Swann's Way
going away, which, in fact, he was merely allowing to start a little
sooner than it must. At once he could imagine Odette, puzzled, anxious,
distressed at having received neither visit nor letter from him and this
picture of her, by calming his jealousy, made it easy for him to break
himself of the habit of seeing her. At odd moments, no doubt, in the
furthest recesses of his brain, where his determination had thrust
it away, and thanks to the length of the interval, the three weeks'
separation to which he had agreed, it was with pleasure that he would
consider the idea that he would see Odette again on her return; but it
was also with so little impatience that he began to ask himself whether
he would not readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy an
abstinence. It had lasted, so far, but three days, a much shorter time
than he had often, before, passed without seeing Odette, and without
having, as on this occasion he had, premeditated a separation. And
yet, there and then, some tiny trace of contrariety in his mind, or
of weakness in his body,--by inciting him to regard the present as an
exceptional moment, one not to be governed by the rules, one in which
prudence itself would allow him to take advantage of the soothing
effects of a pleasure and to give his will (until the time should come
when its efforts might serve any purpose) a holiday--suspended the
action of his will, which ceased to exert its inhibitive control; or,
without that even, the thought of some information for which he had
forgotten to ask Odette, such as if she had decided in what colour she
would have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to some investment,
whether they were 'ordinary' or 'preference' shares that she wished him
to buy (for it was all very well to shew her that he could live without
seeing her, but if, after that, the carriage had to be painted over
again, if the shares produced no dividend, a fine lot of good he would
have done),--and suddenly, like a stretched piece of elastic which is
let go, or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped open, the idea
of seeing her again, from the remote point in time to which it had been
attached, sprang back into the field of the present and of immediate
possibilities.
It sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance, so
irresistible, in fact, that Swann had been far less unhappy in watching
the end gradually approaching, day by day, of the fortnight which he
must spend apart from Odette, than he was when kept waiting ten minutes
while his coachman brought round the carriage which was to take him to
her, minutes which he passed in transports of impatience and joy, in
which he recaptured a thousand times over, to lavish on it all the
wealth of his affection, that idea of his meeting with Odette, which, by
so abrupt a repercussion, at a moment when he supposed it so remote, was
once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness. The fact
was that this idea no longer found, as an obstacle in its course, the
desire to contrive without further delay to resist its coming, which
had ceased to have any place in Swann's mind since, having proved to
himself--or so, at least, he believed--that he was so easily capable of
resisting it, he no longer saw any inconvenience in postponing a plan of
separation which he was now certain of being able to put into operation
whenever he would. Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back
to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence,
all of which long habit had enfeebled, but which had acquired new vigour
during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a
period of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having
lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted
what had been, until then, a pleasure in store, which could easily be
sacrificed, into an unlooked-for happiness which he was powerless to
resist. Finally, the idea returned to him with its beauty enhanced by
his own ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might, perhaps,
have done on finding that he shewed no sign of life, with the result
that he was going now to meet with the entrancing revelation of an
Odette almost unknown.
But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was
only a feint, saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came,
now, to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage, or the purchase
of stock. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these
crises through which he passed, and in the general idea which she formed
of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism, looking only
to what she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always
identical termination. An imperfect idea (though possibly all the more
profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of
view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered that Odette failed
to understand him, just as a morphinomaniac or a consumptive, each
persuaded that he has been thrown back, one by some outside event,
at the moment when he was just going to shake himself free from his
inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the
moment when he was just going to be finally cured, feels himself to be
misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance
to these pretended contingencies, mere disguises, according to him,
assumed, so as to be perceptible by his patients, by the vice of one
and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased
to weigh heavily and incurably upon them while they were nursing their
dreams of normality and health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann's
love had reached that stage at which the physician and (in the case of
certain affections) the boldest of surgeons ask themselves whether
to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still
reasonable, or indeed possible.
Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct knowledge.
When he sought to measure it, it happened sometimes that he found it
diminished, shrunken almost to nothing; for instance, the very moderate
liking, amounting almost to dislike, which, in the days before he was
in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded
complexion, returned on certain days. "Really, I am making distinct
headway," he would tell himself on the morrow, "when I come to think it
over carefully, I find out that I got hardly any pleasure, last night,
out of being in bed with her; it's an odd thing, but I actually thought
her ugly." And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long
way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette's person, indeed,
no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the
photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he
had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the
pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his
mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, "It is she!" as
when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one
of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are
suffering. "She?"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it
is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague
conceptions of maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in
question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape
our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was
Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all
his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it
away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case
was past operation.
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests
that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding
himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting
(although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate
of its worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's
eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his
love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by
seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would
feel there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and
among people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure
as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were
depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used
to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the
smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the
soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in
Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of
daily life at Versailles, what Mme. de Maintenon ate and drank, or the
shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And in the small extent to which
this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which
Swann was tasting was that he could emigrate for a moment into those few
and distant parts of himself which had remained almost foreign to his
love and to his pain. In this respect the personality, with which my
great-aunt endowed him, of 'young Swann,' as distinct from the more
individual personality of Charles Swann, was that in which he now most
delighted. Once when, because it was the birthday of the Princesse de
Parme (and because she could often be of use, indirectly, to Odette,
by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and all that sort of
thing), he had decided to send her a basket of fruit, and was not quite
sure where or how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of
his mother who, delighted to be doing a commission for him, had written
to him, laying stress on the fact that she had not chosen all the fruit
at the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they
were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always
had the best, am soon, "every fruit visited and examined, one by one,
by myself." And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the
Princess thanked him, he had been able to judge of the flavour of the
strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that
"every fruit visited and examined one by one, by myself" had brought
balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he
rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich
and respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from
generation to generation the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art
of ordering things from shops.
Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was 'young Swann' not to
feel, when he assumed that part again for a moment, a keener pleasure
than he was capable of feeling at other times--when, indeed, he was
grown sick of pleasure; and if the friendliness of the middle-class
people, for whom he had never been anything else than 'young Swann,' was
less animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flattering, for
all that, since in the middle-class mind friendship is inseparable from
respect), no letter from a Royal Personage, offering him some princely
entertainment, could ever be so attractive to Swann as the letter which
asked him to be a witness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the
family of some old friends of his parents; some of whom had 'kept up'
with him, like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had