In Search of Lost Time (41 page)

Realizing that he often failed to satisfy her dreams, he at least tried to see that she enjoyed being with him, not to oppose the vulgar ideas, the bad taste, which she displayed in all things, and which he loved, moreover, like everything else that emanated from her, which even enchanted him, for they were so many particular traits by which the woman's essence appeared to him, became visible. And so, when she looked happy because she was going to
La Reine Topaz
,
⁴²
or when her gaze became serious, worried and petulant, because she was afraid of missing the flower show or merely of not being in time for tea, with
muffins
and
toast
,
⁴³
at the ‘Thé de la rue Royale',
⁴⁴
regular attendance at which she believed was indispensable in establishing a woman's reputation for elegance, Swann, enchanted as we are by the naturalness of a child or the truthfulness of a portrait that seems about to speak, sensed so clearly his mistress's soul rising to the surface of her face that he could not resist going over to touch it with his lips. ‘Ah! She wants to be taken to the flower show, little Odette, she wants to be admired, well then, we'll take her, we must obey.' Since Swann's vision was rather poor, he had resigned himself to wearing glasses for working at home, and to adopting, for going out in the world, a monocle, which was less disfiguring. The first time she saw him with one in his eye, she could not contain her joy: ‘I really do think for a
man it's very smart! How it suits you! You look like a real gentleman. All you're missing is a title!' she added, with a touch of regret. He was happy that Odette was like this, just as, if he had been in love with a Breton woman, he would have enjoyed seeing her in a coiffe and hearing her tell him she believed in ghosts. Until then, as is true of many men whose taste for the arts develops independently from their sensuality, a bizarre disparity had existed between the satisfactions he conceded to one and those he conceded to the other, as he enjoyed, in the company of increasingly crude women, the seductions of increasingly refined works of art, taking a little housemaid to a closed orchestra box for the performance of a decadent play that he wanted to see or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, and sure, in any case, that a cultivated woman of the world would not have understood any more about it, but would not have been able to keep quiet so nicely. But now that he loved Odette, to feel what she felt, to try to have but a single soul for the two of them, was so sweet to him that he tried to enjoy the things she liked, and his pleasure, not only in imitating her habits, but in adopting her opinions, was all the more profound because, since they had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love, because of which he preferred them. If he went to more than one performance of
Serge Panine
,
⁴⁵
if he sought out opportunities to go to see Olivier Métra
⁴⁶
conduct, it was for the sweetness of being initiated into all of Odette's ideas, of feeling he was sharing equally in all her tastes. This charm of bringing him close to her, which was possessed by the works or the places that she liked, seemed to him more mysterious than the charm intrinsic in those that were lovelier but did not remind him of her. What was more, because he had allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to weaken, and because his scepticism as a man of the world had, unbeknownst to him, penetrated to them, he thought (or at least he had thought this for so long that he still said it) that the objects of our preferences do not have an absolute value in themselves, but that they all depend on one's period, one's social class, they are all merely fashions, the most vulgar of which are equal to those that pass for the most distinguished. And just as he believed that the importance Odette attached to having cards for the opening was not in itself a more ridiculous thing than the
pleasure he used to take in lunching at the home of the Prince of Wales, likewise he did not think that the admiration she professed for Monte Carlo or for the Righi
⁴⁷
was more unreasonable than the fondness he himself felt for Holland, which she imagined to be ugly, or for Versailles, which she found dreary. And so he denied himself those places, pleased to tell himself that it was for her sake, that he wanted to feel things, love things, only with her.

Like everything else that was part of Odette's environment and no more, in some sense, than a means by which he could see her, talk to her, he enjoyed the company of the Verdurins. There, because at the centre of all the amusements, meals, music, games, costumed suppers, excursions into the country, theatre parties, even the rare ‘grand soirées' given for the ‘bores', was the presence of Odette, the sight of Odette, conversation with Odette, of which the Verdurins gave to Swann, by inviting him, the inestimable gift, he was happier among the ‘little clan' than anywhere else, and sought to attribute real merits to it, for by so doing he could imagine that, out of preference, he would associate with it all his life. For, since he did not dare to say to himself, afraid that he would not believe it, that he would always love Odette, at least by supposing that he would always associate with the Verdurins (a proposition that, a priori, raised fewer objections of principle on the part of his intelligence), he could see himself in the future continuing to meet Odette every evening; this did not perhaps quite amount to the same thing as always loving her, but for the moment, while he loved her, to believe that he would not stop seeing her one day was all that he asked. ‘What a charming place, he would say to himself. How fundamentally real their life is! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are there than high-society people! How sincere, despite some rather absurd little exaggerations, is Mme Verdurin's love of painting, music – what a passion she has for works of art, and how she longs to please artists! The notion she has formed of society people is not accurate; but then again, society's notion of artistic circles is even more false! Perhaps I make no very great intellectual demands in conversation, but I'm perfectly happy with Cottard though he does make inept puns. And as for the painter, his pretentiousness may be unpleasant when he's trying to surprise people,
but on the other hand he has one of the finest minds I've ever known. And also, most of all, you feel free there, you do what you like without feeling constrained, without standing on ceremony. What a quantity of good humour is expended every day in that drawing-room! Decidedly, apart from a few rare exceptions, I will never go anywhere else. More and more, that is where I will find my companionship and live my life.'

And since the qualities that he believed to be intrinsic to the Verdurins were merely the reflection of the pleasures he enjoyed in their house because of his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound, more vital, along with those pleasures. Because Mme Verdurin sometimes gave Swann the only thing that could constitute happiness for him; because, on a certain evening when he felt anxious because Odette had been talking to one guest more than another, and when, irritated at her, he did not want to take the initiative of asking her if she would return home with him, Mme Verdurin brought him peace and joy by saying spontaneously: ‘Odette, you will take M. Swann home, won't you?'; because, when summer was approaching, and he had at first wondered uneasily if Odette would be going away without him, if he could continue to see her every day, Mme Verdurin invited them both to spend it at her home in the country – Swann, unconsciously allowing gratitude and self-interest to infiltrate into his intelligence and influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim that Mme Verdurin was the soul of high-mindedness. Apropos of a few delightful or eminent people whom one of his old classmates from the é cole du Louvre might mention to him, he would respond: ‘I prefer the Verdurins a hundred times over.' And, with a solemnity that was new to him: ‘They are magnanimous creatures, and magnanimity is, fundamentally, the only thing that matters and that gives us distinction here on earth. You know, there are only two classes of people: the magnanimous ones and all the rest; and when you reach my age you have to choose, you have to decide once and for all whom you intend to like and whom you intend to despise, stick with the ones you like and, so as to make up for the time you've wasted with the others, not leave them again until you die. Well!' he added with that slight emotion you feel when, even without fully realizing it, you say
something not because it is true, but because you enjoy saying it and you listen to it in your own voice as if it came from somewhere other than from yourself, ‘the die is cast, I have chosen to like only magnanimous hearts and to live from now on only in magnanimity. You ask me if Mme Verdurin is truly intelligent. I assure you that she has given me proof of a nobility of heart, of a loftiness of soul which, you know, can't be attained without an equal loftiness of mind. Certainly she has a profound intelligence where the arts are concerned. But perhaps this is not her most admirable quality; and a small action, an ingeniously, exquisitely good one, that she has performed for me, a genial attention, a familiarly sublime gesture, reveal a more profound understanding of life than any philosophical treatise.'

Yet he could have said to himself that there were old friends of his parents just as simple as the Verdurins, friends of his youth as smitten with art, that he knew other great-hearted people, and that nevertheless, now that he had opted for simplicity, the arts and magnanimity, he never saw them any more. But these people did not know Odette, and, if they had known her, would never have thought of bringing the two of them together.

And so doubtless there was not, in the whole Verdurin circle, a single faithful partisan who liked them or thought he liked them as much as Swann. And yet, when M. Verdurin had said he did not much care for Swann, he was not only expressing his own thoughts, but also guessing his wife's. Doubtless Swann's affection for Odette was too private and he had neglected to make Mme Verdurin his daily confidante concerning it; doubtless the very discretion with which he had made use of the Verdurins' hospitality, often refraining from coming to dinner for a reason that they did not suspect and in place of which they saw a desire not to turn down an invitation to the home of some ‘bores', doubtless, too, and despite all the precautions he had taken to hide it from them, their gradual discovery of his brilliant position in society, all fed their irritation with him. But the deeper reason for it was different. It was that they had very quickly sensed in him a reserved, impenetrable space, where he continued to profess silently to himself that the Princesse de Sagan was not grotesque and that Cottard's jokes were not funny, in the end, and, even though he never
deviated from his affability and never rebelled against their dogmas, an impossibility of imposing them on him, of wholly converting him to them, the like of which they had never encountered before in anyone. They would have forgiven him for associating with bores (to whom, for that matter, in his heart of hearts, he preferred the Verdurins and the whole of the little clan a thousand times over), if he had consented, as a good example, to renounce them in the presence of the faithful. But this was an abjuration they understood could not be wrung from him.

How different from a ‘newcomer' whom Odette had asked them to invite, though she had not met him more a few times, and in whom they invested many hopes: the Comte de Forcheville! (It turned out that in fact he was Saniette's brother-in-law, which filled the faithful with surprise: the old archivist's manners were so humble that they had always thought he was from a social rank inferior to theirs and did not expect to learn that he belonged to a world that was rich and relatively aristocratic.) True, Forcheville was grossly snobbish, whereas Swann was not; true, he did not even dream of placing the circle of the Verdurins above all others, as Swann did. But he did not have the natural delicacy that stopped Swann from joining in with the too manifestly false criticisms that Mme Verdurin leveled against people he knew. As for the vulgar and pretentious tirades the painter launched into on certain days, and as for the travelling-salesman jokes that Cottard ventured, for which Swann, who liked both men, could easily find excuses without having the heart or the hypocrisy to applaud them, Forcheville by contrast was of an intellectual calibre that allowed him to be dumbfounded, awestruck by the first, though he did not understand them, and to delight in the second. And in fact the first dinner at the Verdurins' at which Forcheville was present exposed all these differences, brought out his qualities and precipitated Swann's fall from grace.

At this dinner there was, besides the regulars, a professor from the Sorbonne, Brichot, who had met M. and Mme Verdurin at the spa and, if his duties at the university and his scholarly work had not given him very few hours of freedom, would willingly have come to their house often. For he had that curiosity, that excessive interest in life
which, when combined with a degree of scepticism concerning the object of their studies, gives certain intelligent men in any profession, doctors who do not believe in medicine, schoolteachers who do not believe in Latin compositions, a reputation for having minds that are broad, brilliant and even superior. At Mme Verdurin's, he made a point of seeking his illustrations in whatever was most up-to-date when he spoke of philosophy and history, principally because he thought such subjects were only a preparation for real life and he imagined he would find put into practice by the little clan what he had known before now only from books, and then perhaps also because, having had instilled in him in the past, and having preserved without knowing it, a respect for certain subjects, he believed he was casting off his academic tendencies by taking liberties with them which, on the contrary, appeared such to him only because he had remained an academic.