Swann's Way
not possibly send messages to him, before all those people, without
compromising herself. Sometimes she would be absent for several days
on end, when the Verdurins took her to see the tombs at Dreux, or to
Compiègne, on the painter's advice, to watch the sun setting through the
forest--after which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.
"To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who
have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly
bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or
Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of
that she trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded
of creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of
Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge
of art, I should say, to do that; though, surely, even without any
particularly refined sense of smell, one would not deliberately choose
to spend a holiday in the latrines, so as to be within range of their
fragrant exhalations."
But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds--alas, without
allowing him to appear there, as though by accident, at her side, for,
as she said, that would "create a dreadful impression,"--he would plunge
into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway
timetable, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the
afternoon, in the evening, even in the morning. The ways? More than
that, the authority, the right to join her. For, after all, the
time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the
public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that
at eight o'clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which
arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds
was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous;
an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether
different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never
even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified
the labour and expense of stoking the engines.
So it came to this; that she could not prevent him from going to
Pierrefonds if he chose to do so. Now that was precisely what he found
that he did choose to do, and would at that moment be doing were he,
like the travelling public, not acquainted with Odette. For a long
time past he had wanted to form a more definite impression of
Viollet-le-Duc's work as a restorer. And the weather being what it was,
he felt an overwhelming desire to spend the day roaming in the forest of
Compiègne.
It was, indeed, a piece of bad luck that she had forbidden him access
to the one spot that tempted him to-day. To-day! Why, if he went down
there, in defiance of her prohibition, he would be able to see her that
very day! But then, whereas, if she had met, at Pierrefonds, some one
who did not matter, she would have hailed him with obvious pleasure:
"What, you here?" and would have invited him to come and see her at the
hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if, on the other hand,
it was himself, Swann, that she encountered there, she would be annoyed,
would complain that she was being followed, would love him less in
consequence, might even turn away in anger when she caught sight of him.
"So, then, I am not to be allowed to go away for a day anywhere!" she
would reproach him on her return, whereas in fact it was he himself who
was not allowed to go.
He had had the sudden idea, so as to contrive to visit Compiègne and
Pierrefonds without letting it be supposed that his object was to meet
Odette, of securing an invitation from one of his friends, the Marquis
de Forestelle, who had a country house in that neighbourhood. This
friend, to whom Swann suggested the plan without disclosing its
ulterior purpose, was beside himself with joy; he did not conceal his
astonishment at Swann's consenting at last, after fifteen years, to come
down and visit his property, and since he did not (he told him) wish
to stay there, promised to spend some days, at least, in taking him for
walks and excursions in the district. Swann imagined himself down there
already with M. de Forestelle. Even before he saw Odette, even if he did
not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on
that soil where, not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she
was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility
of her suddenly appearing: in the courtyard of the Château, now
beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he had gone to
visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic;
down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of
sunset;--innumerable and alternative hiding-places, to which would fly
simultaneously for refuge, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his
happy, vagabond and divided heart. "We mustn't, on any account," he
would warn M. de Forestelle, "run across Odette and the Verdurins. I
have just heard that they are at Pierrefonds, of all places, to-day. One
has plenty of time to see them in Paris; it would hardly be worth while
coming down here if one couldn't go a yard without meeting them." And
his host would fail to understand why, once they had reached the place,
Swann would change his plans twenty times in an hour, inspect the
dining-rooms of all the hotels in Compiègne without being able to make
up his mind to settle down in any of them, although he had found no
trace anywhere of the Verdurins, seeming to be in search of what he had
claimed to be most anxious to avoid, and would in fact avoid, the moment
he found it, for if he had come upon the little 'group,' he would have
hastened away at once with studied indifference, satisfied that he had
seen Odette and she him, especially that she had seen him when he was
