Swann's Way
invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such attempts would be
bound to fail; perhaps, indeed, she feared lest, merely by speaking of
her to his friends, he should provoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind.
The fact remains that she had consistently held him to his promise never
to mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into society was,
she had told him, a quarrel which she had had, long ago, with another
girl, who had avenged herself by saying nasty things about her. "But,"
Swann objected, "surely, people don't all know your friend." "Yes,
don't you see, it's like a spot of oil; people are so horrid." Swann was
unable, frankly, to appreciate this point; on the other hand, he knew
that such generalisations as "People are so horrid," and "A word of
scandal spreads like a spot of oil," were generally accepted as true;
there must, therefore, be cases to which they were literally applicable.
Could Odette's case be one of these? He teased himself with the
question, though not for long, for he too was subject to that mental
oppression which had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced
by a difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which
concealed such terrors for Odette inspired her, probably, with no very
great longing to enter it, since it was too far removed from the world
which she already knew for her to be able to form any clear conception
of it. At the same time, while in certain respects she had retained a
genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a
little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark
and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted
to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether that held
by fashionable people. For the latter, fashion is a thing that emanates
from a comparatively small number of leaders, who project it to a
considerable distance--with more or less strength according as one
is nearer to or farther from their intimate centre--over the widening
circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names
form a sort of tabulated index. People 'in society' know this index by
heart, they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they
have extracted a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation
that Swann, for example, without needing to draw upon his knowledge of
the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had
been guests at a dinner, could tell at once how fashionable the dinner
had been, just as a man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can
estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. But Odette was one
of those persons (an extremely numerous class, whatever the fashionable
world may think, and to be found in every section of society) who do
not share this knowledge, but imagine fashion to be something of quite
another kind, which assumes different aspects according to the circle to
which they themselves belong, but has the special characteristic--common
alike to the fashion of which Odette used to dream and to that before
which Mme. Cottard bowed--of being directly accessible to all. The other
kind, the fashion of 'fashionable people,' is, it must be admitted,
accessible also; but there are inevitable delays. Odette would say of
some one: "He never goes to any place that isn't really smart."
And if Swann were to ask her what she meant by that, she would answer,
with a touch of contempt, "Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy,
at your age, having to be told what the smart places are in Paris! What
do you expect me to say? Well, on Sunday mornings there's the Avenue de
l'Impératrice, and round the lake at five o'clock, and on Thursdays
the Eden-Théâtre, and the Hippodrome on Fridays; then there are the
balls..."
"What balls?"
"Why, silly, the balls people give in Paris; the smart ones, I mean.
Wait now, Herbinger, you know who I mean, the fellow who's in one of
the jobbers' offices; yes, of course, you must know him, he's one of the
best-known men in Paris, that great big fair-haired boy who wears
such swagger clothes; he always has a flower in his buttonhole and a
light-coloured overcoat with a fold down the back; he goes about with
that old image, takes her to all the first-nights. Very well! He gave
a ball the other night, and all the smart people in Paris were there.
I should have loved to go! but you had to shew your invitation at the
door, and I couldn't get one anywhere. After all, I'm just as glad,
now, that I didn't go; I should have been killed in the crush, and seen
nothing. Still, just to be able to say one had been to Herbinger's ball.
You know how vain I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the
people who tell you they were there are telling stories.... But I am
surprised that you weren't there, a regular 'tip-topper' like you."
Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashion;
feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous,
devoid of all importance, he saw no advantage to be gained by imparting
it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased
to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except
when they were the means of his obtaining tickets for the paddock at
race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre. She hoped that he would
continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances, but she had come to
regard them as less smart since the day when she had passed the Marquise
de Villeparisis in the street, wearing a black serge dress and a bonnet
with strings.
"But she looks like a pew-opener, like an old charwoman, darling! That a
marquise! Goodness knows I'm not a marquise, but you'd have to pay me
a lot of money before you'd get me to go about Paris rigged out like
that!"
Nor could she understand Swann's continuing to live in his house on the
Quai d'Orléans, which, though she dared not tell him so, she considered
unworthy of him.
It was true that she claimed to be fond of 'antiques,' and used to
assume a rapturous and knowing air when she confessed how she loved
to spend the whole day 'rummaging' in second-hand shops, hunting for
'bric-à-brac,' and things of the 'right date.' Although it was a point
of honour, to which she obstinately clung, as though obeying some old
family custom, that she should never answer any questions, never give
any account of what she did during the daytime, she spoke to Swann once
about a friend to whose house she had been invited, and had found that
everything in it was 'of the period.' Swann could not get her to tell
him what 'period' it was. Only after thinking the matter over she
replied that it was 'mediaeval'; by which she meant that the walls were
panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and
added, in the hesitating but confident tone in which one refers to a
person whom one has met somewhere, at dinner, the night before, of whom
one had never heard until then, but whom one's hosts seemed to regard as
some one so celebrated and important that one hopes that one's listener
will know quite well who is meant, and will be duly impressed: "Her
dining-room... is... eighteenth century!" Incidentally, she had thought
it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women
looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She
mentioned it again, a third time, when she shewed Swann a card with the
name and address of the man who had designed the dining-room, and whom
she wanted to send for, when she had enough money, to see whether he
could not do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one
of the sort she used to dream of, one which, unfortunately, her little
house would not be large enough to contain, with tall sideboards,
Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the Château at Blois. It was
on this occasion that she let out to Swann what she really thought of
his abode on the Quai d'Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that
her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on,
although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming,
but in the 'Sham-Antique.'
"You wouldn't have her live, like you, among a lot of broken-down chairs
and threadbare carpets!" she exclaimed, the innate respectability of
the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the
acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'
People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised
sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour
and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of
humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, provided
one talked enough about them; when a man had told her at dinner that he
loved to wander about and get his hands all covered with dust in the
old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in
this commercial age, since he was not concerned about the things that
interested it, and that he belonged to another generation altogether,
she would come home saying: "Why, he's an adorable creature; so
sensitive! I had no idea," and she would conceive for him a strong and
sudden friendship. But, on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had
these tastes but did not speak of them, left her cold. She was obliged,
of course, to admit that Swann was most generous with his money, but she
would add, pouting: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him,"
and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the
practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.
Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of
which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy
in his company, tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas, that bad
taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, which all the same
he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her,
which even fascinated him, for were they not so many more of those
characteristic features, by virtue of which the essential qualities
of the woman emerged, and were made visible? And so, when she was in a
happy mood because she was going to see the _Reine Topaze_, or when her
eyes grew serious, troubled, petulant, if she was afraid of missing the
flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and
toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular
attendance was indispensable, and set the seal upon a woman's
certificate of 'smartness,' Swann, enraptured, as all of us are, at
times, by the natural behaviour of a child, or by the likeness of a
portrait, which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so
distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to fill the outlines of her
face that he could not refrain from going across and welcoming it
with his lips. "Oh, then, so little Odette wants us to take her to the
flower-show, does she? she wants to be admired, does she? very well, we
will take her there, we can but obey her wishes." As Swann's sight was
beginning to fail, he had to resign himself to a pair of spectacles,
which he wore at home, when working, while to face the world he adopted
a single eyeglass, as being less disfiguring. The first time that she
saw it in his eye, she could not contain herself for joy: "I really do
think--for a man, that is to say--it is tremendously smart! How nice you
look with it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!" she
concluded, with a tinge of regret in her voice. He liked Odette to say
these things, just as, if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he
would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she
believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose