In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (26 page)

On the other hand, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love
must profit by it. Each visit that I paid to Mme. Swann without seeing
Gilberte was a cruel punishment, but I felt that it correspondingly
enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me.

Besides, if I always took care, before going to see Mme. Swann, that
there should be no risk of her daughter's appearing, that arose, it is
true, from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps
from that hope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to
renounce her (very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a
continuous form, in this human soul of ours, one of whose laws,
confirmed by the unlooked–for wealth of illustration that memory
supplies, is intermittence), and hid from me all that in it was
unbearably cruel. As for that hope, I saw clearly how far it was
chimerical. I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer
tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is
perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune. We are all of us
obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little
follies in ourselves. Now my hope remained more intact—while at the
same time our separation became more effectual—if I refrained from
meeting Gilberte. If I had found myself face to face with her in her
mother's drawing–room, we might perhaps have uttered irrevocable words
which would have rendered our breach final, killed my hope and, on the
other hand, by creating a fresh anxiety, reawakened my love and made
resignation harder.

Ever so long ago, before I had even thought of breaking with her
daughter, Mme. Swann had said to me: "It is all very well your coming
to see Gilberte; I should like you to come sometimes for my sake, not
to my 'kettledrums,' which would bore you because there is such a
crowd, but on the other days, when you will always find me at home if
you come fairly late." So that I might be thought, when I came to see
her, to be yielding only after a long resistance to a desire which she
had expressed in the past. And very late in the afternoon, when it
was quite dark, almost at the hour at which my parents would be
sitting down to dinner, I would set out to pay Mme. Swann a visit, in
the course of which I knew that I should not see Gilberte, and yet
should be thinking only of her. In that quarter, then looked upon as
remote, of a Paris darker than Paris is to–day, where even in the
centre there was no electric light in the public thoroughfares and
very little in private houses, the lamps of a drawing–room situated on
the ground level, or but slightly raised above it, as were the rooms
in which Mme. Swann generally received her visitors, were enough to
lighten the street, and to make the passer–by raise his eyes,
connecting with their glow, as with its apparent though hidden cause,
the presence outside the door of a string of smart broughams. This
passer–by was led to believe, not without a certain emotion, that a
modification had been effected in this mysterious cause, when he saw
one of the carriages begin to move; but it was merely a coachman who,
afraid of his horses' catching cold, started them now and again on a
brisk walk, all the more impressive because the rubber–tired wheels
gave the sound of their hooves a background of silence from which it
stood out more distinct and more explicit.

