In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (28 page)

New Year’s Day went by, hour after hour, without bringing me that letter from Gilberte. And as I received a few others containing greetings belated or retarded by the congestion of the mails at that season, on the third and fourth of January I still hoped, but more and more faintly. On the days that followed, I wept a great deal. True, this was due to the fact that, having been less sincere than I thought in my renunciation of Gilberte, I had clung to the hope of a letter from her in the New Year. And seeing that hope exhausted before I had had time to shelter myself behind another, I suffered like an invalid who has emptied his phial of morphia without having another within his reach. But perhaps also in my case—and these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, for a single feeling is often made up of contrary elements—the hope that I entertained of ultimately receiving a letter had brought to my mind’s eye once again the image of Gilberte, had reawakened the emotions which the expectation of finding myself in her presence, the sight of her, her behaviour towards me, had aroused in me before. The immediate possibility of a reconciliation had suppressed in me that faculty the immense importance of which we are apt to overlook: the faculty of resignation. Neurasthenics find it impossible to believe the friends who assure them that they will gradually recover their peace of mind if they will stay in bed and receive no letters, read no newspapers. They imagine that such a regime will only exasperate their twitching nerves. And similarly lovers, contemplating it from within a contrary state of mind, not having yet begun to put it to the test, are unable to believe in the healing power of renunciation.

Because of the violence of my heart-beats, my doses of caffeine were reduced; the palpitations ceased. Whereupon I asked myself whether it was not to some extent the drug that had been responsible for the anguish I had felt when I had fallen out with Gilberte, an anguish which I had attributed, whenever it recurred, to the pain of not seeing her any more or of running the risk of seeing her only when she was a prey to the same ill-humour. But if this drug had been at the root of the sufferings which my imagination must in that case have interpreted wrongly (not that there would be anything extraordinary in that, seeing that, for lovers, the most acute mental suffering often has its origin in the physical presence of the woman with whom they are living), it had been, in that sense, like the philtre which, long after they have absorbed it, continues to bind Tristan to Isolde. For the physical improvement which the reduction of my caffeine effected almost at once did not arrest the evolution of that grief which my absorption of the toxin had perhaps, if not created, at any rate contrived to render more acute.

