Swann's Way
hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette.
These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing
them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe
that she was lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was
also, however, sufficient. Given that, everything that Odette might say
appeared to him suspect. Did she mention a name: it was obviously that
of one of her lovers; once this supposition had taken shape, he would
spend weeks in tormenting himself; on one occasion he even approached a
firm of 'inquiry agents' to find out the address and the occupation of
the unknown rival who would give him no peace until he could be proved
to have gone abroad, and who (he ultimately learned) was an uncle of
Odette, and had been dead for twenty years.
Although she would not allow him, as a rule, to meet her at public
gatherings, saying that people would talk, it happened occasionally
that, at an evening party to which he and she had each been invited--at
Forcheville's, at the painter's, or at a charity ball given in one of
the Ministries--he found himself in the same room with her. He could
see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be
spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures
which--while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed,
as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the
evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray--seemed illimitable to
him since he had not been able to see their end. And, once or twice,
he derived from such evenings that kind of happiness which one would be
inclined (did it not originate in so violent a reaction from an anxiety
abruptly terminated) to call peaceful, since it consists in a pacifying
of the mind: he had looked in for a moment at a revel in the painter's
studio, and was getting ready to go home; he was leaving behind him
Odette, transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom
her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to hint at
some voluptuous pleasure to be enjoyed there or elsewhere (possibly at
the Bal des Incohérents, to which he trembled to think that she might be
going on afterwards) which made Swann more jealous than the thought of
their actual physical union, since it was more difficult to imagine; he
was opening the door to go, when he heard himself called back in these
words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which
had so appalled him, made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect,
made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible,
but tender and familiar, a thing that kept close to his side, like
a part of his own daily life, in his carriage; a thing that stripped
Odette herself of the excess of brilliance and gaiety in her appearance,
shewed that it was only a disguise which she had assumed for a moment,
for his sake and not in view of any mysterious pleasures, a disguise of
which she had already wearied)--in these words, which Odette flung out
after him as he was crossing the threshold: "Can't you wait a minute for
me? I'm just going; we'll drive back together and you can drop me." It
was true that on one occasion Forcheville had asked to be driven home at
the same time, but when, on reaching Odette's gate, he had begged to be
allowed to come in too, she had replied, with a finger pointed at Swann:
"Ah! That depends on this gentleman. You must ask him. Very well, you
may come in, just for a minute, if you insist, but you mustn't stay
long, for, I warn you, he likes to sit and talk quietly with me, and
he's not at all pleased if I have visitors when he's here. Oh, if you
only knew the creature as I know him; isn't that so, my love, there's no
one that really knows you, is there, except me?"
And Swann was, perhaps, even more touched by the spectacle of her
addressing him thus, in front of Forcheville, not only in these tender
words of predilection, but also with certain criticisms, such as: "I
feel sure you haven't written yet to your friends, about dining with
them on Sunday. You needn't go if you don't want to, but you might at
least be polite," or "Now, have you left your essay on Vermeer here, so
that you can do a little more to it to-morrow? What a lazy-bones! I'm
going to make you work, I can tell you," which proved that Odette kept
herself in touch with his social engagements and his literary work, that
they had indeed a life in common. And as she spoke she bestowed on him a
smile which he interpreted as meaning that she was entirely his.
And then, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as
when the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting
all round an object, on the wall beyond it, huge and fantastic shadows
which, in time, contract and are lost in the shadow of the object
itself, all the terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of
Odette melted away and vanished in the charming creature who stood there
before his eyes. He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in
Odette's house, in the lamp-light, was, perhaps, after all, not an
artificial hour, invented for his special use (with the object of
concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly
in his thoughts without his ever being able to form a satisfactory
impression of it, an hour of Odette's real life, of her life when he was
not there, looking on) with theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits,
but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette's life; that, if he himself
had not been there, she would have pulled forward the same armchair for
Forcheville, would have poured out for him, not any unknown brew, but
precisely that orangeade which she was now offering to them both; that
the world inhabited by Odette was not that other world, fearful and
supernatural, in which he spent his time in placing her--and which
existed, perhaps, only in his imagination, but the real universe,
exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which
he might sit down, presently, and write, and this drink which he was
being permitted, now, to taste; all the objects which he contemplated
with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing
his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves
were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable
realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took
shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed
his troubled heart. Ah! had fate but allowed him to share a single
dwelling with Odette, so that in her house he should be in his own; if,
when asking his servant what there would be for luncheon, it had been
Odette's bill of fare that he had learned from the reply; if, when
Odette wished to go for a walk, in the morning, along the Avenue du
Bois-de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he
had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carrying her cloak when she
was too warm; and in the evening, after dinner, if she wished to stay at
home, and not to dress, if he had been forced to stay beside her, to
do what she asked; then how completely would all the trivial details
of Swann's life, which seemed to him now so gloomy, simply because they
would, at the same time, have formed part of the life of Odette, have
taken on--like that lamp, that orangeade, that armchair, which had
absorbed so much of his dreams, which materialised so much of his
longing,--a sort of superabundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity.
And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much
longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have created an atmosphere
favourable to his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature
always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her
was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by
the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection and gratitude, when
those normal relations were established between them which would put an
end to his melancholy madness; then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's
daily life would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic
interest--as he had several times, already, felt that they might be,
on the day, for instance, when he had read, through its envelope, her
letter to Forcheville. Examining his complaint with as much scientific
detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study
its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette
might or might not do would be indifferent to him. But in his morbid
state, to tell the truth, he feared death itself no more than such a
recovery, which would, in fact, amount to the death of all that he then
was.
After these quiet evenings, Swann's suspicions would be temporarily
lulled; he would bless the name of Odette, and next day, in the morning,
would order the most attractive jewels to be sent to her, because her
kindnesses to him overnight had excited either his gratitude, or the
desire to see them repeated, or a paroxysm of love for her which had
need of some such outlet.
But at other times, grief would again take hold of him; he would imagine
that Odette was Forcheville's mistress, and that, when they had both sat
watching him from the depths of the Verdurins' landau, in the Bois, on
the evening before the party at Chatou to which he had not been invited,
while he implored her in vain, with that look of despair on his face
which even his coachman had noticed, to come home with him, and then
turned away, solitary, crushed,--she must have employed, to draw
Forcheville's attention to him, while she murmured: "Do look at him,
storming!" the same glance, brilliant, malicious, sidelong, cunning, as
on the evening when Forcheville had driven Saniette from the Verdurins'.
At such times Swann detested her. "But I've been a fool, too," he would
argue. "I'm paying for other men's pleasures with my money. All the
same, she'd better take care, and not pull the string too often, for
I might very well stop giving her anything at all. At any rate, we'd
better knock off supplementary favours for the time being. To think
that, only yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth
for the season, I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly
little places the King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us. However
she didn't seem particularly keen; she hasn't said yes or no yet. Let's
hope that she'll refuse. Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a
fortnight on end with her, who takes about as much interest in music as
a fish does in little apples; it will be fun!" And his hatred, like
his love, needing to manifest itself in action, he amused himself with
urging his evil imaginings further and further, because, thanks to the
perfidies with which he charged Odette, he detested her still more, and
would be able, if it turned out--as he tried to convince himself--that
she was indeed guilty of them, to take the opportunity of punishing her,
emptying upon her the overflowing vials of his wrath. In this way, he
went so far as to suppose that he was going to receive a letter from
her, in which she would ask him for money to take the house at Bayreuth,
but with the warning that he was not to come there himself, as she had
promised Forcheville and the Verdurins to invite them. Oh, how he
would have loved it, had it been conceivable that she would have
that audacity. What joy he would have in refusing, in drawing up that
vindictive reply, the terms of which he amused himself by selecting and
declaiming aloud, as though he had actually received her letter.
The very next day, her letter came. She wrote that the Verdurins and