Swann's Way
of what people would think, she did actually manage to see Swann, the
predominant quality in her attitude, now, was self-assurance; a striking
contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge for, perhaps a natural reaction
from the timorous emotion which, in the early days of their friendship,
she had felt in his presence, and even in his absence, when she began a
letter to him with the words: "My dear, my hand trembles so that I can
scarcely write." (So, at least, she pretended, and a little of that
emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have been anxious to
enlarge and emphasise it.) So Swann had been pleasing to her then. Our
hands do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.
When they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful, how easy,
how bold do we become in their presence! In speaking to him, in writing
to him now, she no longer employed those words by which she had
sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating
opportunities for saying "my" and "mine" when she referred to him: "You
are all that I have in the world; it is the perfume of our friendship, I
shall keep it," nor spoke to him of the future, of death itself, as of
a single adventure which they would have to share. In those early days,
whatever he might say to her, she would answer admiringly: "You know,
you will never be like other people!"--she would gaze at his long,
slightly bald head, of which people who know only of his successes
used to think: "He's not regularly good-looking, if you like, but he is
smart; that tuft, that eyeglass, that smile!" and, with more curiosity
perhaps to know him as he really was than desire to become his mistress,
she would sigh:
"I do wish I could find out what there is in that head of yours!"
But, now, whatever he might say, she would answer, in a tone sometimes
of irritation, sometimes indulgent: "Ah! so you never will be like other
people!"
She would gaze at his head, which was hardly aged at all by his recent
anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process
which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music
of which one has read the programme, or the 'likenesses' in a child
whose family one has known: "He's not positively ugly, if you like,
but he is really rather absurd; that eyeglass, that tuft, that smile!"
realising in their imagination, fed by suggestion, the invisible
boundary which divides, at a few months' interval, the head of an ardent
lover from a cuckold's), and would say:
"Oh, I do wish I could change you; put some sense into that head of
yours."
Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if it was only
Odette's way of behaving to him that left room for doubt, he would fling
himself greedily upon her words: "You can if you like," he would tell
her.
And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to control him, to
make him work would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women
asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though
it is only fair to add that in those other women's hands the noble
task would have seemed to Swann nothing more than an indiscreet and
intolerable usurpation of his freedom of action. "If she didn't love me,
just a little," he told himself, "she would not wish to have me altered.
To alter me, she will have to see me more often." And so he was able to
trace, in these faults which she found in him, a proof at least of
her interest, perhaps even of her love; and, in fact, she gave him so
little, now, of the last, that he was obliged to regard as proofs of
her interest in him the various things which, every now and then, she
forbade him to do. One day she announced that she did not care for his
coachman, who, she thought, was perhaps setting Swann against her, and,
anyhow, did not shew that promptness and deference to Swann's orders
which she would have liked to see. She felt that he wanted to hear her
say: "Don't have him again when you come to me," just as he might have
wanted her to kiss him. So, being in a good temper, she said it; and he
was deeply moved. That evening, when talking to M. de Charlus, with whom
he had the satisfaction of being able to speak of her openly (for the
most trivial remarks that he uttered now, even to people who had never
heard of her, had always some sort of reference to Odette), he said to
him:
"I believe, all the same, that she loves me; she is so nice to me now,
and she certainly takes an interest in what I do."
And if, when he was starting off for her house, getting into his
carriage with a friend whom he was to drop somewhere on the way,
his friend said: "Hullo! that isn't Loredan on the box?" with what
melancholy joy would Swann answer him:
"Oh! Good heavens, no! I can tell you, I daren't take Loredan when I
go to the Rue La Pérouse; Odette doesn't like me to have Loredan, she
thinks he doesn't suit me. What on earth is one to do? Women, you know,
women. My dear fellow, she would be furious. Oh, lord, yes; I've only to
take Rémi there; I should never hear the last of it!"
These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which Odette now
adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him suffer; but he did not realise
how much he suffered; since it had been with a regular progression, day
after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly
contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he
could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. Now
this change was his deep, his secret wound, which pained him day and
night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it,
he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made
to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a vague way: "There
was a time when Odette loved me more," but he never formed any definite
picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he
contrived never to look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever
he entered or left the room, because in one of its drawers he had locked
away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first
evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in
which she said: "Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never
have let you have that back," and "At whatever hour of the day or night
you may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please,"
so there was a place in his heart to which he would never allow his
thoughts to trespass too near, forcing them, if need be, to evade it by
a long course of reasoning so that they should not have to pass within
reach of it; the place in which lingered his memories of happy days.
But his so meticulous prudence was defeated one evening when he had gone
out to a party.
It was at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's, on the last, for that season,
of the evenings on which she invited people to listen to the musicians
who would serve, later on, for her charity concerts. Swann, who had
intended to go to each of the previous evenings in turn, but had never
been able to make up his mind, received, while he was dressing for this
party, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who came with an offer to
go with him to the Marquise's, if his company could be of any use in
helping Swann not to feel quite so bored when he got there, to be a
little less unhappy. But Swann had thanked him with:
"You can't conceive how glad I should be of your company. But the
greatest pleasure that you can give me will be if you will go instead
to see Odette. You know what a splendid influence you have over her. I
don't suppose she'll be going anywhere this evening, unless she goes to
see her old dressmaker, and I'm sure she would be delighted if you went
with her there. In any case, you'll find her at home before then. Try
to keep her amused, and also to give her a little sound advice. If you
could arrange something for to-morrow which would please her, something
that we could all three do together. Try to put out a feeler, too, for
the summer; see if there's anything she wants to do, a cruise that we
might all three take; anything you can think of. I don't count upon
seeing her to-night, myself; still if she would like me to come, or
if you find a loophole, you've only to send me a line at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's up till midnight; after that I shall be here. Ever so
many thanks for all you are doing for me--you know what I feel about
you!"
His friend promised to go and do as Swann wished as soon as he had
deposited him at the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where he arrived
soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening
in the Rue La Pérouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to
everything that did not involve Odette, and in particular to the details
of fashionable life, a state which invested them with the charm that is
to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire,
appears to us in its own guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the
foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which
hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions,
and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and
setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of
Balzac's 'tigers'--now 'grooms'--. who normally followed their mistress
when she walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out
of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the
stables, as gardeners might be drawn up for inspection at the ends of
their several flower-beds. The peculiar tendency which he had always
had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits
in galleries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more
general form; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached
from it, which presented itself to him in a series of pictures. In the
cloak-room, into which, in the old days, when he was still a man of
fashion, he would have gone in his overcoat, to emerge from it in
evening dress, but without any impression of what had occurred there,
his mind having been, during the minute or two that he had spent in
it, either still at the party which he had just left, or already at the
party into which he was just about to be ushered, he now noticed, for
the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest,
the scattered pack of splendid effortless animals, the enormous footmen
who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests, until,
pointing their noble greyhound profiles, they towered upon their feet
and gathered in a circle round about him.
One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the
headsman in certain Renaissance pictures which represent executions,
tortures, and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take
his 'things.' But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by
the softness of his cotton gloves, so effectively that, as he approached
Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his
person and the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to
which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost
over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching
by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of
his satellites, a novice and timid, who was expressing the panic that
overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and
displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of
its captivity.
A few feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing,
motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior