Swann's Way
anything like it in the way of moonlight. 'I've heard that tale before,'
I said to her; you see, I knew quite well what she was after." Odette
narrated this episode almost as if it were a joke, either because it
appeared to her to be quite natural, or because she thought that she was
thereby minimising its importance, or else so as not to appear ashamed.
But, catching sight of Swann's face, she changed her tone, and:
"You are a fiend!" she flung at him, "you enjoy tormenting me, making me
tell you lies, just so that you'll leave me in peace."
This second blow struck at Swann was even more excruciating than the
first. Never had he supposed it to have been so recent an affair, hidden
from his eyes that had been too innocent to discern it, not in a past
which he had never known, but in evenings which he so well remembered,
which he had lived through with Odette, of which he had supposed himself
to have such an intimate, such an exhaustive knowledge, and which now
assumed, retrospectively, an aspect of cunning and deceit and cruelty.
In the midst of them parted, suddenly, a gaping chasm, that moment on
the Island in the Bois de Boulogne. Without being intelligent, Odette
had the charm of being natural. She had recounted, she had acted the
little scene with so much simplicity that Swann, as he gasped for
breath, could vividly see it: Odette yawning, the "rock there,"... He
could hear her answer--alas, how lightheartedly--"I've heard that tale
before!" He felt that she would tell him nothing more that evening, that
no further revelation was to be expected for the present. He was silent
for a time, then said to her:
"My poor darling, you must forgive me; I know, I am hurting you
dreadfully, but it's all over now; I shall never think of it again."
But she saw that his eyes remained fixed upon the things that he did not
know, and on that past era of their love, monotonous and soothing in his
memory because it was vague, and now rent, as with a sword-wound, by the
news of that minute on the Island in the Bois, by moonlight, while he
was dining with the Princesse des Laumes. But he had so far acquired
the habit of finding life interesting--of marvelling at the strange
discoveries that there were to be made in it--that even while he was
suffering so acutely that he did not believe it possible to endure such
agony for any length of time, he was saying to himself: "Life is indeed
astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far
more common than one has been led to believe. Here is a woman in whom
I had absolute confidence, who looks so simple, so honest, who, in any
case, even allowing that her morals are not strict, seemed quite normal
and healthy in her tastes and inclinations. I receive a most improbable
accusation, I question her, and the little that she admits reveals far
more than I could ever have suspected." But he could not confine himself
to these detached observations. He sought to form an exact estimate of
the importance of what she had just told him, so as to know whether he
might conclude that she had done these things often, and was likely to
do them again. He repeated her words to himself: "I knew quite well what
she was after." "Two or three times." "I've heard that tale before." But
they did not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them held a knife
with which it stabbed him afresh. For a long time, like a sick man
who cannot restrain himself from attempting, every minute, to make the
movement that, he knows, will hurt him, he kept on murmuring to himself:
"I'm quite happy where I am, thank you," "I've heard that tale before,"
but the pain was so intense that he was obliged to stop. He was amazed
to find that actions which he had always, hitherto, judged so lightly,
had dismissed, indeed, with a laugh, should have become as serious to
him as a disease which might easily prove fatal. He knew any number
of women whom he could ask to keep an eye on Odette, but how was he to
expect them to adjust themselves to his new point of view, and not to
remain at that which for so long had been his own, which had always
guided him in his voluptuous existence; not to say to him with a smile:
"You jealous monster, wanting to rob other people of their pleasure!"
