Swann's Way
whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in
dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
by some one of the Master's Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer's Saxons.
And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
if in its creator's purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the
overlaying of the florid triple diadem of its brushed tresses, can
suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of
hyacinths and a serpent's writhing back. Others again, no less colossal,
were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase which, by their
decorative presence and marmorean immobility, was made worthy to be
named, like that god-crowned ascent in the Palace of the Doges, the
'Staircase of the Giants,' and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by
the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy would
he, on the other hand, have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck
flights to the little dressmaker's, in whose attic he would so gladly
have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to
spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the
privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in
the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who, on that account,
seemed to keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his
mistress more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything
that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential, enviable staircase to
the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the
building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed
milk-can set out, in readiness for the morning round, upon the door-mat;
on the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann was at that moment
climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each
anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter's lodge or
the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor
service which they controlled, and doing homage for them to the guests,
a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest
of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by
themselves like small shopkeepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the
plebeian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate),
scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had
been heaped upon them before they were allowed to don the brilliant
livery which they wore only at long intervals, and in which they did not
feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway,
their splendid pomp tempered by a democratic good-fellowship, like
saints in their niches, and a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard
fashion, like the beadle in a church, struck the pavement with his staff
as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up
which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and
a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's
sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in
which the lackeys, seated like notaries before their massive registers,
rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a
little hall which--just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners
to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they
take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else
besides--displayed to him as he entered it, like some priceless effigy
by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young footman, his body
slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more
crimson face, from which seemed to burst forth torrents of fire,
timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced the Aubusson tapestries that
screened the door of the room in which the music was being given with
his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared, with a soldierly
impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of alarums,
incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot--to be looking out,
angel or sentinel, from the tower of dungeon or cathedral, for the
approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to
enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an
usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering
to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house
in which at that very moment he might have been, if Odette had but
permitted, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a
door-mat wrung his heart.
He speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human
male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of
the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of
faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new
and uncanny, now that their features,--instead of being to him symbols
of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who
until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after,
boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged--were at rest,
measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now
found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many
of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled
Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted
to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not
now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because
he did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréaute, who
were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than two
figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who
had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the
General's monocle, stuck like a shell-splinter in his common, scarred,
victorious, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it
left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops,
appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious
to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose, while
that which M. de Bréaute wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey
gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar
pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore,
glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the
microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and
never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness
of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of
refreshments.
"Hallo! you here! why, it's ages since I've seen you," the General
greeted Swann and, noticing the look of strain on his face and
concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away,
went on, "You're looking well, old man!" while M. de Bréauté turned
with, "My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?" to a 'society
novelist' who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his
own monocle, the sole instrument that he used in his psychological
investigations and remorseless analyses of character, and who now
replied, with an air of mystery and importance, rolling the 'r':--"I am
observing!"
The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minute and rimless, and, by
enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it
was incrusted like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which there
was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, it gave to his face a
melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of suffering
terribly when in love. But that of M. de Saint-Candé, girdled, like
Saturn, with an enormous ring, was the centre of gravity of a face which
composed itself afresh every moment in relation to the glass, while
his thrusting red nose and swollen sarcastic lips endeavoured by their
grimaces to rise to the level of the steady flame of wit that sparkled
in the polished disk, and saw itself preferred to the most ravishing
eyes in the world by the smart, depraved young women whom it set
dreaming of artificial charms and a refinement of sensual bliss; and
then, behind him, M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp's head and
goggling eyes moved slowly up and down the stream of festive gatherings,
unlocking his great mandibles at every moment as though in search of
his orientation, had the air of carrying about upon his person only an
accidental and perhaps purely symbolical fragment of the glass wall of
his aquarium, a part intended to suggest the whole which recalled to
Swann, a fervent admirer of Giotto's Vices and Virtues at Padua, that
Injustice by whose side a leafy bough evokes the idea of the forests
that enshroud his secret lair.
Swann had gone forward into the room, under pressure from Mme. de
Saint-Euverte and in order to listen to an aria from _Orfeo_ which was
being rendered on the flute, and had taken up a position in a corner
from which, unfortunately, his horizon was bounded by two ladies of
'uncertain' age, seated side by side, the Marquise de Cambremer and the
Vicomtesse de Franquetot, who, because they were cousins, used to spend
their time at parties in wandering through the rooms, each clutching her
bag and followed by her daughter, hunting for one another like people at
a railway station, and could never be at rest until they had reserved,
by marking them with their fans or handkerchiefs, two adjacent chairs;
Mme. de Cambremer, since she knew scarcely anyone, being all the more
glad of a companion, while Mme. de Franquetot, who, on the contrary,
was extremely popular, thought it effective and original to shew all
her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure
country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common. Filled
with ironical melancholy, Swann watched them as they listened to the
pianoforte intermezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds')
which came after the flute, and followed the virtuoso in his dizzy
flight; Mme. de Franquetot anxiously, her eyes starting from her head,
as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were
a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing,
a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of
astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: "It isn't
possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all
that!"; Mme. de Cambremer, as a woman who had received a sound musical
education, beating time with her head--transformed for the nonce into
the pendulum of a metronome, the sweep and rapidity of whose movements