In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (15 page)

But so far as Odette was concerned, Swann was quite blind, not merely to these deficiencies in her education but to the general mediocrity of her intelligence. More than that; whenever Odette told a silly story Swann would sit listening to his wife with a complacency, a merriment, almost an admiration in which some vestige of desire for her must have played a part; while in the same conversation, anything subtle or even profound that he himself might say would be listened to by Odette with an habitual lack of interest, rather curtly, with impatience, and would at times be sharply contradicted. And we may conclude that this subservience of refinement to vulgarity is the rule in many households, when we think, conversely, of all the superior women who yield to the blandishments of a boor, merciless in his censure of their most delicate utterances, while they themselves, with the infinite indulgence of love, are enraptured by the feeblest of his witticisms. To return to the reasons which prevented Odette, at this period, from gaining admittance to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be observed that the latest turn of the social kaleidoscope had been actuated by a series of scandals. Women to whose houses one had been going with perfect confidence had been discovered to be common prostitutes or British spies. For some time thereafter one expected people to be (such at least was one’s intention) staid and solidly based. Odette represented exactly what one had just severed relations with, only, incidentally, to renew them at once (for men, their natures not altering overnight, seek in every new order a continuance of the old), though seeking it under another form which would allow one to be taken in, and to believe that it was no longer the same society as before the crisis. However, the “branded” women of that society and Odette were too closely alike. Society people are very short-sighted; at the moment when they cease to have any relations with the Jewish ladies they know, while they are wondering how they are to fill the gap thus made in their lives, they perceive, thrust into it as by the windfall of a night of storm, a new lady, also Jewish; but by virtue of her novelty she is not associated in their minds with her predecessors, with what they are convinced that they must abjure. She does not ask that they shall respect her God. They take her up. There was no question of anti-Semitism at the time when I used first to visit Odette. But she resembled what people wished for a time to avoid.

As for Swann himself, he still often called on some of his former acquaintances, who, of course, belonged to the very highest society. And yet when he spoke to us of the people whom he had just been to see I noticed that, among those whom he had known in the old days, the choice that he made was dictated by the same kind of taste, partly artistic, partly historic, that inspired him as a collector. And remarking that it was often some Bohemian noblewoman who interested him because she had been the mistress of Liszt or because one of Balzac’s novels had been dedicated to her grandmother (as he would purchase a drawing if Chateaubriand had written about it), I conceived a suspicion that we had, at Combray, replaced one error, that of regarding Swann as a rich bourgeois who did not go into society, by another, when we supposed him to be one of the smartest men in Paris. To be a friend of the Comte de Paris means nothing at all. Is not the world full of such “friends of princes,” who would not be received in any house that was at all exclusive? Princes know themselves to be princes, and are not snobs; besides, they believe themselves to be so far above everything that is not of their blood royal that noblemen and commoners appear, in the depths beneath them, to be practically on a level.

But Swann was not content with seeking in society, and fastening on the names which the past has inscribed on its roll and which are still to be read there, a simple artistic and literary pleasure; he indulged in the slightly vulgar diversion of arranging as it were social nosegays by grouping heterogeneous elements, by bringing together people taken at random here, there and everywhere. These amusing (to Swann) sociological experiments did not always provoke an identical reaction from all his wife’s friends. “I’m thinking of asking the Cottards to meet the Duchesse de Vendôme,” he would say to Mme Bontemps with a laugh, in the zestful tone of an epicure who has thought of and intends to try substituting cayenne pepper for cloves in a sauce. But this plan, which might indeed appear agreeable to the Cottards, was calculated to infuriate Mme Bontemps. She herself had recently been introduced by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and had found this as agreeable as it seemed to her natural. The thought of being able to boast about it at the Cottards’ had been by no means the least savoury ingredient of her pleasure. But like those persons recently decorated who, their investiture once accomplished, would like to see the fountain of honour turned off at the main, Mme Bontemps would have preferred that, after herself, no one else in her own circle should be made known to the Princess. She inwardly cursed the depraved taste which caused Swann, in order to gratify a wretched aesthetic whim, to destroy at one swoop the dazzling impression she had made on the Cottards when she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. How was she even to dare to announce to her husband that the Professor and his wife were in their turn to partake of this pleasure of which she had boasted to him as though it were unique. If only the Cottards could be made to know that they were being invited not seriously but for the amusement of their host! It is true that the Bontemps had been invited for the same reason, but Swann, having acquired from the aristocracy that eternal Donjuanism which, in treating with two women of no importance, makes each of them believe that it is she alone who is seriously loved, had spoken to Mme Bontemps of the Duchesse de Vendôme as of a person with whom it was essential for her to dine. “Yes, we’re having the Princess here with the Cottards,” said Mme Swann a few weeks later. “My husband thinks that we might get something quite amusing out of the conjunction.” For if she had retained from the “little nucleus” certain habits dear to Mme Verdurin, such as that of shouting things aloud so as to be heard by all the faithful, she made use, at the same time, of certain expressions, such as “conjunction,” which were dear to the Guermantes circle, of which she was thus undergoing the attraction, unconsciously and at a distance, as the sea is swayed by the moon, though without being drawn perceptibly closer to it. “Yes, the Cottards and the Duchesse de Vendôme. Don’t you think that might be rather fun?” asked Swann.