not, apparently, thinking about her. But no; she would guess at
once that it was for her sake that he had come there. And when M. de
Forestelle came to fetch him, and it was time to start, he excused
himself: "No, I'm afraid not; I can't go to Pierrefonds to-day. You see,
Odette is there." And Swann was happy in spite of everything in feeling
that if he, alone among mortals, had not the right to go to Pierrefonds
that day, it was because he was in fact, for Odette, some one who
differed from all other mortals, her lover; and because that restriction
which for him alone was set upon the universal right to travel freely
where one would, was but one of the many forms of that slavery, that
love which was so dear to him. Decidedly, it was better not to risk a
quarrel with her, to be patient, to wait for her return. He spent his
days in poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne, as though it
had been that of the 'Pays du Tendre'; he surrounded himself with
photographs of the Château of Pierrefonds. When the day dawned on which
it was possible that she might return, he opened the time-table
again, calculated what train she must have taken, and, should she have
postponed her departure, what trains were still left for her to take. He
did not leave the house, for fear of missing a telegram, he did not go
to bed, in case, having come by the last train, she decided to surprise
him with a midnight visit. Yes! The front-door bell rang. There seemed
some delay in opening the door, he wanted to awaken the porter, he
leaned out of the window to shout to Odette, if it was Odette, for
in spite of the orders which he had gone downstairs a dozen times to
deliver in person, they were quite capable of telling her that he was
not at home. It was only a servant coming in. He noticed the incessant
rumble of passing carriages, to which he had never before paid any
attention. He could hear them, one after another, a long way off, coming
nearer, passing his door without stopping, and bearing away into the
distance a message which was not for him. He waited all night, to no
purpose, for the Verdurins had returned unexpectedly, and Odette had
been in Paris since midday; it had not occurred to her to tell him; not
knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a
theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was peacefully asleep.
As a matter of fact, she had never given him a thought. And such moments
as these, in which she forgot Swann's very existence, were of more value
to Odette, did more to attach him to her, than all her infidelities. For
in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had
once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love, on
the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins' and had
hunted for her all evening. And he did not have (as I had, afterwards,
at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings
that would return with the night. For his days, Swann must pass them
without Odette; and as he told himself, now and then, to allow so pretty
a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to leave a
case filled with jewels in the middle of the street. In this mood he
would scowl furiously at the passers-by, as though they were so many
pickpockets. But their faces--a collective and formless mass--escaped
the grasp of his imagination, and so failed to feed the flame of his
jealousy. The effort exhausted Swann's brain, until, passing his hand
over his eyes, he cried out: "Heaven help me!" as people, after lashing
themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavours to master the
problem of the reality of the external world, or that of the immortality
of the soul, afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning
act of faith. But the thought of his absent mistress was incessantly,
indissolubly blended with all the simplest actions of Swann's daily
life--when he took his meals, opened his letters, went for a walk or
to bed--by the fact of his regret at having to perform those actions
without her; like those initials of Philibert the Fair which, in the
church of Brou, because of her grief, her longing for him, Margaret of
Austria intertwined everywhere with her own. On some days, instead of
staying at home, he would go for luncheon to a restaurant not far off,
to which he had been attracted, some time before, by the excellence of
its cookery, but to which he now went only for one of those reasons,
at once mystical and absurd, which people call 'romantic'; because this
restaurant (which, by the way, still exists) bore the same name as the
street in which Odette lived: the Lapérouse. Sometimes, when she had
been away on a short visit somewhere, several days would elapse before
she thought of letting him know that she had returned to Paris. And
then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have
taken) the precaution of covering herself, at all costs, with a little
fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just, at that very
moment, arrived by the morning train. What she said was a falsehood;
at least for Odette it was a falsehood, inconsistent, lacking (what it
would have had, if true) the support of her memory of her actual arrival
at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of
what she was saying, while she said it, by the contradictory picture, in
her mind, of whatever quite different thing she had indeed been doing at
the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train. In
Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled
and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so
indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had
come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been
convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or