Swann's Way
counterpanes, gave him the same stifling sensation that, nowadays,
people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive
from a smoking lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were
dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven; while he
changed his clothes, he would be wondering, all the time, about Odette,
and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette
gave to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar
charm as to those in which she was at his side. He would get into his
carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in
after him and had settled down upon his knee, like a pet animal which
he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table,
unobserved by his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm
himself with it, and, as a feeling of languor swept over him, would
give way to a slight shuddering movement which contracted his throat
and nostrils--a new experience, this,--as he fastened the bunch of
columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither
well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the
Verdurins', and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in
the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even
for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the
finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a
city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what
was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray,
where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed,
thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise,
he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an
arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed
with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner,
trained and twined by the gardener's skilful hand, there ran all about
his table currant-bush and rose.
After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at
Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so
abruptly--especially if it threatened to rain, and so to scatter the
'faithful' before their normal time--that on one occasion the Princesse
des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left
before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the
Bois) observed:
"Really, if Swann were thirty years older, and had diabetes, there might
be some excuse for his running away like that. He seems to look upon us
all as a joke."
He persuaded himself that the spring-time charm, which he could not go
down to Combray to enjoy, he would find at least on the Ile des Cygnes
or at Saint-Cloud. But as he could think only of Odette, he would
return home not knowing even if he had tasted the fragrance of the young
leaves, or if the moon had been shining. He would be welcomed by the
little phrase from the sonata, played in the garden on the restaurant
piano. If there was none in the garden, the Verdurins would have taken
immense pains to have a piano brought out either from a private room
or from the restaurant itself; not because Swann was now restored to
favour; far from it. But the idea of arranging an ingenious form of
entertainment for some one, even for some one whom they disliked, would
stimulate them, during the time spent in its preparation, to a momentary
sense of cordiality and affection. Now and then he would remind himself
that another fine spring evening was drawing to a close, and would force
himself to notice the trees and the sky. But the state of excitement
into which Odette's presence never failed to throw him, added to a
feverish ailment which, for some time now, had scarcely left him,
robbed him of that sense of quiet and comfort which is an indispensable
background to the impressions that we derive from nature.
One evening, when Swann had consented to dine with the Verdurins, and
had mentioned during dinner that he had to attend, next day, the annual
banquet of an old comrades' association, Odette had at once exclaimed
across the table, in front of everyone, in front of Forcheville, who was
now one of the 'faithful,' in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:
"Yes, I know, you have your banquet to-morrow; I sha'n't see you, then,
till I get home; don't be too late."
And although Swann had never yet taken offence, at all seriously,
at Odette's demonstrations of friendship for one or other of the
'faithful,' he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow,
before them all, with that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each
other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her house, and
her own preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had
often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman; and in
the supremacy which he wielded over a creature so distinctly inferior to
himself there was nothing that especially flattered him when he heard
it proclaimed to all the 'faithful'; but since he had observed that,
to several other men than himself, Odette seemed a fascinating and
desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused
a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest
particles of her heart. And he had begun to attach an incalculable value
to those moments passed in her house in the evenings, when he held her
upon his knee, made her tell him what she thought about this or that,
and counted over that treasure to which, alone of all his earthly
possessions, he still clung. And so, after this dinner, drawing her
aside, he took care to thank her effusively, seeking to indicate to
her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of
the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme
pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should
last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.
When he came away from his banquet, the next evening, it was pouring
rain, and he had nothing but his victoria. A friend offered to take
him home in a closed carriage, and as Odette, by the fact of her having
invited him to come, had given him an assurance that she was expecting
no one else, he could, with a quiet mind and an untroubled heart, rather
than set off thus in the rain, have gone home and to bed. But perhaps,
if she saw that he seemed not to adhere to his resolution to end every
evening, without exception, in her company, she might grow careless, and
fail to keep free for him just the one evening on which he particularly
desired it.
It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology
for having been unable to come away earlier, she complained that it was
indeed very late; the storm had made her unwell, her head ached, and
she warned him that she would not let him stay longer than half an hour,
that at midnight she would send him away; a little while later she felt
tired and wished to sleep.
"No cattleya, then, to-night?" he asked, "and I've been looking forward
so to a nice little cattleya."
But she was irresponsive; saying nervously: "No, dear, no cattleya
tonight. Can't you see, I'm not well?"
"It might have done you good, but I won't bother you."
She begged him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains
close round her bed and left her. But, when he was in his own house
again, the idea suddenly struck him that, perhaps, Odette was expecting
some one else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired,
that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should
suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left
the house she had lighted it again, and had reopened her door to the
stranger who was to be her guest for the night. He looked at his watch.
It was about an hour and a half since he had left her; he went out, took
a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at
right angles to that other street, which lay at the back of her house,
and along which he used to go, sometimes, to tap upon her bedroom
window, for her to let him in. He left his cab; the streets were all
deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite
her house. Amid the glimmering blackness of all the row of windows, the
lights in which had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one,
from which overflowed, between the slats of its shutters, dosed like a
wine-press over its mysterious golden juice, the light that filled the
room within, a light which on so many evenings, as soon as he saw it,
far off, as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its
message: "She is there--expecting you," and now tortured him with: "She
is there with the man she was expecting." He must know who; he tiptoed
along by the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting
bars of the shutters he could see nothing; he could hear, only, in the
silence of the night, the murmur of conversation. What agony he suffered
as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere were moving, behind
the closed sash, the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that
murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his
own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at
that moment tasting with the stranger.
And yet he was not sorry that he had come; the torment which had forced
him to leave his own house had lost its sharpness when it lost its
uncertainty, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, at that
first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, almost
within his grasp, before his eyes, in the full glare of the lamp-light,
caught and kept there, an unwitting prisoner, in that room into which,
when he would, he might force his way to surprise and seize it; or
rather he would tap upon the shutters, as he had often done when he had
come there very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn
that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices; while
he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing at him,
as sharing with that other the knowledge of how effectively he had been
tricked, now it was he that saw them, confident and persistent in
their error, tricked and trapped by none other than himself, whom they
believed to be a mile away, but who was there, in person, there with a
plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to
tap upon the shutter. And, perhaps, what he felt (almost an agreeable
feeling) at that moment was something more than relief at the solution
of a doubt, at the soothing of a pain; was an intellectual pleasure.
If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the
delicate attraction that they had had for him long ago--though only when
a light was shed upon them by a thought, a memory of Odette--now it was
another of the faculties, prominent in the studious days of his youth,
that Odette had quickened with new life, the passion for truth, but for
a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress,
receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the
sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost
impersonal in its absolute beauty) was Odette--Odette in her activities,
her environment, her projects, and her past. At every other period in
his life, the little everyday words and actions of another person had
always seemed wholly valueless to Swann; if gossip about such things
were repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he
listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his