“I think it will go very badly, and can only lead to a lot of bother. People oughtn’t to play with fire,” snapped Mme Bontemps, furious. She and her husband, and also the Prince d’Agrigente, were, as it happened, invited to this dinner, which Mme Bontemps and Cottard had each two alternative ways of describing, according to whom they were addressing. To some Mme Bontemps for her part, and Cottard for his, would say casually, when asked who else had been of the party: “Only the Prince d’Agrigente; it was very intimate.” But there were others who might, alas, be better informed (once, indeed, someone had challenged Cottard with: “But weren’t the Bontemps there too?” “Oh, I forgot them,” Cottard had blushingly admitted to the tactless questioner whom he ever afterwards classified among the mischief-makers). For these the Bontemps and the Cottards had each adopted, without any mutual arrangement, a version the framework of which was identical for both parties, their own names being interchanged. “Let me see,” Cottard would say, “there were our host and hostess, the Duc and Duchesse de Vendôme—” (with a self-satisfied smile) “Professor and Mme Cottard, the Prince d’Agrigente, and, upon my soul, heaven only knows how they got there, for they were like fish out of water, M. and Mme Bontemps!” Mme Bontemps would recite exactly the same “piece,” only it was M. and Mme Bontemps who were named with self-satisfied emphasis between the Duchesse de Vendôme and the Prince d’Agrigente, while the scurvy lot, whom she wound up by accusing of having invited themselves, and who completely spoiled the picture, were the Cottards.

When he had been paying social calls Swann would often come home with little time to spare before dinner. At that point in the evening, around six o’clock, when in the old days he used to feel so wretched, he no longer asked himself what Odette might be about, and was hardly at all concerned to hear that she had people with her or had gone out. He recalled at times that he had once, years ago, tried to read through its envelope a letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville. But this memory was not pleasing to him, and rather than plumb the depths of shame that he felt in it he preferred to indulge in a little grimace, twisting up the corners of his mouth and adding, if need be, a shake of the head which signified “What do I care about it?” True, he considered now that the hypothesis on which he had often dwelt at that time, according to which it was his jealous imagination alone that blackened what was in reality the innocent life of Odette—that this hypothesis (which after all was beneficent, since, so long as his amorous malady had lasted, it had diminished his sufferings by making them seem imaginary) was not the correct one, that it was his jealousy that had seen things in the correct light, and that if Odette had loved him more than he supposed, she had also deceived him more. Formerly, while his sufferings were still keen, he had vowed that, as soon as he had ceased to love Odette and was no longer afraid either of vexing her or of making her believe that he loved her too much, he would give himself the satisfaction of elucidating with her, simply from his love of truth and as a point of historical interest, whether or not Forcheville had been in bed with her that day when he had rung her bell and rapped on her window in vain, and she had written to Forcheville that it was an uncle of hers who had called. But this so interesting problem, which he was only waiting for his jealousy to subside before clearing up, had precisely lost all interest in Swann’s eyes when he had ceased to be jealous. Not immediately, however. Long after he had ceased to feel any jealousy with regard to Odette, the memory of that day, that afternoon spent knocking vainly at the little house in the Rue La Pérouse, had continued to torment him. It was as though his jealousy, not dissimilar in that respect from those maladies which appear to have their seat, their centre of contagion, less in certain persons than in certain places, in certain houses, had had for its object not so much Odette herself as that day, that hour in the irrevocable past when Swann had knocked at every entrance to her house in turn, as though that day, that hour alone had caught and preserved a few last fragments of the amorous personality which had once been Swann’s, that there alone could he now recapture them. For a long time now it had been a matter of indifference to him whether Odette had been, or was being, unfaithful to him. And yet he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of hers, to such an extent had the painful curiosity persisted in him to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six o’clock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations. He went on trying to discover what no longer interested him, because his old self, though it had shrivelled to extreme decrepitude, still acted mechanically, in accordance with preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in picturing to. himself that anguish—so compelling once that he had been unable to imagine that he would ever be delivered from it, that only the death of the woman he loved (though death, as will be shown later on in this story by a cruel corroboration, in no way diminishes the sufferings
caused by jealousy) seemed to him capable of smoothing the path of his life which then seemed impassably obstructed.