Only, as the middle of the month of January approached, once my hopes of a New Year letter had been disappointed, once the additional pang that had come with their disappointment had been assuaged, it was my old sorrow, that of “before the holidays,” which began again. What was perhaps the most cruel thing about it was that I myself was its architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient. The one thing that mattered to me was my relationship with Gilberte, and it was I who was labouring to make it impossible by gradually creating out of this prolonged separation from my beloved, not indeed her indifference, but what would come to the same thing in the end, my own. It was to a slow and painful suicide of that self which loved Gilberte that I was goading myself with untiring energy, with a clear sense not only of what I was doing in the present but of what must result from it in the future: I knew not only that after a certain time I should cease to love Gilberte, but also that she herself would regret it and that the attempts which she would then make to see me would be as vain as those that she was making now, no longer because I loved her too much but because I should certainly be in love with some other woman whom I should continue to desire, to wait for, through hours of which I should not dare to divert a single particle of a second to Gilberte who would be nothing to me then. And no doubt at that very moment in which (since I was determined not to see her again, barring a formal request for a reconciliation, a complete declaration of love on her part, neither of which was in the least degree likely to be forthcoming) I had already lost Gilberte, and loved her more than ever since I could feel all that she was to me better than in the previous year when, spending all my afternoons in her company, or as many as I chose, I believed that no peril threatened our friendship—no doubt at that moment the idea that I should one day entertain identical feelings for another was odious to me, for that idea deprived me, not only of Gilberte, but of my love and my suffering: my love, my suffering, in which through my tears I was attempting to grasp precisely what Gilberte was, and yet was obliged to recognise that they did not pertain exclusively to her but would, sooner or later, be some other woman’s fate. So that—or such, at least, was my way of thinking then—we are always detached from our fellow-creatures: when we love, we sense that our love does not bear a name, that it may spring up again in the future, could have sprung up already in the past, for another person rather than this one; and during the time when we are not in love, if we resign ourselves philosophically to love’s inconsistencies and contradictions, it is because we do not at that moment feel the love which we speak about so freely, and hence do not know it, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment. Of course there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that that future in which I should no longer love her, which my suffering helped me to divine although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of it, would gradually take shape, that its coming was, if not imminent, at least inevitable, if she herself did not come to my rescue and nip my future indifference in the bud. How often was I not on the point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her: “Take care. My mind is made up. This is my final attempt. I am seeing you now for the last time. Soon I shall love you no longer!” But to what end? By what right could I reproach her for an indifference which, without considering myself guilty on that account, I myself manifested towards everything that was not Gilberte? The last time! To me, that appeared as something of immense significance, because I loved Gilberte. On her it would doubtless have made just as much impression as those letters in which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country, requests which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect. The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte? She would not have heard me. We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. My words would have come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my beloved, unrecognisable, sounding false and absurd, having no longer any kind of meaning. The truth which one puts into one’s words does not carve out a direct path for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them. Then the political opponent who, despite every argument, every proof, condemns the votary of the rival doctrine as a traitor, himself comes to share the hated conviction, in which he who once sought in vain to disseminate it no longer believes. Then the masterpiece of literature whose excellence seemed self-evident to the admirers who read it aloud, while to those who listened it presented only a senseless or commonplace image, will by those too be proclaimed a masterpiece, but too late for the author to learn of their conversion. Similarly, in love, the barriers, do what he may, cannot be broken down from without by the despairing lover; it is when he no longer cares about them that suddenly, as the result of an effort directed from elsewhere, accomplished within the heart of the one who did not love, those barriers which he has charged in vain will fall to no avail. If I had come to Gilberte to tell her of my future indifference and the means of preventing it, she would have assumed that my love for her, the need that I had of her, were even greater than she had supposed, and her reluctance to see me would thereby have been increased. And it is all too true, moreover, that it was that love for her which helped me, by the disparate states of mind which it successively produced in me, to foresee, more clearly than she herself could, the end of that love. And yet some such warning I might perhaps have addressed, by letter or by word of mouth, to Gilberte, after a long enough interval, which would render her, it is true, less indispensable to me, but might also have proved to her that she was not so indispensable. Unfortunately certain well or ill intentioned persons spoke of me to her in a fashion which must have led her to think that they were doing so at my request. Whenever I thus learned that Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had by a few ill-chosen words nullified the whole sacrifice that I had just been making, wasted all the advantage of my reserve by wrongly making me appear to have emerged from it, I had a double grievance. In the first place I now had to date from that day only my laborious and fruitful abstention which these tiresome people had, unknown to me, interrupted and consequently brought to nothing. But in addition I should now have less pleasure in seeing Gilberte, who would think of me no longer as containing myself in dignified resignation, but as plotting in the dark for an interview which she had scorned to grant me. I cursed all this idle chatter of people who so often, without any intention either of hurting us or of doing us a service, for no reason, for talking’s sake, sometimes because we ourselves have not been able to refrain from talking in their presence and because they are indiscreet (as we ourselves are), do us, at a crucial moment, so much harm. It is true that in the baleful task of destroying our love they are far from playing a part comparable to that played by two persons who are in the habit, one from excess of good-will and the other from excess of ill-will, of undoing everything at the moment when everything is on the point of being settled. But against these two persons we bear no such grudge as against the inopportune Cottards of this world, for one of them is the person whom we love and the other is ourself.

