The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (45 page)

After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so abruptly—especially if it threatened to rain, and thus to scatter the “faithful” before their normal time—that on one occasion the Princesse des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left before the coffee was served to join the Verdurins on the Island in the Bois) observed: “Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, there might be
some excuse for his running away like that. I must say it’s pretty cool of him.”

He persuaded himself that the charm of spring which he could not go down to Combray to enjoy might at least be found on the Ile des Cygnes or at Saint-Cloud. But as he could think only of Odette, he did not even know whether he had smelt the fragrance of the young leaves, or if the moon had been shining. He would be greeted by the little phrase from the sonata, played in the garden on the restaurant piano. If there was no piano in the garden, the Verdurins would have taken immense pains to have one brought down either from one of the rooms or from the dining-room. Not that Swann was now restored to favour; far from it. But the idea of arranging an ingenious form of entertainment for someone, even for someone they disliked, would stimulate them, during the time spent in its preparation, to a momentary sense of cordiality and affection. From time to time he would remind himself that another fine spring evening was drawing to a close, and would force himself to notice the trees and the sky. But the state of agitation into which Odette’s presence never failed to throw him, added to a feverish ailment which had persisted for some time now, robbed him of that calm and well-being which are the indispensable background to the impressions we derive from nature.

One evening, when Swann had consented to dine with the Verdurins, and had mentioned during dinner that he had to attend next day the annual banquet of an old comrades’ association, Odette had exclaimed across the table, in front of Forcheville, who was now one of the “faithful,” in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:

“Yes, I know you have your banquet tomorrow; I shan’t see you, then, till I get home; don’t be too late.”

And although Swann had never yet taken serious offence at Odette’s friendship for one or other of the “faithful,” he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow in front of them all, with that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her house and the preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and there was nothing especially flattering in seeing the supremacy he wielded over someone so inferior to himself proclaimed to all the “faithful”; but since he had observed that to many other men besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart. And he had begun to attach an incalculable value to those moments spent in her house in the evenings, when he held her upon his knee, made her tell him what she thought about this or that, and counted over the only possessions on earth to which he still clung. And so, drawing her aside after this dinner, he took care to thank her effusively, seeking to indicate to her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for so long as his love should last and he remain vulnerable, from the assaults of jealousy.

When he came away from his banquet, the next evening, it was pouring with rain, and he had nothing but
his victoria. A friend offered to take him home in a closed carriage, and as Odette, by the fact of her having invited him to come, had given him an assurance that she was expecting no one else, he could have gone home to bed with a quiet mind and an untroubled heart, rather than set off thus in the rain. But perhaps, if she saw that he seemed not to adhere to his resolution to spend the late evening always, without exception, in her company, she might not bother to keep it free for him on the one occasion when he particularly desired it.

It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology for having been unable to come away earlier, she complained that it was indeed very late, that the storm had made her feel unwell and her head ached, and warned him that she would not let him stay more than half an hour, that at midnight she would send him away; a little while later she felt tired and wished to sleep.

“No cattleya, then, tonight?” he asked, “and I’ve been so looking forward to a nice little cattleya.”

She seemed peevish and on edge, and replied: “No, dear, no cattleya tonight. Can’t you see I’m not well?”

“It might have done you good, but I won’t bother you.”

She asked him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains round her bed and left. But, when he was back in his own house, the idea suddenly struck him that perhaps Odette was expecting someone else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired, so that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left the house she had put it on again and
had opened her door to the man who was to spend the night with her. He looked at his watch. It was about an hour and a half since he had left her. He went out, took a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at right angles to that other street which lay at the back of her house and along which he used sometimes to go, to tap upon her bedroom window, for her to let him in. He left his cab; the streets were deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite her house. Amid the glimmering blackness of the row of windows in which the lights had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one, from which percolated—between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice—the light that filled the room within, a light which on so many other evenings, as soon as he saw it from afar as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its message: “She is there—expecting you,” and which now tortured him, saying: “She is there with the man she was expecting.” He must know who; he tiptoed along the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting bars of the shutters he could see nothing, could only hear, in the silence of the night, the murmur of conversation.

