In Search of Lost Time (52 page)

Even when he could not find out where she had gone, it would have been enough to soothe the anguish which he felt at these times, and for which Odette's presence, the sweetness of being close to her was the only specific (a specific that in the long run aggravated the disease, like many remedies, but at least momentarily soothed his pain), it would have been enough for him, if only Odette had permitted it, to remain in her house while she was out, to wait for her there until the hour of her return, into whose stillness and appeasement would have flowed and melted the hours which some magical illusion, some evil spell had made him believe were different from the rest. But she did not want this; he returned home; he forced himself, on the way, to make various plans, he stopped thinking about Odette; he even succeeded, while he was undressing, in turning over some fairly cheerful thoughts in his mind; and it was with a light heart, full of the hope of going to see some great painting the next day, that he got into bed and put out his light; but, no sooner, as he prepared to go to sleep, did he cease to exert upon himself a constraint of which he was not even aware because it was by now so habitual, than at that very instant an icy shiver would run through him and he would begin to sob. He did not even want to know why, dried his eyes, said to himself with a smile: ‘Delightful – I'm turning into a real neurotic.' Then he could not think without a feeling of great weariness that the next day he would again have to begin trying to find out what Odette had been doing, use all his influence to attempt to see her. This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without results was so cruel to him that one day, seeing a lump on his abdomen, he felt real joy at the thought that he might have a fatal tumor, that he was no
longer going to have to take charge of anything, that it was the disease that would manage him, make him its plaything, until the impending end. And indeed if, during this period, he often desired death though without admitting it to himself, it was to escape not so much the acuteness of his sufferings as the monotony of his struggle.

And yet he would have liked to live on until the time came when he no longer loved her, when she would have no reason to lie to him and he could at last learn from her if, on the day when he had gone to see her in the afternoon, she was or was not in bed with Forcheville. Often for several days, the suspicion that she loved someone else would distract him from that question about Forcheville, would make it a matter almost of indifference to him, like those new developments in a continuing state of ill health which seem momentarily to have delivered us from the preceding ones. There were even days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He thought he was cured. But the next morning, when he woke up, he felt in the same place the same pain, the sensation of which, in the course of the preceding day, he had diluted in a flood of different impressions. But it had not moved from its place. And in fact, it was the sharpness of this pain that had woken Swann.

Since Odette did not give him any information about these very important things which occupied her so fully each day (although he had lived long enough to know that these things are never anything else but pleasures), he could not try to imagine them for very long at a time, his brain was working with nothing in it; then he would pass his finger over his tired eyelids as he would have wiped the glass of his lorgnon, and stop thinking altogether. Yet floating up from that great unknown were certain occupations which reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by her to some obligation towards distant relatives or friends from an earlier time, who, because they were the only ones she regularly mentioned to him as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to form the stable, necessary framework of Odette's life. Because of the tone in which she referred from time to time to ‘the day I go to the Hippodrome with my friend', if, having felt ill and thought: ‘Perhaps Odette would be kind enough to come round to the house,' he recalled abruptly that this was in fact that very
day, he would say to himself: ‘Oh no! It's not worth the trouble of asking her to come, I should have thought of it earlier, this is the day she goes to the Hippodrome with her friend. We must confine ourselves to what's possible; it's pointless wearing oneself out proposing things that are unacceptable and have already been refused in advance.' And the duty incumbent upon Odette of going to the Hippodrome, to which Swann thus yielded, did not appear to him merely unavoidable; but the mark of necessity with which it was stamped seemed to make plausible and legitimate everything that was closely or distantly related to it. If, after a man passing in the street had greeted Odette and aroused Swann's jealousy, she answered his questions by associating the stranger with one of the two or three paramount duties of which she had spoken to him, if, for example, she said: ‘That was a gentleman who was in the box of the friend with whom I go to the Hippodrome,' this explanation would calm Swann's suspicions, since he did indeed find it inevitable that the friend would have other guests besides Odette in her box at the Hippodrome, but had never tried or managed to picture them. Ah! how he would have liked to know her, the friend who went to the Hippodrome, and how he would have liked her to take him there with Odette! How gladly he would have given up all his connections in exchange for any person Odette was in the habit of seeing, even a manicurist or a shop assistant! He would have gone to more trouble for that person than for a queen. Wouldn't she have given him, with what she contained of Odette's life, the only effective calmative for his pain? How happily he would have hurried to spend the days at the home of one of those humble people with whom Odette kept up friendly relations out of either self-interest or true simplicity! How willingly he would have taken up residence for ever on the fifth floor of a certain sordid and coveted house to which Odette did not take him and in which, if he had lived there with the little retired dressmaker whose lover he would willingly have pretended to be, he would have had a visit from her almost every day! In these almost working-class neighbourhoods, what a modest life, abject, but sweet, nourished with calm and happiness, he would have agreed to live indefinitely!