The "winter–garden," of which in those days the passer–by generally
caught a glimpse, in whatever street he might be walking, if the
drawing–room did not stand too high above the pavement, is to be seen
to–day only in photogravures in the gift–books of P. J. Stahl, where,
in contrast to the infrequent floral decorations of the Louis XVI
drawing–rooms now in fashion—a single rose or a Japanese iris in a
long–necked vase of crystal into which it would be impossible to
squeeze a second—it seems, because of the profusion of indoor plants
which people had then, and of the absolute want of style in their
arrangement, as though it must have responded in the ladies whose
houses it adorned to some living and delicious passion for botany
rather than to any cold concern for lifeless decoration. It suggested
to one, only on a larger scale, in the houses of those days, those
tiny, portable hothouses laid out on New Year's morning beneath the
lighted lamp—for the children were always too impatient to wait for
daylight—among all the other New Year's presents but the loveliest of
them all, consoling them with its real plants which they could tend as
they grew for the bareness of the winter soil; and even more than
those little houses themselves, those winter–gardens were like the
hothouse that the children could see there at the same time, portrayed
in a delightful book, another of their presents, and one which, for
all that it was given not to them but to Mlle. Lili, the heroine of
the story, enchanted them to such a pitch that even now, when they are
almost old men and women, they ask themselves whether, in those
fortunate years, winter was not the loveliest of the seasons. And
inside there, beyond the winter–garden, through the various kinds of
arborescence which from the street made the lighted window appear like
the glass front of one of those children's playthings, pictured or
real, the passer–by, drawing himself up on tiptoe, would generally
observe a man in a frock coat, a gardenia or a carnation in his
buttonhole, standing before a seated lady, both vaguely outlined, like
two intaglios cut in a topaz, in the depths of the drawing–room
atmosphere clouted by the samovar—then a recent importation—with
steam which may very possibly be escaping from it still to–day, but to
which, if it does, we are grown so accustomed now that no one notices
it. Mme. Swann attached great importance to her 'tea'; she thought
that she shewed her originality and expressed her charm when she said
to a man, "You will find me at home any day, fairly late; come to
tea!" so that she allowed a sweet and delicate smile to accompany the
words which she pronounced with a fleeting trace of English accent,
and which her listener duly noted, bowing solemnly in acceptance, as
though the invitation had been something important and uncommon which
commanded deference and required attention. There was another reason,
apart from those given already, for the flowers' having more than a
merely ornamental part in Mme. Swann's drawing–room, and this reason
pertained not to the period, but, in some degree, to the former life
of Odette. A great courtesan, such as she had been, lives largely for
her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time
to live for her home. The things that one sees in the house of a
'respectable' woman, things which may of course appear to her also to
be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost
importance to the courtesan. The culminating point of her day is not
the moment in which she dresses herself for all the world to see, but
that in which she undresses herself for a man. She must be as smart in
her wrapper, in her nightgown, as in her outdoor attire. Other women
display their jewels, but as for her, she lives in the intimacy of her
pearls. This kind of existence imposes on her as an obligation and
ends by giving her a fondness for luxury which is secret, that is to
say which comes near to being disinterested. Mme. Swann extended this
to include her flowers. There was always beside her chair an immense
bowl of crystal filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long
white daisy–petals scattered upon the water, which seemed to be
testifying, in the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite and
interrupted occupation, such as the cup of tea which Mme. Swann would,
for her own amusement, have been drinking there by herself; an
occupation more intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that
one felt oneself impelled to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed
there by her side, as one would have apologised for looking at the
title of the still open book which would have revealed to one what had
just been read by—and so, perhaps, what was still in the mind of
Odette. And unlike the book the flowers were living things; it was
annoying, when one entered the room to pay Mme. Swann a visit, to
discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her not to
find the room empty, so prominent a place in it, enigmatic and
intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of
which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume which had not been
made ready for Odette's visitors but, as it were, forgotten there by
her, had held and would hold with her again private conversations
which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in
vain to read, fastening one's eyes on the moist purple, the still
liquid water–colour of the Parma violets. By the end of October Odette
would begin to come home with the utmost punctuality for tea, which
was still known, at that time, as 'five–o'clock tea,' having once
heard it said, and being fond of repeating that if Mme. Verdurin had
been able to form a salon it was because people were always certain of
finding her at home at the same hour. She imagined that she herself
had one also, of the same kind, but freer,
senza rigore
as she used
to say. She saw herself figuring thus as a sort of Lespinasse, and
believed that she had founded a rival salon by taking from the du
Defiant of the little group several of her most attractive men,
notably Swann himself, who had followed her in her secession and into
her retirement, according–to a version for which one can understand
that she had succeeded in gaining credit among her more recent
friends, ignorant of what had passed, though without convincing
herself. But certain favourite parts are played by us so often before
the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find
it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a
reality which we have almost entirely forgotten. On days on which Mme.
Swann had not left the house, one found her in a wrapper of
crêpe–de–Chine
, white as the first snows of winter, or, it might be,
in one of those long pleated garments of mousseline–de–soie, which
seemed nothing more than a shower of white or rosy petals, and would
be regarded to–day as hardly suitable for winter, though quite
wrongly. For these light fabrics and soft colours gave to a woman—in
the stifling warmth of the drawing–rooms of those days, with their
heavily curtained doors, rooms of which the most effective thing that
the society novelists of the time could find to say was that they were
"exquisitely cushioned"—the same air of coolness that they gave to
the roses which were able to stay in the room there by her side,
despite the winter, in the glowing flesh tints of their nudity, as
though it were already spring. By reason of the muffling of all sound
in the carpets, and of the remoteness of her cosy retreat, the lady of
the house, not being apprised of your entry as she is to–day, would
continue to read almost until you were standing before her chair,
which enhanced still further that sense of the romantic, that charm of
a sort of secret discovery, which we find to–day in the memory of
those gowns, already out of fashion even then, which Mme. Swann was
perhaps alone in not having discarded, and which give us the feeling
that the woman who wore them must have been the heroine of a novel
because most of us have scarcely set eyes on them outside the pages of
certain of Henry Gréville's tales. Odette had, at this time, in her
drawing–room, when winter began, chrysanthemums of enormous size and a
variety of colours such as Swann, in the old days, certainly never saw
in her drawing–room in the Rue La Pérouse. My admiration for
them—when I went to pay Mme. Swann one of those melancholy visits
during which, prompted by my sorrow, I discovered in her all the
mystical poetry of her character as the mother of that Gilberte to
whom she would say on the morrow: "Your friend came to see me
yesterday,"—sprang, no doubt, from my sense that, rose–pale like the
Louis XIV silk that covered her chairs, snow–white like her
crêpe–de–Chine
wrapper, or of a metallic red like her samovar, they
superimposed upon the decoration of the room another, a supplementary
scheme of decoration, as rich, as delicate in its colouring, but one
which was alive and would last for a few days only. But I was touched
to find that these chrysanthemums appeared less ephemeral than, one
might almost say, lasting, when I compared them with the tones, as
pink, as coppery, which the setting sun so gorgeously displays amid
the mists of a November afternoon, and which, after seeing them,
before I had entered the house, fade from the sky, I found again
inside, prolonged, transposed on to the flaming palette of the
flowers. Like the fires caught and fixed by a great colourist from the
impermanence of the atmosphere and the sun, so that they should enter
and adorn a human dwelling, they invited me, those chrysanthemums, to
put away all my sorrows and to taste with a greedy rapture during that
'tea–time' the too fleeting joys of November, of which they set ablaze
all around me the intimate and mystical glory. Alas, it was not in the
conversations to which I must listen that I could hope to attain to
that glory; they had but little in common with it. Even with Mme.
Cottard, and although it was growing late, Mme. Swann would assume her
most caressing manner to say: "Oh, no, it's not late, really; you
mustn't look at the clock; that's not the right time; it's stopped;
you can't possibly have anything else to do now, why be in such a
hurry?" as she pressed a final tartlet upon the Professor's wife, who
was gripping her card–case in readiness for flight.