Meanwhile, since almost every time I went to see her Mme Swann would invite me to come to tea with her daughter and tell me to reply to the latter direct, I was constantly writing to Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions which might, I felt, have won her over, but sought only to carve out the easiest channel for the flow of my tears. For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow’s rendezvous. When one renounces love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to the person who is its cause the expression of it which seems most moving. One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: “I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.” I said also: “I shall probably never see you again,” and said it while continuing to avoid showing a coldness which she might think feigned, and the words, as I wrote them,
made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen. For at the next request for a meeting which she would convey to me I should have again, as I had now, the courage not to yield, and, with one refusal after another, I should gradually come to the moment when, by virtue of not having seen her again, I should no longer wish to see her. I wept, but I found courage enough to sacrifice, I savoured the melancholy pleasure of sacrificing, the happiness of being with her to the possibility of being pleasing in her eyes one day—a day, alas, when being pleasing in her eyes would be immaterial to me. Even the supposition, improbable though it was, that at this moment, as she had claimed during the last visit that I had paid her, she loved me, that what I took for the boredom which one feels in the company of a person of whom one has grown tired had been due only to a jealous susceptibility, to a feigned indifference analogous to my own, only rendered my decision less painful. It seemed to me that in years to come, when we had forgotten one another, when I should be able to look back and tell her that this letter which I was now in the course of writing to her had not been for one moment sincere, she would answer: “What, you really did love me, did you? If you only knew how I waited for that letter, how I longed for us to meet, how I cried when I read it.” The thought, while I was writing it, immediately on my return from her mother’s house, that I was perhaps consummating that very misunderstanding, that thought, by its very sadness, by the pleasure of imagining that I was loved by Gilberte, gave me the impulse to continue my letter.

If, at the moment of leaving Mme Swann, when her tea-party ended, I was thinking of what I was going to write to her daughter, Mme Cottard, as she departed, had been filled with thoughts of a wholly different kind. On her little “tour of inspection” she had not failed to congratulate Mme Swann on the new furnishings, the recent “acquisitions” which caught the eye in her drawing-room. She could also see among them some, though only a very few, of the things that Odette had had in the old days in the Rue La Pérouse, for instance her animals carved in precious stones, her mascots.

For since Mme Swann had picked up from a friend whose opinion she valued the word “trashy”—which had opened to her new horizons because it denoted precisely those things which a few years earlier she had considered “smart”—all those things had, one after another, followed into retirement the gilded trellis that had served as background to her chrysanthemums, innumerable bonbonnières from Giroux’s, and the coroneted note-paper (not to mention the coins of gilt pasteboard littered about on the mantelpieces, which, even before she had come to know Swann, a man of taste had advised her to jettison). Moreover in the artistic disorder, the studio-like jumble of the rooms, whose walls were still painted in sombre colours which made them as different as possible from the white-enamelled drawing-rooms Mme Swann was to favour a little later, the Far East was retreating more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth century; and the cushions which, to make me “comfortable,” Mme Swann heaped up and buffeted into position behind my back were sprinkled with Louis XV garlands and not, as of old, with Chinese dragons. In the room in which she was usually to be found, and of which she would say, “Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn’t live with a lot of hostile, pompous things; this is where I do my work” (though she never stated precisely at what she was working, whether a picture, or perhaps a book, for the hobby of writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to do something, not to be quite useless), she was surrounded by Dresden pieces (having a fancy for that sort of porcelain, which she pronounced with an English accent, saying in any connexion: “How pretty that is; it reminds me of Dresden flowers”), and dreaded for them even more than in the old days for her grotesque figures and her vases the ignorant handling of her servants who were made to expiate the anxiety that they had caused her by submitting to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most courteous and considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked. Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming. Nowadays it was rarely in Japanese kimonos that Odette received her intimates, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau housecoat whose flowering foam she would make as though to rub gently over her bosom, and in which she basked, lolled, disported herself with such an air of well-being, of cool freshness, taking such deep breaths, that she seemed to look on these garments not as something decorative, a mere setting for herself, but as necessary, in the same way as her “tub” or her daily “constitutional,” to satisfy the requirements of her physiognomy and the niceties of hygiene. She used often to say that she would go without bread rather than give up art and cleanliness, and that the burning of the “Gioconda” would distress
her infinitely more than the destruction, by the same element, of the “fulltitudes” of people she knew. Theories which seemed paradoxical to her friends, but made them regard her as a superior woman, and earned her a weekly visit from the Belgian Minister, so that in the little world of which she was the sun everyone would have been greatly astonished to learn that elsewhere—at the Verdurins’, for instance—she was reckoned a fool. It was this vivacity of mind that made Mme Swann prefer men’s society to women’s. But when she criticised the latter it was always from the courtesan’s standpoint, singling out the blemishes that might lower them in the esteem of men, thick ankles, a bad complexion, inability to spell, hairy legs, foul breath, pencilled eyebrows. But towards a woman who had shown her kindness or indulgence in the past she was more lenient, especially if this woman was now in trouble. She would defend her warmly, saying: “People are not fair to her. I assure you, she’s quite a nice woman really.”