It also sometimes happened that when, after meeting Swann, she
saw some man approaching her whom he did not know, he could observe on Odette's face the sadness she had shown the day he had come to see her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for on the days when, despite everything she had to do and her fear of what other people would think, she managed to see Swann, what now predominated in her attitude was assurance: a great contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge or a natural reaction to the timorous emotion which, in the early days when she had known him, she had felt with him, and even far away from him, when she would begin a letter with these words: ‘My dear, my hand is shaking so hard I can scarcely write' (at least so she claimed, and a little of that emotion must have been sincere for her to want to feign more of it). She liked Swann then. We do not tremble except for ourselves, except for those we love. When our happiness is no longer in their hands, what calm, what ease, what boldness we enjoy in their company! When speaking to him, when writing to him, she no longer used any of those words with which she had sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating occasions for saying ‘my', ‘mine', when she referred to him – ‘You are my property, this is the fragrance of our friendship, I'm keeping it' – and for talking to him about the future, about death even, as a single thing that would be shared by the two of them. In those days, to everything he said, she would answer admiringly: ‘You – you will never be like anyone else'; she would look at his long face, his slightly bald head, about which the people who knew of Swann's successes with women would think: ‘He's not conventionally handsome, granted, but he is smart: that quiff of hair, that monocle, that smile!', and, perhaps with more curiosity to know what he was than desire to become his mistress, she would say: ‘If only I could know what is in that head!'

Now, to all of Swann's remarks she would reply in a tone that was at times irritated, at times indulgent: ‘Oh, you really never will be like anyone else!' She would look at that head, which was only a little more aged by worry (but about which now everyone thought, with that same aptitude which enables you to discover the intentions of a symphonic piece when you have read the programme, and the resemblances of a child when you know its parents: ‘He's not positively
ugly, granted, but he is absurd; that monocle, that quiff of hair, that smile!' creating in their suggestible imaginations the immaterial demarcation that separates by several months' distance the head of an adored lover from the head of a cuckold), she would say: ‘Oh, if only I could change what's in that head, if only I could make it reasonable.'

Always prepared to believe what he hoped for, if Odette's behaviour towards him left any room at all for doubt, he would throw himself avidly on that remark:

– You can if you want to, he would say to her.

And he would try to show her that to soothe him, direct him, make him work, would be a noble task to which many other women might ask nothing better than to devote themselves, though it would only be fair to add that in their hands the noble task would have appeared to him merely an indiscreet and intolerable usurpation of his freedom. ‘If she did not love me a little, he would say to himself, she would not want to transform me. In order to transform me, she will have to see more of me.' Thus he regarded this reproach of hers as a sort of proof of interest, of love perhaps; and indeed, she now gave him so few that he was obliged to regard as such the prohibitions she imposed on him against one thing or another. One day, she declared that she did not like his coachman, that he was perhaps turning Swann against her, that in any case he did not show the punctuality and the deference to Swann that she wanted. She felt that he longed to hear her say: ‘Don't use him any more when you come to see me,' as he would have longed for a kiss. Since she was in a good mood, she said it; he was touched. That evening, chatting with M. de Charlus, with whom he had the comfort of being able to talk about her openly (for the least bit of conversation he had, even with people who did not know her, always somehow related to her), he said to him:

– Yet I believe she loves me; she is so kind to me, what I do is certainly not a matter of indifference to her. And if, when he was setting off for her house, getting into his carriage with a friend whom he was to drop along the way, the friend said: ‘Why, that's not Lorédan on the box!', with what melancholy joy Swann would answer him:

– Oh Lord no! I tell you I can't use Lorédan when I go to the rue
La Pérouse. Odette doesn't like me to use Lorédan, she doesn't think he's good for me. Well, what do you expect! Women, you know, women! I tell you she wouldn't like it at all. Oh, lord, yes; if I'd used Rémi, there'd be no end of trouble!

This new manner, indifferent, distracted, irritable, which was now Odette's manner with him, certainly caused Swann to suffer; but he was not aware of his suffering; since it was only gradually, day by day, that Odette had cooled towards him, it was only by comparing what she was now to what she had been in the beginning that he would have been able to fathom the depth of the change that had taken place. Yet that change was his profound, his secret wound which hurt him day and night, and as soon as he felt that his thoughts were going a little too close to it, he would quickly guide them in another direction for fear of suffering too much. He would certainly say to himself in an abstract way: ‘There was a time when Odette loved me more,' but he would never look back at that time. Just as there was a bureau in his office which he took pains not to look at, which he made a detour to avoid as he came and went, because in one of its drawers were stowed the chrysanthemum she had given him that first evening on which he had driven her home, and the letters in which she had said: ‘If you had forgotten your heart here too, I would not have let you take it back,' and ‘At whatever hour of the day or night you need me, send word and my life will be yours to command,' in the same way there was a place in him which he never let his thoughts approach, when necessary forcing them to make the detour of a lengthy argument so that they would not have to pass in front of it: this was the place in which lived the memory of the happy days.

But his meticulous prudence was foiled one evening when he had gone out to a fashionable party.

It was at the home of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, on the last, for that year, of the evenings on which she invited people to hear the musicians who were afterwards used by her for her charity concerts. Swann, who had wanted to go to each of the preceding evenings in turn and had not been able to resolve to do it, had received, while he was dressing to go to this one, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who was coming with an offer to return with him to the home of the
Marquise, if his company would help him to be a little less bored there, a little less sad. But Swann had answered:

– You can't doubt how much pleasure I would take in being with you. But the greatest pleasure you could give me would be to go to see Odette instead. You know what an excellent influence you have on her. I believe she's not going out this evening before she goes to see her old dressmaker, and I'm sure she'd be delighted to have you accompany her there. In any case you'll find her at home before that. Try to amuse her and also to talk some sense to her. If you could arrange something for tomorrow that she enjoys and that we could all three do together… Also, try to begin planning for this summer, see if there's something she might want to do, a cruise we could all three take, I don't know. I'm not counting on seeing her tonight myself; still, if she wanted to see me or if you were to find a way, you would only need to send me word at Mme de Saint-Euverte's up to midnight, and afterwards at home. Thank you for all that you do for me – you know how fond I am of you.