"One simply can't tear oneself away from this house!" observed Mme.
Bontemps to Mme. Swann, while Mme. Cottard, in her astonishment at
hearing her own thought put into words, exclaimed: "Why, that's just
what I always say myself, what I tell my own little judge, in the
court of conscience!" winning the applause of the gentlemen from the
Jockey Club, who had been profuse in their salutations, as though
confounded at such an honour's being done them, when Mme. Swann had
introduced them to this common and by no means attractive little
woman, who kept herself, when confronted with Odette's brilliant
friends, in reserve, if not on what she herself called 'the defensive,'
for she always used stately language to describe the simplest
happenings. "I should never have suspected it," was Mme. Swann's
comment, "three Wednesdays running you've played me false." "That's
quite true, Odette; it's simply ages, it's an eternity since I saw you
last. You see, I plead guilty; but I must tell you," she went on with a
vague suggestion of outraged modesty, for although a doctor's wife she
would never have dared to speak without periphrasis of rheumatism or
of a chill on the kidneys," that I have had a lot of little troubles.
As we all have, I dare say. And besides that I've had a crisis among
my masculine domestics. I'm sure, I'm no more imbued with a sense of
my own authority than most ladies; still I've been obliged, just to
make an example you know, to give my Vatel notice; I believe he was
looking out anyhow for a more remunerative place. But his departure
nearly brought about the resignation of my entire ministry. My own
maid refused to stay in the house a moment longer; oh, we have had
some Homeric scenes. However I held fast to the reins through thick
and thin; the whole affair's been a perfect lesson, which won't be
lost on me, I can tell you. I'm afraid I'm boring you with all these
stories about servants, but you know as well as I do what a business
it is when one is obliged to set about rearranging one's household.