But to bring to light, some day, those passages in the life of Odette to which he had owed his sufferings had not been Swann’s only ambition; he had also resolved to avenge himself for his sufferings when, being no longer in love with Odette, he should no longer be afraid of her; and the opportunity of gratifying this second ambition had now presented itself, for Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who gave him no grounds for jealousy but none the less made him jealous, because he was no longer capable of altering his mode of loving, and it was the mode he had employed with Odette that must serve him now for another. To make Swann’s jealousy revive it was not necessary for this woman to be unfaithful; it sufficed that for some reason or other she should have been away from him, at a party for instance, and should have appeared to enjoy herself. That was enough to reawaken in him the old anguish, that lamentable and contradictory excrescence of his love, which alienated Swann from what was in fact a sort of need to attain (the real feelings this young woman had for him, the hidden longing that absorbed her days, the secret places of her heart), for between Swann and the woman whom he loved this anguish piled up an unyielding mass of previous suspicions, having their cause in Odette, or in some other perhaps who had preceded Odette, which allowed the ageing lover to know his mistress of today only through the old, collective spectre of the “woman who aroused his jealousy” in which he had arbitrarily embodied his new love. Often, however, Swann would accuse his jealousy of making him believe in imaginary infidelities; but then he would remember that he had given Odette the benefit of the same argument, and wrongly. And so everything that the young woman whom he loved did in the hours when he was not with her ceased to appear innocent. But whereas at that other time he had made a vow that if ever he ceased to love the woman who, though he did not then know it, was to be his future wife, he would show her an implacable indifference that would at last be sincere, in order to avenge his pride that had so long been humiliated, now that he could enforce those reprisals without risk to himself (for what harm could it do him to be taken at his word and deprived of those intimate moments with Odette that had once been so necessary to him?), he no longer wished to do so; with his love had vanished the desire to show that he no longer loved. And he who, when he was suffering at the hands of Odette, so longed to let her see one day that he had fallen for another, now that he was in a position to do so took infinite precautions lest his wife should suspect the existence of this new love.

It was not only in those tea-parties, on account of which I had formerly had the sorrow of seeing Gilberte leave me and go home earlier than usual, that I was henceforth to take part, but the excursions she made with her mother which, by preventing her from coming to the Champs-Elysées, had deprived me of her on those days when I loitered alone upon the lawn in front of the roundabout—in these also M. and Mme Swann now included me: I had a seat in their landau, and indeed it was me that they asked if I would rather go to the theatre, to a dancing lesson at the house of one of Gilberte’s friends, to some social gathering given by a friend of Mme Swann’s (what the latter called “a little
meeting
”) or to visit the tombs at Saint-Denis.

On the days when I was to go out with the Swanns I would arrive at their house in time for what Mme Swann called “le lunch.” As one was not expected before half-past twelve, while my parents in those days had their meal at a quarter past eleven, it was not until they had risen from table that I made my way towards that sumptuous quarter, deserted enough at any time, but more particularly at that hour, when everyone had gone home. Even on frosty days in winter if the weather was fine, tightening every few minutes the knot of a gorgeous Charvet tie and looking to see that my patent-leather boots were not getting dirty, I would wander up and down the avenues, waiting until twenty-seven minutes past the hour. I could see from afar in the Swanns’ little garden-plot the sunlight glittering like hoar-frost from the bare-boughed trees. It is true that the garden boasted only two. The unusual hour presented the scene in a new light. These pleasures of nature (intensified by the suppression of habit and indeed by my physical hunger), were infused by the thrilling prospect of sitting down to lunch with Mme Swann. It did not diminish them, but dominated and subdued them, made of them social accessories; so that if, at this hour when ordinarily I did not notice them, I seemed now to be discovering the fine weather, the cold, the wintry sunlight, it was all as a sort of preface to the creamed eggs, as a patina, a cool pink glaze applied to the decoration of that mystic chapel which was the habitation of Mme Swann, and in the heart of which there was by contrast so much warmth, so many scents and flowers.