Swann's Way
observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the
barrenness of his life,--to feel himself transformed into a creature
foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost
a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world
through his two ears alone. And as, notwithstanding, he sought in the
little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend,
with what a strange frenzy of intoxication must he strip bare his
innermost soul of the whole armour of reason, and make it pass,
unattended, through the straining vessel, down into the dark filter of
sound. He began to reckon up how much that was painful, perhaps even how
much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase;
and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase
repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong!
He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused, he felt it
stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened
his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play him the phrase
again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she
must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those
earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How
closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until
lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour,
as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to
stop, saying: "How do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me?
I can't do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want; am I to
play the phrase or do you want to play with me?" Then he would become
annoyed, and she would burst out with a laugh which was transformed, as
it left her lips, and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else
she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy
to figure in Botticelli's 'Life of Moses,' he would place it there,
giving to Odette's neck the necessary inclination; and when he had
finished her portrait in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the
wall of the Sixtine, the idea that she was, none the less, in the room
with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed
and won, the idea of her material existence, of her being alive, would
sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting
from his head and jaws that parted as though to devour her, he would
fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks.
And then, as soon as he had left the house, not without returning to
kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to take away with him, in
memory, some detail of her fragrance or of her features, while he drove
home in his victoria, blessing the name of Odette who allowed him to pay
her these daily visits, which, although they could not, he felt, bring
any great happiness to her, still, by keeping him immune from the fever
of jealousy--by removing from him every possibility of a fresh outbreak
of the heart-sickness which had manifested itself in him that evening,
when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins'--might help him to
arrive, without any recurrence of those crises, of which the first had
been so distressing that it must also be the last, at the termination of
this strange series of hours in his life, hours almost enchanted, in the
same manner as these other, following hours, in which he drove through a
deserted Paris by the light of the moon: noticing as he drove home that
the satellite had now changed its position, relatively to his own,
and was almost touching the horizon; feeling that his love, also, was
obedient to these immutable laws of nature, he asked himself whether
this period, upon which he had entered, was to last much longer, whether
presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that dear countenance,
save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of
ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm. For Swann was finding
in things once more, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had
found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with
this difference, that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette
alone. He could feel reawakening in himself the inspirations of his
boyhood, which had been dissipated among the frivolities of his later
life, but they all bore, now, the reflection, the stamp of a particular
being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure
in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit, he became
gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.
He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent
her time during the day, any more than he knew of her past; so little,
indeed, that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing
us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
And so he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life
had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years
earlier, when he still did not know her, some one had spoken to him of a
woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette,
as of a 'tart,' a 'kept' woman, one of those women to whom he still
attributed (having lived but little in their company) the entire set of
characteristics, fundamentally perverse, with which they had been, for
many years, endowed by the imagination of certain novelists. He would
say to himself that one has, as often as not, only to take the exact
counterpart of the reputation created by the world in order to judge a
person fairly, when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette,
so good, so simple, so enthusiastic in the pursuit of ideals, so nearly
incapable of not telling the truth that, when he had once begged her, so
that they might dine together alone, to write to Mme. Verdurin, saying
that she was unwell, the next day he had seen her, face to face
with Mme. Verdurin, who asked whether she had recovered, blushing,
stammering, and, in spite of herself, revealing in every feature how
painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie; and, while in her
answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imaginary illness,
seeming to ask pardon, by her suppliant look and her stricken accents,
for the obvious falsehood of her words.
On certain days, however, though these came seldom, she would call upon
him in the afternoon, to interrupt his musings or the essay on Vermeer
to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that
Mme. de Crécy was in the small drawing-room. He would go in search of
her, and, when he opened the door, on Odette's blushing countenance, as
soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear--changing the curve
of her lips, the look in her eyes, the moulding of her cheeks--an
all-absorbing smile. Once he was left alone he would see again that
smile, and her smile of the day before, another with which she had
greeted him sometime else, the smile which had been her answer, in the
carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his
rearranging her cattleyas; and the life of Odette at all other times,
since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him upon a neutral and
colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon
which one sees, here and there, in every corner and in all directions,
traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But,
once in a while, illuminating a chink of that existence which Swann
still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was
not so, because he was unable to imagine anything that might occupy it,
some friend who knew them both, and suspecting that they were in love,
had not dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least
importance, would describe Odette's figure, as he had seen her, that
very morning, going on foot up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed
with skunks, wearing a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her
bosom. This simple outline reduced Swann to utter confusion by enabling
him suddenly to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not
wholly subordinated to his own; he burned to know whom she had been
seeking to fascinate by this costume in which he had never seen her; he
registered a vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going
at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless life--a
life almost nonexistent, since she was then invisible to him--of his
mistress, there had been but a single incident apart from all those
smiles directed towards himself; namely, her walking abroad beneath a
Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of violets in her bosom.
Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase instead of the
_Valse des Roses_, Swann made no effort to induce her to play the things
that he himself preferred, nor, in literature any more than in music, to
correct the manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was
not intelligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell her
about the great poets, she had imagined that she would suddenly get
to know whole pages of romantic and heroic verse, in the style of the
Vicomte de Borelli, only even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she
asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman
that had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she
had lost all interest in that painter. She would often say: "I'm sure,
poetry; well, of course, there'd be nothing like it if it was all true,
if the poets really believed the things they said. But as often as not
you'll find there's no one so mean and calculating as those fellows. I
know something about poetry. I had a friend, once, who was in love with
a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love, and
heaven, and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He had more than
three hundred thousand francs out of her before he'd finished." If,
then, Swann tried to shew her in what artistic beauty consisted, how one
ought to appreciate poetry or painting, after a minute or two she would
cease to listen, saying: "Yes... I never thought it would be like that."
And he felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to
lie to her, assuring her that what he had said was nothing, that he
had only touched the surface, that he had not time to go into it all
properly, that there was more in it than that. Then she would interrupt
with a brisk, "More in it? What?... Do tell me!", but he did not tell
her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different
from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was
afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the
same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love.
With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what
she had supposed. "You're always so reserved; I can't make you out." She
marvelled increasingly at his indifference to money, at his courtesy
to everyone alike, at the delicacy of his mind. And indeed it happens,
often enough, to a greater man than Swann ever was, to a scientist or
artist, when he is not wholly misunderstood by the people among whom
he lives, that the feeling in them which proves that they have been
convinced of the superiority of his intellect is created not by any
admiration for his ideas--for those are entirely beyond them--but by
their respect for what they term his good qualities. There was also the
respect with which Odette was inspired by the thought of Swann's social
position, although she had no desire that he should attempt to secure