The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (39 page)

The coachman came back, however, with the report that he could not find her anywhere, and added the advice, as an old and privileged servant: “I think, sir, that all we can do now is to go home.”

But the air of indifference which Swann could so lightly assume when Rémi uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a cast-off cloak when he saw Rémi attempt to make him abandon hope and retire from the quest.

“Certainly not!” he exclaimed. “We must find the lady. It’s most important. She would be extremely put out—it’s a business matter—and vexed with me if she didn’t see me.”

“But I don’t see how the lady can be vexed,” answered Rémi, “since it was she who left without waiting for you, sir, and said she was going to Prévost’s, and then wasn’t there.”

Meanwhile the restaurants were closing and their lights began to go out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness. From time to time the shadowy figure of a woman gliding up to Swann, murmuring a few words in his ear, asking him to take her home, would make him start. Anxiously he clutched at all these dim forms, as though, among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that
blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when—in this moment of deprivation—the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult; to assuage—the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.

Swann made Rémi drive him to such restaurants as were still open; it was only the hypothesis of a happy outcome that he had envisaged with calm; now he no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon their meeting, and promised in case of success to reward his coachman, as though, by inspiring in him a will to succeed which would reinforce his own, he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette—assuming that she had long since gone home to bed—might yet be found seated in some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the search as far as the Maison Dorée, burst twice into Tortoni’s and, still without seeing her, had just emerged from the Café Anglais and was striding, wild-eyed, towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens, when he collided with a person coming in the opposite direction: it was Odette. She explained, later, that there had been no room at Prévost’s,
that she had gone, instead, to sup at the Maison Dorée, in an alcove where he must have failed to see her, and that she was going back to her carriage.

She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As for him, he had ransacked the streets of Paris not because he supposed it possible that he should find her, but because it was too painful for him to abandon the attempt. But this happiness which his reason had never ceased to regard as unattainable, that evening at least, now seemed doubly real; for, since he himself had contributed nothing to it by anticipating probabilities, it remained external to himself; there was no need for him to think it into existence—it was from itself that there emanated, it was itself that projected towards him, that truth whose radiance dispelled like a bad dream the loneliness he had so dreaded, that truth on which his happy musings now dwelt unthinkingly. So will a traveller, arriving in glorious weather at the Mediterranean shore, no longer certain of the existence of the lands he has left behind, let his eyes be dazzled by the radiance streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure of the sea.

He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept waiting, and ordered his own to follow.

She was holding in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was dressed, beneath her cloak, in a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side to reveal a large triangle of white silk skirt, and with a yoke, also of white silk, in the cleft of the low-necked bodice, in which
were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward in their seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own. Then he went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word; just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I straighten the flowers on your bodice? The jolt has disarranged them. I’m afraid of their dropping out, so I’d just like to fasten them a little more securely.”

She was not used to being made so much fuss of by men, and she smiled as she answered: “No, not at all; I don’t mind in the least.”

But he, daunted a little by her answer, and also, perhaps, to bear out the pretence that he had been sincere in adopting the stratagem, or even because he was already beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed, “No, no, you mustn’t speak. You’ll get out of breath again. You can easily answer in signs; I shall understand. Really and truly now, you don’t mind my doing this? Look, there’s a little—I think it must be pollen, spilt over your dress. Do you mind if I brush it off with my hand? That’s not too hard? I’m not hurting you, am I? Perhaps I’m tickling you a bit? I don’t want to touch the velvet in case I crease it. But you see, I really had to fasten the flowers; they would have fallen out if I hadn’t. Like that, now; if I just tuck them a little further down … Seriously, I’m not annoying you, am I? And if I just sniff
them to see whether they’ve really got no scent? I don’t believe I ever smelt any before. May I? Tell the truth, now.”

Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who should say, “You’re quite mad; you know very well that I like it.”

He ran his other hand upwards along Odette’s cheek; she gazed at him fixedly, with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women of the Florentine master in whose faces he had found a resemblance with hers; swimming at the brink of the eyelids, her brilliant eyes, wide and slender like theirs, seemed on the verge of welling out like two great tears. She bent her neck, as all their necks may be seen to bend, in the pagan scenes as well as in the religious pictures. And in an attitude that was doubtless habitual to her, one which she knew to be appropriate to such moments and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force were drawing it towards Swann’s. And it was Swann who, before she allowed it, as though in spite of herself, to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance, between his hands. He had wanted to leave time for his mind to catch up with him, to recognise the dream which it had so long cherished and to assist at its realisation, like a relative invited as a spectator when a prize is given to a child of whom she has been especially fond. Perhaps, too, he was fixing upon the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time, the comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveller hopes to
bear away with him in memory a landscape he is leaving for ever.

But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of offending her, or from reluctance to appear retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: “It’s most unfortunate; the cattleyas don’t need tucking in this evening; they’ve not been disturbed as they were the other night. I think, though, that this one isn’t quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others?” Or else, if she had none: “Oh! no cattleyas this evening; then there’s no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.” So that for some time there was no change in the procedure which he had followed on that first evening, starting with fumblings with fingers and lips at Odette’s bosom, and it was thus that his caresses still began. And long afterwards, when the rearrangement (or, rather, the ritual pretence of a rearrangement) of her cattleyas had quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor “Do a cattleya,” transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without thinking when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. And perhaps this particular manner of saying “to make love” did
not mean exactly the same thing as its synonyms. However jaded we may be about women, however much we may regard the possession of the most divergent types as a repetitive and predictable experience, it none the less becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned are—or are thought by us to be—so difficult as to oblige us to make it spring from some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as had originally been for Swann the arrangement of the cattleyas. He tremblingly hoped, that evening (but Odette, he told himself, if she was deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his intention), that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge for him from their large mauve petals; and the pleasure which he had already felt and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps only because she had not recognised it, seemed to him for that reason—as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid the flowers of the earthly paradise—a pleasure which had never before existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure—as the special name he gave it was to certify—entirely individual and new.

