Swann's Way
them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like
corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.
She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the
day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. "What! you knew him as long ago as that?
Oh, yes, of course you did," he corrected himself, so as not to shew
that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble
at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, when he had
received that letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had been
having luncheon, perhaps, with Forcheville at the Maison d'Or. She swore
that she had not. "Still, the Maison d'Or reminds me of something or
other which, I knew at the time, wasn't true," he pursued, hoping to
frighten her. "Yes, that I hadn't been there at all that evening when I
told you I had just come from there, and you had been looking for me
at Prévost's," she replied (judging by his manner that he knew) with a
firmness that was based not so much upon cynicism as upon timidity, a
fear of crossing Swann, which her own self-respect made her anxious to
conceal, and a desire to shew him that she could be perfectly frank if
she chose. And so she struck him with all the sharpness and force of a
headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty,
since she was quite unconscious of hurting him; she even began to laugh,
though this may perhaps, it is true, have been chiefly to keep him from
thinking that she was ashamed, at all, or confused. "It's quite true, I
hadn't been to the Maison Dorée. I was coming away from Forcheville's. I
had, really, been to Prévost's--that wasn't a story--and he met me there
and asked me to come in and look at his prints. But some one else came
to see him. I told you that I was coming from the Maison d'Or because I
was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really,
don't you see? I admit, I did wrong, but at least I'm telling you all
about it now, a'n't I? What have I to gain by not telling you, straight,
that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, if it were
true? Especially as at that time we didn't know one another quite so
well as we do now, did we, dear?"
He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the utterly
spiritless creature which these crushing words had made of him. And so,
even in the months of which he had never dared to think again, because
they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was
already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening on which
they had "done a cattleya") when she had told him that she was coming
from the Maison Dorée, how many others must there have been, each
of them covering a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He
recalled how she had said to him once: "I need only tell Mme. Verdurin
that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There is always
some excuse." From himself too, probably, many times when she had glibly
uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the
hour fixed for a meeting, those moments must have hidden, without his
having the least inkling of it at the time, an engagement that she had
had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: "I need only
tell Swann that my dress wasn't ready, or that my cab came late. There
is always some excuse." And beneath all his most pleasant memories,
beneath the simplest words that Odette had ever spoken to him in those
old days, words which he had believed as though they were the words of
a Gospel, beneath her daily actions which she had recounted to him,
beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's flat, the Avenue du
Bois, the Hippodrome, he could feel (dissembled there, by virtue of that
temporal superfluity which, after the most detailed account of how a day
has been spent, always leaves something over, that may serve as a hiding
place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of
a possible undercurrent of falsehood which debased for him all that
had remained most precious, his happiest evenings, the Rue La Pérouse
itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours
than those of which she told him; extending the power of the dark horror
that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to
the Maison Dorée, and, like the obscene creatures in the 'Desolation of
Nineveh,' shattering, stone by stone, the whole edifice of his past....
If, now, he turned aside whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of
the Maison Dorée it was because that name recalled to him, no longer,
as, such a little time since, at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's party, the good
fortune which he long had lost, but a misfortune of which he was now
first aware. Then it befell the Maison Dorée, as it had befallen the
Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him.
For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them,
single, continuous and individual passions. They are composed of an
infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is
ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the
impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann's
love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of
infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which
had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time
without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by
others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann's heart
alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him a kindness of
which she would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage,
under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come; he must
instantly accompany her home, to "do a cattleya," and the desire
which she pretended to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so
imperious, the kisses which she lavished on him were so demonstrative
and so unfamiliar, that this brutal and unnatural fondness made Swann
just as unhappy as any lie or unkind action. One evening when he had
thus, in obedience to her command, gone home with her, and while she was
interspersing her kisses with passionate words, in strange contrast to
her habitual coldness, he thought suddenly that he heard a sound; he
rose, searched everywhere and found nobody, but he had not the courage
to return to his place by her side; whereupon she, in a towering
rage, broke a vase, with "I never can do anything right with you,
you impossible person!" And he was left uncertain whether she had not
actually had some man concealed in the room, whose jealousy she had
wished to wound, or else to inflame his senses.
