Swann's Way
neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as
well as in the scriptural. And although her attitude was, doubtless,
habitual and instinctive, one which she knew to be appropriate to such
moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all
her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force
were drawing it down towards Swann's. And Swann it was who, before she
allowed her face, as though despite her efforts, to fall upon his lips,
held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance between his
hands. He had intended to leave time for her mind to overtake her body's
movements, to recognise the dream which she had so long cherished and to
assist at its realisation, like a mother invited as a spectator when
a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps,
moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not
yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for
the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his
departure, a traveller strives to bear away with him in memory the view
of a country to which he may never return.
But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which
had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete
surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or from reluctance to
appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked
the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which
could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first
occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If
she had any cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: "It is most
unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've
not been disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that
this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than
the others?" Or else, if she had none: "Oh! no cattleyas this evening;
then there's nothing for me to arrange." So that for some time there
was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first
evening, when he had started by touching her throat, with his fingers
first and then with his lips, but their caresses began invariably with
this modest exploration. And long afterwards, when the arrangement (or,
rather, the ritual pretence of an arrangement) of her cattleyas had
quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor "Do a cattleya," transmuted
into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its
original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical
possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing),
survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long forgotten custom
from which it sprang. And yet possibly this particular manner of saying
"to make love" had not the precise significance of its synonyms.
However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard
the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable
and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be
described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure
if the women concerned be--or be thought to be--so difficult as to
oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our
relations with them, as was originally for Swann the arrangement of the
cattleyas. He trembled as he hoped, that evening, (but Odette, he told
himself, if she were deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his
intention) that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge
for him from their large and richly coloured petals; and the pleasure
which he already felt, and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps
only because she was not yet aware of it herself, seemed to him for that
reason--as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid
the flowers of the earthly paradise--a pleasure which had never before
existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure--and the
special name which he was to give to it preserved its identity--entirely
individual and new.
The ice once broken, every evening, when he had taken her home, he must
follow her into the house; and often she would come out again in her
dressing-gown, and escort him to his carriage, and would kiss him before
the eyes of his coachman, saying: "What on earth does it matter what
people see?" And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins' (which
happened occasionally, now that he had opportunities of meeting Odette
elsewhere), when--more and more rarely--he went into society, she would
beg him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. The
season was spring, the nights clear and frosty. He would come away from
an evening party, jump into his victoria, spread a rug over his knees,
tell the friends who were leaving at the same time, and who insisted on
his going home with them, that he could not, that he was not going
in their direction; then the coachman would start off at a fast trot
without further orders, knowing quite well where he had to go. His
friends would be left marvelling, and, as a matter of fact, Swann was
no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now
demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention
to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to
be met. In a restaurant, or in the country, his manner was deliberately
and directly the opposite of that by which, only a few days earlier,
his friends would have recognised him, that manner which had seemed
permanently and unalterably his own. To such an extent does passion
manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not
only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates
the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible. On the
other hand, there was one thing that was, now, invariable, namely that
wherever Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on
afterwards to Odette. The interval of space separating her from him
was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend, by an
irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank,
as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have
preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way,
and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his
putting himself to such inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to
visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were
saying to one another: "He is tied hand and foot; there must certainly
be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all hours,"
made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose
existence is coloured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual
sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of their practical
interests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he may not
consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she
was waiting for him, that she was not anywhere or with anyone else, that
he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish,
forgotten, it is true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which
he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins' before
his arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which was so agreeable
that it might even be called a state of happiness. Perhaps it was to
that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which
Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so
immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the
power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person
seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with
poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on
which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann
could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him
in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his
victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early spring, and saw the
dazzling moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he
would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the
moon's, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and since
then had shed upon the world that mysterious light in which he saw it
bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants
to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden,
he would go round first into the other street, over which, at the
ground-level, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened) of
the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room.
He would rap upon the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer,
before running to meet him at the gate. He would find, lying open on the
piano, some of her favourite music, the _Valse des Roses_, the _Pauvre
Fou_ of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her
will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead,
to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata. It was true that
Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in
our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble
of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The
little phrase was associated still, in Swann's mind, with his love for
Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were
no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by
any but himself; he realised, too, that Odette's qualities were not such
as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in
her company. And often, when the cold government of reason stood
unchallenged, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his
intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the
little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate
in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of
Swann's soul were altered; a margin was left for a form of enjoyment
which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external
object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely
individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior to that
of other concrete things. This thirst for an untasted charm, the little
phrase would stimulate it anew in him, but without bringing him any
definite gratification to assuage it. With the result that those parts
of Swann's soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all care
for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men
alike, were left bare by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to
inscribe the name of Odette. Moreover, where Odette's affection might
seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would
come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence.
Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have
said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe
more deeply. And the pleasure which the music gave him, which was
shortly to create in him a real longing, was in fact closely akin,
at such moments, to the pleasure which he would have derived from
experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contract with a world
for which we men were not created, which appears to lack form because
our eyes cannot perceive it, to lack significance because it escapes
our intelligence, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. Deep
repose, mysterious refreshment for Swann,--for him whose eyes, although
delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute