Swann's Way
invited him to my mother's wedding, while others barely knew him by
sight, but were, they thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the
son, to the worthy successor of the late M. Swann.
But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of
them, the people of fashion, in a certain sense, were also a part of his
house, his service, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon
his brilliant connections, the same external support, the same solid
comfort as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the
fine table-linen which had come down to him from his forebears. And the
thought that, if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the
house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would
be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg
and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old
Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would, one day, be buried
in her own fine clothes, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so
exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and
patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which
in her mind's eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually
of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of
all,--since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference
to Odette, Swann was constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed
feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but at least less welcome
to her than anyone, even the most wearisome of the Verdurins'
'faithful,'--when he betook himself to a world in which he was the
paramount example of taste, a man whom no pains were spared to attract,
whom people were genuinely sorry not to see, he began once again to
believe in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite
for it, as an invalid may feel who has been in bed for months and on a
strict diet, when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an
official banquet or the advertisement of a cruise round Sicily.
If he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not
paying them visits, it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her
that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He still paid them (asking
himself at the end of each month whether, seeing that he had perhaps
exhausted her patience, and had certainly gone rather often to see her,
it would be enough if he sent her four thousand francs), and for each
visit he found a pretext, a present that he had to bring her, some
information which she required, M. de Charlus, whom he had met actually
going to her house, and who had insisted upon Swann's accompanying him.
And, failing any excuse, he would beg M. de Charlus to go to her
at once, and to tell her, as though spontaneously, in the course of
conversation, that he had just remembered something that he had to say
to Swann, and would she please send a message to Swann's house asking
him to come to her then and there; but as a rule Swann waited at home
in vain, and M. de Charlus informed him, later in the evening, that his
device had not proved successful. With the result that, if she was now
frequently away from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her;
that she who, when she was in love with him, used to say, "I am always
free" and "What can it matter to me, what other people think?" now,
whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded
some engagement. When he spoke of going to a charity entertainment, or a
private view, or a first-night at which she was to be present, she would
expostulate that he wished to advertise their relations in public, that
he was treating her like a woman off the streets. Things came to such a
pitch that, in an effort to save himself from being altogether forbidden
to meet her anywhere, Swann, remembering that she knew and was deeply
attached to my great-uncle Adolphe, whose friend he himself also
had been, went one day to see him in his little flat in the Rue
de Bellechasse, to ask him to use his influence with Odette. As it
happened, she invariably adopted, when she spoke to Swann about my
uncle, a poetical tone, saying: "Ah, he! He is not in the least
like you; it is an exquisite thing, a great, a beautiful thing, his
friendship for me. He's not the sort of man who would have so little
consideration for me as to let himself be seen with me everywhere in
public." This was embarrassing for Swann, who did not know quite to what
rhetorical pitch he should screw himself up in speaking of Odette to my
uncle. He began by alluding to her excellence, _a priori_, the axiom
of her seraphic super-humanity, the revelation of her inexpressible
virtues, no conception of which could possibly be formed. "I should
like to speak to you about her," he went on, "you, who know what a woman
supreme above all women, what an adorable being, what an angel Odette
is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris. Everyone doesn't see
Odette in the light in which you and I have been privileged to see her.
And so there are people who think that I am behaving rather foolishly;
she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors, at the theatre. Now
you, in whom she has such enormous confidence, couldn't you say a few
words for me to her, just to assure her that she exaggerates the harm
which my bowing to her in the street might do her?"
My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she
would love him all the more; he advised Odette to let Swann meet her
everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told
Swann that she had just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that
my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by assault.
She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my
uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met
again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if
he had met my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk
things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to
throw a light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had
led, in the old days, at Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the
winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there,
perhaps, that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one
had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been
Odette's lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which he
would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to
learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them,
incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted
them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only,
each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the
picture that he had formed of his mistress. At one time indeed he felt
that he could understand that this moral 'lightness,' of which he would
never have suspected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden
or Nice, when she had gone, in the past, to spend several months in
one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety.
He attempted, in order to question them, to get into touch again with
certain men of that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette,
and, besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their
heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom,
up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that
pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that
he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those
pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been
solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no
longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any
moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and
dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had
been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's _Septennat_,
in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer
beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but
splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he
would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant
details that made up the daily round on the Côte d'Azur in those days,
if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled
him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does
the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century
Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the
Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit,
often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming;
and she would comment: "You do look sad!" It was not very long since,
from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best
women that he had known, he had passed to that of her being 'kept'; and
yet already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the Odette de
Crécy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-makers, to the 'ladies'
men' of Nice and Baden, to this face, the expression on which was so
often gentle, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself:
"What does it mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who
Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they're true,
are always based upon other people's ideas"; he would reflect that this
legend--even if it were authentic--was something external to Odette,
was not inherent in her like a mischievous and ineradicable personality;
that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank
eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a docile body
which he had pressed tightly in his arms and explored with his fingers,
a woman of whom he might one day come into absolute possession if he
succeeded in making himself indispensable to her. There she was,
often tired, her face left blank for the nonce by that eager, feverish
preoccupation with the unknown things which made Swann suffer; she would
push back her hair with both hands; her forehead, her whole face would
seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some
worthy sentiment such as is to be found in all creatures when, in a
moment of rest or meditation, they are free to express themselves, would
flash out from her eyes like a ray of gold. And immediately the whole of
her face would light up like a grey landscape, swathed in clouds which,
suddenly, are swept away and the dull scene transfigured, at the moment
of the sun's setting. The life which occupied Odette at such times, even
the future which she seemed to be dreamily regarding, Swann could have
shared with her. No evil disturbance seemed to have left any effect on
them. Rare as they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the
process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the
intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette
compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on
(as we shall see in the second part of this story) sacrifices which the
other Odette would never have won from him. But how rare those moments
were, and how seldom he now saw her! Even in regard to their evening
meetings, she would never tell him until the last minute whether she
would be able to see him, for, reckoning on his being always free, she
wished first to be certain that no one else would offer to come to her.
She would plead that she was obliged to wait for an answer which was of
the very greatest importance, and if, even after she had made Swann