Sometimes he repaired to 'gay' houses, hoping to learn something about
Odette, although he dared not mention her name. "I have a little thing
here, you're sure to like," the 'manageress' would greet him, and he
would stay for an hour or so, talking dolefully to some poor girl who
sat there astonished that he went no further. One of them, who was still
quite young and attractive, said to him once, "Of course, what I should
like would be to find a real friend, then he might be quite certain,
I should never go with any other men again." "Indeed, do you think it
possible for a woman really to be touched by a man's being in love with
her, and never to be unfaithful to him?" asked Swann anxiously. "Why,
surely! It all depends on their characters!" Swann could not help making
the same remarks to these girls as would have delighted the Princesse
des Laumes. To the one who was in search of a friend he said, with a
smile: "But how nice of you, you've put on blue eyes, to go with
your sash." "And you too, you've got blue cuffs on." "What a charming
conversation we are having, for a place of this sort! I'm not boring
you, am I; or keeping you?" "No, I've nothing to do, thank you. If you
bored me I should say so. But I love hearing you talk." "I am highly
flattered.... Aren't we behaving prettily?" he asked the 'manageress,'
who had just looked in. "Why, yes, that's just what I was saying to
myself, how sensibly they're behaving! But that's how it is! People come
to my house now, just to talk. The Prince was telling me, only the other
day, that he's far more comfortable here than with his wife. It seems
that, nowadays, all the society ladies are like that; a perfect scandal,
I call it. But I'll leave you in peace now, I know when I'm not wanted,"
she ended discreetly, and left Swann with the girl who had the blue
eyes. But presently he rose and said good-bye to her. She had ceased to
interest him. She did not know Odette.
The painter having been ill, Dr. Cottard recommended a sea-voyage;
several of the 'faithful' spoke of accompanying him; the Verdurins
could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris, so first of
all hired, and finally purchased a yacht; thus Odette was constantly
going on a cruise. Whenever she had been away for any length of time,
Swann would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her, but,
as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical
distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to
Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, when they had gone
away, as everyone thought, for a month only, either they succumbed to a
series of temptations, or else M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged
everything beforehand, to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to
the 'faithful' only as time went on; anyhow, from Algiers they flitted
to Tunis; then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had
been absent for nearly a year, and Swann felt perfectly at ease and
almost happy. Albeit M. Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the
pianist and Dr. Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no
need of them, and that, in any event, it was most rash to allow Mme.
Cottard to return to Paris, where, Mme. Verdurin assured him, a
revolution had just broken out, he was obliged to grant them their
liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One
day, shortly after the return of these four travellers, Swann, seeing
an omnibus approach him, labelled 'Luxembourg,' and having some
business there, had jumped on to it and had found himself sitting
opposite Mme. Cottard, who was paying a round of visits to people whose
'day' it was, in full review order, with a plume in her hat, a silk
dress, a muff, an umbrella (which would do for a parasol if the rain
kept off), a card-case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the
cleaners. Wearing these badges of rank, she would, in fine weather, go
on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when
she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a
transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the
natural courtesy of the woman broke through the starched surface of the
doctor's-wife, not being certain, either, whether she ought to mention
the Verdurins before Swann, she produced, quite naturally, in her slow
and awkward, but not unattractive voice, which, every now and then, was
completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, topics selected from
those which she had picked up and would repeat in each of the score of
houses up the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an
afternoon.
"I needn't ask you, M. Swann, whether a man so much in the movement as
yourself has been to the Mirlitons, to see the portrait by Machard that
the whole of Paris is running after. Well, and what do you think of it?
Whose camp are you in, those who bless or those who curse? It's the
same in every house in Paris now, no one will speak of anything else but