It was not only the furniture of Odette’s drawing-room, it was Odette herself whom Mme Cottard and all those who had frequented the society of Mme de Crécy would have found it difficult, if they had not seen her for some little time, to recognise. She seemed to be so much younger. No doubt this was partly because she had put on a little weight, was in better health, seemed at once calmer, cooler, more restful, and also because the new way in which she braided her hair gave more breadth to a face which was animated by an application of pink powder, and into which her eyes and profile, formerly too prominent, seemed now to have been reabsorbed. But another reason for this change lay in the fact that, having reached the turning-point of life, Odette had at length discovered, or invented, a physiognomy of her own, an unalterable “character,” a “style of beauty,” and on her uncoordinated features—which for so long, exposed to the dangerous and futile vagaries of the flesh, putting on momentarily years, a sort of fleeting old age, as a result of the slightest fatigue, had composed for her somehow or other, according to her mood and her state of health, a dishevelled, changeable, formless, charming face—had now set this fixed type, as it were an immortal youthfulness.

Swann had in his room, instead of the handsome photographs that were now taken of his wife, in all of which the same enigmatic and winning expression enabled one to recognise, whatever dress and hat she was wearing, her triumphant face and figure, a little daguerreotype of her, quite plain, taken long before the appearance of this new type, from which the youthfulness and beauty of Odette, which she had not yet discovered when it was taken, appeared to be missing. But doubtless Swann, having remained constant, or having reverted, to a different conception of her, enjoyed in the frail young woman with pensive eyes and tired features, caught in a pose between stillness and motion, a more Botticellian charm. For he still liked to see his wife as a Botticelli figure. Odette, who on the contrary sought not to bring out but to compensate for, to cover and conceal the points about her looks that did not please her, what might perhaps to an artist express her “character” but in her woman’s eyes were blemishes, would not have that painter mentioned in her presence. Swann had a wonderful scarf of oriental silk, blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly that worn by the Virgin in the
Magnificat
. But Mme
Swann refused to wear it. Once only she allowed her husband to order her a dress covered all over with daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and bluebells, like that of the Primavera. And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angel holds out to her, before writing upon the sacred page on which is already traced the word “
Magnificat
.” But he added: “Whatever you do, don’t say anything about it to her; if she knew she was doing it, she would change her pose at once.”

