Swann's Way
possibly have accounted for her not opening the door? For a time Swann
stood still there, heartbroken, bewildered, and yet happy; gazing at
this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a scruple, so
absolute was her trust in his honour; through its transparent window
there had been disclosed to him, with the secret history of an incident
which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of the
life of Odette, seen as through a narrow, luminous incision, cut into
its surface without her knowledge. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the
discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence,
fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of every thing that would feed its
vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself. Now it had food in
store, and Swann could begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening, over
the visits that Odette had received about five o'clock, and could
seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann's
affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on
it, from the beginning, by his ignorance of the occupations in which she
passed her days, as well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him
from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at
first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those moments only in which
an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose
that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus
which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle,
fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in
the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was
incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the
perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.
From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He
decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a
few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every
male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so
he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new
people and crowded places, might now be seen fleeing savagely from human
society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have
turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for
Odette? Thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, passionate
desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter Swann's
character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the
outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.
A month after the evening on which he had intercepted and read Odette's
letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were
giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of
whispered discussions between Mme. Verdurin and several of her guests,
and thought that he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to
a party at Chatou; now he, Swann, had not been invited to any party.
The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the
painter, perhaps without thinking, shouted out: "There must be no lights
of any sort, and he must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark, for us
to see by."
Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that
expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and
to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the
listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching
signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence,
an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder,
the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who
have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have
been made. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had
decided not to struggle any longer against the crushing difficulties of
life, and Swann was anxiously counting the minutes that still separated
him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he
drove her home, he would be able to ask for an explanation, to make her
promise, either that she would not go to Chatou next day, or that she
would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her
arms the anguish that still tormented him. At last the carriages were
ordered. Mme. Verdurin said to Swann:
"Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope," trying, by the
friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent
him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have
until then:
"To-morrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after." M. and Mme.
Verdurin made Forcheville get into their carriage; Swann's was drawn up
behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into
his own.
"Odette, we'll take you," said Mme. Verdurin, "we've kept a little
corner specially for you, beside M. de Forcheville."
"Yes, Mme. Verdurin," said Odette meekly.
"What! I thought I was to take you home," cried Swann, flinging
discretion to the winds, for the carriage-door hung open, time was
precious, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.
"But Mme. Verdurin has asked me..."
"That's all right, you can quite well go home alone; we've left you like
this dozens of times," said Mme. Verdurin.
"But I had something important to tell Mme. de Crécy."
"Very well, you can write it to her instead."
"Good-bye," said Odette, holding out her hand.
He tried hard to smile, but could only succeed in looking utterly
dejected.
"What do you think of the airs that Swann is pleased to put on with
us?" Mme. Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. "I was
afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette
back. It really is too bad, that sort of thing. Why doesn't he say,
straight out, that we keep a disorderly house? I can't conceive how
Odette can stand such manners. He positively seems to be saying, all the
time, 'You belong to me!' I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about
it all, and I hope she will have the sense to understand me." A moment
later she added, inarticulate with rage: "No, but, don't you see, the
filthy creature..." using unconsciously, and perhaps in satisfaction of
the same obscure need to justify herself--like Françoise at Combray when
the chicken refused to die--the very words which the last convulsions of
an inoffensive animal in its death agony wring from the peasant who is
engaged in taking its life. And when Mme. Verdurin's carriage had moved
on, and Swann's took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his
face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard bad news.
Swann sent him away; he preferred to walk, and it was on foot, through
the Bois, that he came home. He talked to himself, aloud, and in
the same slightly affected tone which he had been used to adopt
when describing the charms of the 'little nucleus' and extolling the
magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles,
the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found
them charming, if they were diverted to others than himself, so the
Verdurins' drawing-room, which, not an hour before, had still seemed
to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with
a sort of moral aristocracy, now that it was another than himself whom
Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint, laid
bare to him all its absurdities, its stupidity, its shame.
He drew a fanciful picture, at which he shuddered in disgust, of the
party next evening at Chatou. "Imagine going to Chatou, of all places!
Like a lot of drapers after closing time! Upon my word, these people are
sublime in their smugness; they can't really exist; they must all have
come out of one of Labiche's plays!"
The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. "Could anything be more
grotesque than the lives of these little creatures, hanging on to one
another like that. They'd imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul
they would, if they didn't all meet again to-morrow at _Chatou_!"
Alas! there would be the painter there also, the painter who enjoyed
match-making, who would invite Forcheville to come with Odette to his
studio. He could see Odette, in a dress far too smart for the country,
"for she is so vulgar in that way, and, poor little thing, she is such a
fool!"
He could hear the jokes that Mme. Verdurin would make after dinner,
jokes which, whoever the 'bore' might be at whom they were aimed,
had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them,
laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that
it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. "What a fetid
form of humour!" he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of
disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen
against his collar. "How, in God's name, can a creature made in His
image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The
least sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale
exhalations. It is really impossible to believe that any human being is
incapable of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at
the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand
to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be
impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell
so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin
sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot
possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried,
tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows
that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, and to
teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has
its limits, and mine is at an end," he concluded, as though this sacred
mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from
longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only
since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might, perchance, be
directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from
him.
He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and
the grimaces of Mme. Verdurin, in terrified anticipation of the wrecking
of her nerves by Beethoven's music. "Idiot, liar!" he shouted, "and a
creature like that imagines that she's fond of _Art_!" She would say to
Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville,
as she had so often done for himself: "You can make room for M. de
Forcheville there, can't you, Odette?"... '"In the dark!' Codfish!
Pander!"... 'Pander' was the name he applied also to the music which
would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze in each
other's eyes, to feel for each other's hands. He felt that there was
much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorous attitude towards
the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of
education in France.
In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins', which he had so
often described as 'genuine,' seemed to him now the worst possible form
of life, and their 'little nucleus' the most degraded class of society.
"It really is," he repeated, "beneath the lowest rung of the social
ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. Beyond a doubt, the august words
of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When one comes to think of it,
surely people 'in society' (and, though one may find fault with them now
and then, still, after all they are a very different matter from that
gang of blackmailers) shew a profound sagacity in refusing to know