Now, every evening, when he had taken her home, he had to go in with her; and often she would come out again in her dressing-gown and escort him to his carriage, and would kiss him in front of his coachman, saying: “What do I care what other people think?” And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins’ (which happened occasionally now that he had opportunities of seeing Odette elsewhere), when—more and more rarely—he went into society, she would ask him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. It was spring, and the nights were clear and frosty. Coming
away from a party, he would climb into his victoria, spread a rug over his knees, tell the friends who were leaving at the same time and who wanted him to join them, that he couldn’t, that he wasn’t going in their direction; and the coachman would set off at a fast trot without further orders, knowing where he had to go. His friends would be left wondering, and indeed Swann was no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention to women, and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to be met. In a restaurant, or in the country, his attitude was the opposite of the one by which, only yesterday, his friends would have recognised him, and which had seemed inevitably and permanently his. To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character which not only takes the place of our normal character but obliterates the invariable signs by which it has hitherto been discernible! What was invariable now was that wherever Swann might be, he never failed to go on afterwards to Odette. The interval of space separating her from him was one which he must traverse as inevitably as though it were the irresistible and rapid slope of life itself. Truth to tell, as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party, he would have preferred to return home at once, without going so far out of his way, and to postpone their meeting until the morrow; but the very fact of his putting himself to such inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were saying to one another: “He’s tied hand and foot; there must certainly be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all
hours,” made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose existence is coloured by a love-affair, and in whom the perpetual sacrifice they make of their comfort and of their practical interests engenders a sort of inner charm. Then, though he may not consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not elsewhere with others, that he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish, forgotten but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’ before his arrival, an anguish the present assuagement of which was so agreeable that it might almost be called happiness. Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that he owed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people as a rule mean so little to us that, when we have invested one of them with the power to cause us so much suffering or happiness, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of one’s life a sort of stirring arena in which he or she will be more or less close to one. Swann could not ask himself with equanimity what Odette would mean to him in the years that were to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his victoria on those fine and frosty nights and saw the bright moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted street, he would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the moon’s, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind, and since then had shed upon the world the mysterious light in which he saw it bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden he would go round first into the other street,
over which, on the ground-floor, among the windows (all exactly alike, but darkened) of the adjoining houses, shone the solitary lighted window of her room. He would rap on the pane, and she would hear the signal, and answer, before going to meet him at the front door. He would find, lying open on the piano, some of her favourite music, the
Valse des Roses
, the
Pauvre Fou
of Tagliafico (which, according to the instructions embodied in her will, was to be played at her funeral); but he would ask her, instead, to give him the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase continued to be associated in Swann’s mind with his love for Odette. He was well aware that his love was something that did not correspond to anything outside itself, verifiable by others besides him; he realised that Odette’s qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on the hours he spent in her company. And often, when the cold government of reason stood unchallenged in his mind, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate in him the space that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; a margin was left for an enjoyment that corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him a sort of reality superior to that of concrete things. This thirst for an unknown delight was awakened in him by the little phrase, but without
bringing him any precise gratification to assuage it. With the result that those parts of Swann’s soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all concern for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men alike, were left vacant by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to inscribe the name of Odette. Moreover, in so far as Odette’s affection might seem a little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would come to supplement it, to blend with it its own mysterious essence. Watching Swann’s face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe more freely. And the pleasure which the music gave him, which was shortly to create in him a real need, was in fact akin at such moments to the pleasure which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contact with a world for which we men were not made, which appears to us formless because our eyes cannot perceive it, meaningless because it eludes our understanding, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann—whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life—in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason and make it pass unattended through the
dark filter of sound! He began to realise how much that was painful, perhaps even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter though the phrase repeated that love is frail and fleeting, when his love was so strong! He played with the melancholy which the music diffused, he felt it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play it over to him again and again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, as she did so, she must never stop kissing him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together that lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop, saying: “How do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me? I can’t do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want: am I to play the phrase or play with you?”, and he would get angry, and she would burst out laughing, a laugh that was soon transformed and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else she would look at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli’s “Life of Moses”; he would place it there, giving to Odette’s neck the necessary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in tempera, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was none the less in the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment, ready to be kissed and enjoyed, the idea of her material existence, would sweep over him with so violent an intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and
jaws tensed as though to devour her, he would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks. And then, once he had left her, not without returning to kiss her again because he had forgotten to take away with him the memory of some detail of her fragrance or of her features, as he drove home in his victoria he blessed Odette for allowing him these daily visits which could not, he felt, bring any great joy to her, but which, by keeping him immune from the fever of jealousy—by removing from him any possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness which had afflicted him on the evening when he had failed to find her at the Verdurins’—would help him to arrive, without any recurrence of those crises of which the first had been so painful that it must also be the last, at the end of this strange period of his life, of these hours, enchanted almost, like those in which he drove through Paris by moonlight. And, noticing as he drove home that the moon had now changed its position relatively to his own and was almost touching the horizon, feeling that his love, too, was obedient to these immutable natural laws, he asked himself whether this period upon which he had entered would last much longer, whether presently his mind’s eye would cease to behold that beloved face save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm. For Swann was once more finding in things, since he had fallen in love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied himself an artist; with this difference, that the charm that lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone. He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, stirring again in him,
but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being; and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent soul, he became gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.