Swann's Way
come to her house, any of her friends asked her, half-way through the
evening, to join them at some theatre, or at supper afterwards, she
would jump for joy and dress herself with all speed. As her toilet
progressed, every movement that she made brought Swann nearer to the
moment when he would have to part from her, when she would fly off with
irresistible force; and when at length she was ready, and, plunging into
her mirror a last glance strained and brightened by her anxiety to look
well, smeared a little salve on her lips, fixed a stray loci of hair
over her brow, and called for her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden
tassels, Swann would be looking so wretched that she would be unable to
restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him: "So that is how
you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute! And I thought
I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall know better another time!"
Sometimes, at the risk of annoying her, he made up his mind that he
would find out where she had gone, and even dreamed of a defensive
alliance with Forcheville, who might perhaps have been able to tell him.
But anyhow, when he knew with whom she was spending the evening, it
was very seldom that he could not discover, among all his innumerable
acquaintance, some one who knew--if only indirectly--the man with
whom she had gone out, and could easily obtain this or that piece of
information about him. And while he was writing to one of his friends,
asking him to try to get a little light thrown upon some point or other,
he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to vex himself with questions
to which there was no answer and transferring to some one else the
strain of interrogation. It is true that Swann was little the wiser for
such information as he did receive. To know a thing does not enable us,
always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know
we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can
dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of
power to control them. He was quite happy whenever M. de Charlus was
with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus and her nothing untoward
could ever happen, that when M. de Charlus went anywhere with her, it
was out of friendship for himself, and that he would make no difficulty
about telling him everything that she had done. Sometimes she had
declared so emphatically to Swann that it was impossible for him to see
her on a particular evening, she seemed to be looking forward so keenly
to some outing, that Swann attached a very real importance to the fact
that M. de Charlus was free to accompany her. Next day, without daring
to put many questions to M. de Charlus, he would force him, by appearing
not quite to understand his first answers, to give him more, after each
of which he would feel himself increasingly relieved, for he very
soon learned that Odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of
dissipations.
"But what do you mean, my dear Mémé, I don't quite understand.... You
didn't go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? Surely you went
somewhere else first? No? That is very odd! You don't know how amusing
you are, my dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the Chat
Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours? That's strange.
After all, it wasn't a bad idea; she must have known dozens of people
there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat
there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I can picture you,
sitting there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Mémé; I'm exceedingly
fond of you."
Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so often happened, when
talking to friends who knew nothing of his love, friends to whom he
hardly listened, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance,
"I saw Mme. de Crécy yesterday; she was with a man I didn't know."),
sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid
state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay
there irremovable,--how charming, by way of contrast, were the words:
"She didn't know a soul; she never spoke to a soul." How freely they
coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to
breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette
must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred
to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him,
pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.
Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have
sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then felt, for which Odette's
presence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a specific
which in the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the
disease, but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it
would have sufficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her
house while she was out, to wait there until that hour of her return,
into whose stillness and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there,
all memory of those intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed
spell had made him imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she
would not; he must return home; he forced himself, on the way, to form
various plans, ceased to think of Odette; he even reached the stage,
while he undressed, of turning over all sorts of happy ideas in his
mind: it was with a light heart, buoyed with the anticipation of going
to see some favourite work of art on the morrow, that he jumped into
bed and turned out the light; but no sooner had he made himself ready
to sleep, relaxing a self-control of which he was not even conscious,
so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed his body and he
burst into sobs. He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying
with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic." After
which he could not save himself from utter exhaustion at the thought
that, next day, he must begin afresh his attempt to find out what Odette
had been doing, must use all his influence to contrive to see her. This
compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without
result, was so cruel a scourge that one day, noticing a swelling over
his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a
tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with
anything further, that it was his malady which was going to govern his
life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed,
at this period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even
to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so
much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his
struggle.
And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no
longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when
at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone
to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of
Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was
in love with some one else would distract his mind from the question
of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new
developments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little
time to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even
days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was
cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place
the same pain, a sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were,
diluted in the torrent of different impressions. But it had not stirred
from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had
awakened him.
Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important
matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he had lived
long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything
else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the
effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he would
pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might have
wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There
emerged, however, from this unexplored tract, certain occupations which
reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some
obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as
they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning
as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the
necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which
she referred, from time to time, to "the day when I go with my friend
to the Hippodrome," if, when he felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps
Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that
it was one of those very days, he would correct himself with an "Oh,
no! It's not worth while asking her to come; I should have thought of it
before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the Hippodrome.
We must confine ourselves to what is possible; no use wasting our time
in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in
advance." And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to the
Hippodrome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely
ineluctable in itself; but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed
to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely
connected with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the
salute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann's jealousy, she replied
to his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or
three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him; if, for
instance, she said: "That's a gentleman who was in my friend's box the
other day; the one I go to the Hippodrome with," that explanation would
set Swann's suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that
this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the
Hippodrome, but he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any
coherent impression of them. Oh! how he would have loved to know her,
that friend who went to the Hippodrome, how he would have loved her to
invite him there with Odette. How readily he would have sacrificed
all his acquaintance for no matter what person who was in the habit of
seeing Odette, were she but a manicurist or a girl out of a shop. He
would have taken more trouble, incurred more expense for them than for
queens. Would they not have supplied him, out of what was contained in
their knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one potent anodyne for
his pain? With what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with
one or other of those humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly
relations, either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity
of nature. How willingly would he have fixed his abode for ever in the
attics of some sordid but enviable house, where Odette went but never
took him, and where, if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker,
whose lover he would readily have pretended to be, he would have been
visited by Odette almost daily. In those regions, that were almost
slums, what a modest existence, abject, if you please, but delightful,
nourished by tranquillity and happiness, he would have consented to lead
indefinitely.
It sometimes happened, again, that, when, after meeting Swann, she saw
some man approaching whom he did not know, he could distinguish upon
Odette's face that look of sorrow which she had worn on the day when he
had come to her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for, on
the days when, in spite of all that she had to do, and of her dread