
of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual
thrill of a collector.
On his study table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were a
photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's Daughter. He would
gaze in admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the
imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair
that fell along her tired cheeks; and, adapting what he had already felt
to be beautiful, on aesthetic grounds, to the idea of a living woman,
he converted it into a series of physical merits which he congratulated
himself on finding assembled in the person of one whom he might,
ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a
spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh
and blood, of Jethro's Daughter, became a desire which more than
compensated, thenceforward, for that with which Odette's physical charms
had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat for a long time
gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli,
who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him
the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette
against his heart.
It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains
to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own; feeling that,
since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer
to have very much to say to him when they did meet, he was afraid
lest the manner--at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly
unalterable--which she now adopted when they were together should
ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when
she would make avowal of her passion, by which hope alone he had become
and would remain her lover. And so to alter, to give a fresh moral
aspect to that Odette, of whose unchanging mood he was afraid of growing
weary, he wrote, suddenly, a letter full of hinted discoveries and
feigned indignation, which he sent off so that it should reach her
before dinner-time. He knew that she would be frightened, and that she
would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at
her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard
her utter: and he was right--by repeating this device he had won from
her the most affectionate letters that she had, so far, written him, one
of them (which she had sent to him at midday by a special messenger from
the Maison Dorée--it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête given for
the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) beginning "My dear, my hand
trembles so that I can scarcely write----"; and these letters he had
kept in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she
had not had time to write, when he arrived at the Verdurins' she would
come running up to him with an "I've something to say to you!" and he
would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what
she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.
Even as he drew near to the Verdurins' door, and caught sight of the
great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were
never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming
creature whom he would see, as he entered the room, basking in that
golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out, sharp
and black, between lamp and window, shutting off the light, like those
little pictures which one sees sometimes pasted here and there upon a
glass screen, whose other panes are mere transparencies. He would try
to make out Odette. And then, when he was once inside, without thinking,
his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin
said to the painter: "H'm. Seems to be getting warm." Indeed, her
presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited
seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which
ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his
heart.
And so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism,
namely the 'little clan,' were transformed for Swann into a series of
daily encounters with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to
the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing
which he incurred no very great risk since, even although he had written
to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and
accompany her home.
But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark
drive together, he had taken his other 'little girl' all the way to the
Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at
the Verdurins', he was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing
that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare
of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish; he shook with the
sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began
then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that
certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of
all our pleasures) reduced, if it did not altogether blind him to its
dimensions.
"Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn't here?" M.
Verdurin asked his wife. "I think we may say that he's hooked."
"The face he pulled?" exploded Dr. Cottard who, having left the house
for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and
did not know whom they were discussing.
"D'you mean to say you didn't meet him on the doorstep--the loveliest of
Swanns?"
"No. M. Swann has been here?"
"Just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a Swann tremendously agitated.
In a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left."
"You mean to say that she has gone the 'whole hog' with him; that she
has 'burned her boats'?" inquired the Doctor cautiously, testing the
meaning of his phrases.
"Why, of course not; there's absolutely nothing in it; in fact, between
you and me, I think she's making a great mistake, and behaving like a
silly little fool, which she is, incidentally."
"Come, come, come!" said M. Verdurin, "How on earth do you know that
there's 'nothing in it'? We haven't been there to see, have we now?"
"She would have told me," answered Mme. Verdurin with dignity. "I may
say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I
told her that she ought to live with him. She makes out that she can't;
she admits, she was immensely attracted by him, at first; but he's
always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she
doesn't care for him in that way, she says; it's an ideal love,
'Platonic,' you know; she's afraid of rubbing the bloom off--oh, I don't
know half the things she says, how should I? And yet he's exactly the
sort of man she wants."
"I beg to differ from you," M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. "I am
only half satisfied with the gentleman. I feel that he 'poses.'"
Mme. Verdurin's whole body stiffened, her eyes stared blankly as though
she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device by means of which
she might be supposed not to have caught the sound of that unutterable
word which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to 'pose'
in her house, and, therefore, that there were people in the world who
'mattered more' than herself.
"Anyhow, if there is nothing in it, I don't suppose it's because our
friend believes in her virtue. And yet, you never know; he seems to
believe in her intelligence. I don't know whether you heard the way he
lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata. I am devoted
to Odette, but really--to expound theories of aesthetic to her--the man
must be a prize idiot."
"Look here, I won't have you saying nasty things about Odette," broke in
Mme. Verdurin in her 'spoiled child' manner. "She is charming."
"There's no reason why she shouldn't be charming; we are not saying
anything nasty about her, only that she is not the embodiment of either
virtue or intellect. After all," he turned to the painter, "does it
matter so very much whether she is virtuous or not? You can't tell; she
might be a great deal less charming if she were."
On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins' butler, who had been
somewhere else a moment earlier, when he arrived, and who had been asked
by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she
would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prévost's on her
way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost's, but every few yards
his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street,
loathsome obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath
his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would
delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He
counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to
be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure, and so,
possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his
arriving at Prévost's in time, and of finding her still there. And then,
in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep
and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his
mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself
and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the
thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard
at the Verdurins' that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from
which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as
though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because
he would not see Odette, now, till to-morrow, exactly what he had been
hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme. Verdurin's. He was