Certainly he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stirred the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger. And yet he was not sorry he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own house had become less acute now that it had become less vague,
now that Odette’s other life, of which he had had, at that first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light, almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he would force his way to seize it unawares; or rather he would knock on the shutters, as he often did when he came very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices, and he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing with the other at his illusions, now it was he who saw them, confident in their error, tricked by none other than himself, whom they believed to be far away but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to knock on the shutter. And perhaps the almost pleasurable sensation he felt at that moment was something more than the assuagement of a doubt, and of a pain: was an intellectual pleasure. If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the delightful interest that they had had for him long ago—though only in so far as they were illuminated by the thought or the memory of Odette—now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odette’s life, her actions, her environment, her plans, her past. At every other period in his life, the little everyday activities of another person had always seemed meaningless to Swann; if gossip about such things was repeated to
him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his mind that was engaged; these were the moments when he felt at his most inglorious. But in this strange phase of love the personality of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of a woman’s daily life, was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history. And all manner of actions from which hitherto he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments—so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth.

On the point of knocking on the shutters, he felt a pang of shame at the thought that Odette would now know that he had suspected her, that he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window. She had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who spied. What he was about to do was singularly inept, and she would detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as he refrained from knocking, even in the act of infidelity, perhaps she loved him still. How often the prospect of future happiness is thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification! But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler. He knew that the reality
of certain circumstances which he would have given his life to be able to reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read behind that window, streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of one of those precious manuscripts by whose artistic wealth itself the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved. He felt a voluptuous pleasure in learning the truth which he passionately sought in that unique, ephemeral and precious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm, so beautiful. And moreover, the advantage which he felt—which he so desperately wanted to feel—that he had over them lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being able to show them that he knew. He raised himself on tiptoe. He knocked. They had not heard; he knocked again, louder, and the conversation ceased. A man’s voice—he strained his ears to distinguish whose, among such of Odette’s friends as he knew, it might be—asked:

“Who’s there?”

He could not be certain of the voice. He knocked once again. The window first, then the shutters were thrown open. It was too late, now, to draw back, and since she was about to know all, in order not to seem too miserable, too jealous and inquisitive, he called out in a cheerful, casual tone of voice:

“Please don’t bother; I just happened to be passing, and saw the light. I wanted to know if you were feeling better.”

He looked up. Two old gentlemen stood facing him at the window, one of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into the room, a room that he had never seen before. Having fallen into the habit, when he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by the
fact that it was the only one still lit up in a row of windows otherwise all alike, he had been misled this time by the light, and had knocked at the window beyond hers, which belonged to the adjoining house. He made what apology he could and hurried home, glad that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long a sort of indifference towards Odette, he had not now, by his jealousy, given her the proof that he loved her too much, which, between a pair of lovers, for ever dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love enough.

He never spoke to her of this misadventure, and ceased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it forward into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, deep-rooted pain. As though it were a bodily pain, Swann’s mind was powerless to alleviate it; but at least, in the case of bodily pain, since it is independent of the mind, the mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased. But in this case the mind, merely by recalling the pain, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was to think of it still, to suffer from it still. And when, in conversation with his friends, he forgot about it, suddenly a word casually uttered would make him change countenance like a wounded man when a clumsy hand has touched his aching limb. When he came away from Odette he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled her smiles, of gentle mockery when speaking of this or that other person, of tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis
to let it droop and fall, as though in spite of herself, upon his lips, as she had done on the first evening in the carriage, the languishing looks she had given him as she lay in his arms, nestling her head against her shoulder as though shrinking from the cold.

But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening—and which now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for another—of that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all the marks of affection (now given to another) that she had shown to him. And all the voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, so to speak, but so many sketches, rough plans like those which a decorator submits to one, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which she might adopt for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his torture-chamber.