By what trap-door, suddenly lowered, had he (who had never found, in the
old days, in his love for Odette, any but the most refined of pleasures)
been precipitated into this new circle of hell from which he could not
see how he was ever to escape. Poor Odette! He wished her no harm. She
was but half to blame. Had he not been told that it was her own mother
who had sold her, when she was still little more than a child, at Nice,
to a wealthy Englishman? But what an agonising truth was now contained
for him in those lines of Alfred de Vigny's _Journal d'un Poète_ which
he had previously read without emotion: "When one feels oneself smitten
by love for a woman, one ought to say to oneself, 'What are 'her
surroundings? What has been her life?' All one's future happiness lies
in the answer." Swann was astonished that such simple phrases, spelt
over in his mind as, "I've heard that tale before," or "I knew quite
well what she was after," could cause him so much pain. But he realised
that what he had mistaken for simple phrases were indeed parts of the
panoply which held and could inflict on him the anguish that he had felt
while Odette was telling her story. For it was the same anguish that he
now was feeling afresh. It was no good, his knowing now,--indeed, it
was no good, as time went on, his having partly forgotten and altogether
forgiven the offence--whenever he repeated her words his old anguish
refashioned him as he had been before Odette began to speak: ignorant,
trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might
be effectively wounded by Odette's admission, in the position of a man
who does not yet know the truth; and after several months this old story
would still dumbfounder him, like a sudden revelation. He marvelled
at the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only by the
weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes as age
creeps over one, that he could hope for a relaxation of his torments.
But, as soon as the power that any one of Odette's sentences had to make
Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one
of those to which he had hitherto paid least attention, almost a
new sentence, came to relieve the first, and to strike at him with
undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with
the Princesse des Laumes was painful to him, but it was no more than
the centre, the core of his pain. That radiated vaguely round about it,
overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever
point in it he might intend his memory to rest, it was the whole of that
season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine upon the
Island in the Bois, that sprang back to hurt him. So violently, that by
slow degrees the curiosity which his jealousy was ever exciting in him
was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures which he would be
inflicting upon himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that all
the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him,
a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind,
was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had
consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete
incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past,
now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an
obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued
to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from
laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day,
he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois, or the Princesse des
Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of that old rending pain;
meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him
with fresh sentences, with the names of more places and people and of
different events, which, when his malady was still scarcely healed,
would make it break out again in another form.
But, often enough, the things that he did not know, that he dreaded,
now, to learn, it was Odette herself who, spontaneously and without
thought of what she did, revealed them to him; for the gap which her
vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life
which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead,
was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same
air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any
suspicion of his vices, has no register, no gauge at hand from which
he may ascertain how far those vices (their continuous growth being
imperceptible by himself) have gradually segregated him from the normal
ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette's mind,
with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swann,
her other, her innocuous actions were gradually coloured, infected
by these, without her being able to detect anything strange in them,
without their causing any explosion in the particular region of herself
in which she made them live, but when she related them to Swann, he was
overwhelmed by the revelation of the duplicity to which they pointed.
One day, he was trying--without hurting Odette--to discover from her
whether she had ever had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a
matter of fact, convinced that she had not; the anonymous letter had
put the idea into his mind, but in a purely mechanical way; it had been
received there with no credulity, but it had, for all that, remained
there, and Swann, wishing to be rid of the burden--a dead weight, but
none the less disturbing--of this suspicion, hoped that Odette would now
extirpate it for ever.
"Oh dear, no! Not that they don't simply persecute me to go to them,"
her smile revealed a gratified vanity which she no longer saw that it
was impossible should appear legitimate to Swann. "There was one of them
waited more than two hours for me yesterday, said she would give me any
money I asked. It seems, there's an Ambassador who said to her, 'I'll
kill myself if you don't bring her to me'--meaning me! They told her I'd
gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go myself
and speak to her, before she'd go away. I do wish you could have seen
the way I tackled her; my maid was in the next room, listening, and told
me I shouted fit to bring the house down:--'But when you hear me say
that I don't want to! The idea of such a thing, I don't like it at all!
I should hope I'm still free to do as I please and when I please and
where I please! If I needed the money, I could understand...' The porter
has orders not to let her in again; he will tell her that I am out of
town. Oh, I do wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room
while I was talking to her. I know, you'd have been pleased, my dear.
There's some good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though
people do say such dreadful things about her."
Besides, her very admissions--when she made any--of faults which she
supposed him to have discovered, rather served Swann as a starting-point
for fresh doubts than they put an end to the old. For her admissions
never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate
her confession of all its essential part, there would remain in the
accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined, which crushed
him anew, and was to enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his
jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His spirit carried