Except at these moments of involuntary relaxation in which Swann sought to recapture the melancholy Botticellian droop, Odette’s body seemed now to be cut out in a single silhouette wholly confined within a “line” which, following the contours of the woman, had abandoned the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the reticulations, the elaborate dispersions of the fashions of former days, but also, where it was her anatomy that went wrong by making unnecessary digressions within or without the ideal form traced for it, was able to rectify, by a bold stroke, the errors of nature, to make good, along a whole section of its course, the lapses of the flesh as well as of the material. The pads, the preposterous “bustle” had disappeared, as well as those tailed bodices which, overlapping the skirt and stiffened by rods of whalebone, had so long amplified Odette with an artificial stomach and had given her the appearance of being composed of several disparate pieces which there was no individuality to bind together. The vertical fall of the fringes, the curve of the ruches had made way for the inflexion of a body which made silk palpitate as a siren stirs the waves and gave to cambric a human expression, now that it had been liberated, like an organic and living form, from the long chaos and nebulous envelopment of fashions at last dethroned. But Mme Swann had chosen, had contrived to preserve some vestiges of certain of these, in the very midst of those that had supplanted them. When, in the evening, finding myself unable to work and knowing that Gilberte had gone to the theatre with friends, I paid a surprise visit to her parents, I used often to find Mme Swann in an elegant dishabille the skirt of which, of one of those rich dark colours, blood-red or orange, which seemed to have a special meaning because they were no longer in fashion, was crossed diagonally, though not concealed, by a broad band of black lace which recalled the flounces of an earlier day. When, on a still chilly afternoon in spring, she had taken me (before my break with her daughter) to the Zoo, under her jacket, which she opened or buttoned up according as the exercise made her feel warm, the dog-toothed edging of her blouse suggested a glimpse of the lapel of some non-existent waistcoat such as she had been accustomed to wear some years earlier, when she had liked their edges to have the same slight indentations; and her scarf—of that same “tartan” to which she had remained faithful, but whose tones she had so far softened, red becoming pink and blue lilac, that one might almost have taken it for one of those pigeon’s-breast taffetas which were the latest novelty—was knotted in such a way under her chin, without one’s being able to make out where it was fastened, that one was irresistibly reminded of those bonnet-strings which were now no longer worn. She need only “hold out” like this for a little longer and young men attempting to understand her theory of dress would say: “Mme Swann is quite a period in herself, isn’t she?” As in a fine literary style which superimposes different forms but is strengthened by a tradition that lies concealed behind them, so in Mme Swann’s attire those half-tinted memories of waistcoats or of ringlets, sometimes a tendency, at once repressed, towards the “all aboard,” or even a distant and vague allusion to the “follow-me-lad,” kept alive beneath the concrete form the unfinished likeness of other, older forms which one would not have been able to find effectively reproduced by the milliner or the dressmaker, but about which one’s thoughts incessantly hovered, and enveloped Mme Swann in a sort of nobility—perhaps because the very uselessness of these fripperies made them seem designed to serve some more than utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the traces they preserved of vanished years, or else because of a vestimentary personality peculiar to this woman, which gave to the most dissimilar of her costumes a distinct family likeness. One felt that she did not dress simply for the comfort or the adornment of her body; she was surrounded by her garments as by the delicate and spiritualised machinery of a whole civilisation.

When Gilberte, who, as a rule, gave her tea-parties on the days when her mother was “at home,” had for some reason to go out and I was therefore free to attend Mme Swann’s “do,” I would find her dressed in one or other of her beautiful dresses, some of which were of taffeta, others of grosgrain, or of velvet, or of crêpe-de-Chine, or satin or silk, dresses which, not being loose like the gowns she generally wore in the house but pulled together as though she were just going out in them, gave to her stay-at-home laziness on those afternoons something alert and energetic. And no doubt the bold simplicity of their cut was singularly appropriate to her figure and to her movements, which her sleeves appeared to be symbolising in colours that varied from day to day: one felt that there was a sudden determination in the blue velvet, an easy-going good humour in the white taffeta, and that a sort of supreme discretion full of dignity in her way of holding out her arm had, in order to become visible, put on the appearance, dazzling with the smile of one who had made great sacrifices, of the black crêpe-de-Chine. But at the same time, to these animated dresses the complication of their trimmings, none of which had any practical utility or served any visible purpose, added something detached, pensive, secret, in harmony with the melancholy which Mme Swann still retained, at least in the shadows under her eyes and the drooping arches of her hands. Beneath the profusion of sapphire charms, enamelled four-leaf clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, ruby chains and topaz chestnuts there would be on the dress itself some design carried out in colour which pursued across the surface of an inserted panel a preconceived existence of its own, some row of little satin buttons which buttoned nothing and could not be unbuttoned, a strip of braid that sought to please the eye with the minuteness, the discretion of a delicate reminder; and these, as well as the jewels, gave the impression—having otherwise no possible justification—of disclosing a secret intention, being a pledge of affection, keeping a secret, ministering to a superstition, commemorating a recovery from sickness, a granted wish, a love affair or a philopena. And now and then in the blue velvet of the bodice a hint of “slashes,” in the Henri II style, or in the gown of black satin a slight swelling which, if it was in the sleeves, just below the shoulders, made one think of the “leg of mutton” sleeves of 1830, or if, on the other hand, it was beneath the skirt, of Louis XV “panniers,” gave the dress a just perceptible air of being a “fancy dress” costume and at all events, by insinuating beneath the life of the present day a vague reminiscence of the past, blended with the person of Mme Swann the charm of certain heroines of history or romance. And if I were to draw her attention to this: “I don’t play golf,” she would answer, “like so many of my friends. So I should have no excuse for going about in
sweaters
as they do.”