The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (53 page)

But now, whatever he said, she would answer in a tone that was sometimes irritable, sometimes indulgent: “Ah! won’t you ever be like other people!” And gazing at that face which was only a little aged by his recent anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music of which one has read the programme, or the resemblance of a child whose family one knows: “He’s not positively ugly, if you like, but he’s really rather absurd: that eyeglass, that toupee, that smile!”—adumbrating in their suggestible imaginations the invisible boundary which separates, at a few months’ interval, the face of a successful lover from that of a cuckold), she would say: “Oh, I do wish I could change you, put some sense into that head of yours.”

Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if Odette’s way of behaving to him left the slightest room for doubt, he would fling himself greedily upon her words: “You can if you like,” he would say to her.

And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to guide him, to make him work, would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though it is only fair to add that in those other women’s hands the noble task would have seemed to Swann a tactless and intolerable usurpation of his freedom. “If she didn’t love me just a little,” he told himself, “she wouldn’t want to change me. And to change me, she will have to see me more often.” Thus he saw her very reproaches as proofs of her
interest, perhaps of her love; and indeed she now gave him so few that he was obliged to regard as such the various prohibitions which she imposed on him from time to time. One day she announced that she did not care for his coachman, who, she thought, might be setting Swann against her, and anyhow did not show the promptness and deference to Swann’s orders which she would have liked to see. She felt that he wanted to hear her say: “Don’t take him again when you come to me,” just as he might have wanted her to kiss him. So, being in a good mood, she said it: and he was touched. That evening, talking to M. de Charlus, with whom he had the consolation of being able to speak of her openly (for the most trivial remarks that he uttered now, even to people who had never heard of her, always somehow related to Odette), he said to him: “I believe, all the same, that she loves me. She’s so nice to me, and she certainly takes an interest in what I do.”

And if, when he was setting off for her house, climbing into his carriage with a friend whom he was to drop somewhere on the way, his friend said: “Hullo! that isn’t Loredan on the box?” with what melancholy joy Swann would answer him:

“Oh! Good heavens, no! I can tell you, I daren’t take Loredan when I go to the Rue La Pérouse. Odette doesn’t like me to take Loredan, she doesn’t think he treats me properly. What on earth is one to do? Women, you know, women. My dear fellow, she’d be furious. Oh, lord, yes; if I took Rémi there I should never hear the last of it!”

This new manner, indifferent, offhand, irritable, which Odette now adopted with Swann, undoubtedly
made him suffer; but he did not realise how much he suffered; since it was only gradually, day by day, that Odette had cooled towards him, it was only by directly contrasting what she was today with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. But this change was his deep, secret wound, which tormented him day and night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it, he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of suffering too much. He might say to himself in an abstract way: “There was a time when Odette loved me more,” but he never formed any definite picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a chest of drawers which he contrived never to look at, which he made a detour to avoid whenever he went in or out of the room, because in one of its drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in which she said: “If only you had forgotten your heart also. I should never have let you have that back,” and “At whatever hour of the day or night you may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please,” so there was a place in his heart where he would never allow his thoughts to trespass, forcing them, if need be, into a long divagation so that they should not have to pass within reach of it; the place in which lingered his memory of happier days.

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

It was at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte’s, the last, for that season, of the evenings on which she invited people to listen to the musicians who would serve, later on,
for her charity concerts. Swann, who had intended to go to each of the previous evenings in turn but never succeeded in making up his mind, received, while he was dressing for this one, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who came with an offer to accompany him to the party, if this would help him to feel a little less bored and unhappy when he got there. Swann thanked him and said:

“You can’t conceive how glad I should be of your company. But the greatest pleasure you can give me is to go instead to see Odette. You know what an excellent influence you have over her. I don’t suppose she’ll be going anywhere this evening before she goes to see her old dressmaker, and I’m sure she’d be delighted if you accompanied her there. In any case, you’ll find her at home before then. Try to entertain her, and also to give her a little sound advice. If you could arrange something for tomorrow that would please her, something we could all three do together … Try to put out a feeler, too, for the summer; see if there’s anything she wants to do, a cruise that the three of us might take, or something. I don’t expect to see her tonight myself; still, if she’d like me to come, or if you find a loophole, you’ve only to send me a word at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s up till midnight, and afterwards here. Thank you for all your kindness—you know how fond I am of you.”

The Baron promised to do as Swann wished as soon as he had deposited him at the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where Swann arrived soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening at the Rue La Perouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to everything that did not concern Odette, and in particular to the details of fashionable life, a state which invested
them with the charm that is to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire, appears to us in its own guise. On alighting from his carriage, in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic existence which hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions, and in which they show a great regard for accuracy of costume and setting, Swann was delighted to see the heirs and successors of Balzac’s “tigers”—now “grooms”—who normally followed their mistress on her daily drive, now hatted and booted and posted outside in the roadway in front of the house, or in front of the stables, like gardeners drawn up for inspection beside their flower-beds. The tendency he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here, but in a more positive and more general form; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached from it, which presented itself to him as a series of pictures. In the hall, which in the old days, when he was still a regular attender at such functions, he would have entered swathed in his overcoat to emerge from it in his tails, without noticing what had happened during the few moments he had spent there, his mind having been either still at the party which he had just left or already at the party into which he was about to be ushered, he now noticed for the first time, roused by the unexpected arrival of so belated a guest, the scattered pack of tall, magnificent, idle footmen who were drowsing here and there upon benches and chests and who, pointing their noble greyhound profiles, now rose to their feet and gathered in a circle round about him.

One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect, and not unlike the headsman in certain Renaissance pictures
which represent executions, tortures and the like, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things. But the harshness of his steely glare was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that, as he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat. He took it with a care to which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching by the evidence of his splendid strength. Then he passed it to one of his satellites, a timid novice who expressed the panic that overpowered him by casting furious glances in every direction, and displayed all the dumb agitation of a wild animal in the first hours of its captivity.

A few feet away, a strapping great fellow in livery stood musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna’s paintings, lost in thought, leaning upon his shield, while the people around him are rushing about slaughtering one another; detached from the group of his companions who were thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain aloof from that scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, glaucous eyes, as if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of St James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race—if, indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and where it still dreams—fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue by one of the Master’s Paduan models or an Albrecht Dürer Saxon. And the locks of his
reddish hair, crinkled by nature but glued to his head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which, if in its creator’s purpose it represents but man, manages at least to extract from man’s simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed, as it were, from the whole of animate nature, that a head of hair, by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the superimposition of the florid triple diadem of its tresses, can suggest at once a bunch of seaweed, a brood of fledgling doves, a bed of hyacinths and a coil of snakes.

Others again, no less colossal, were disposed upon the steps of a monumental staircase for which their decorative presence and marmorean immobility might have earned, like the one in the Palace of the Doges, the name “Staircase of the Giants,” and on which Swann now set foot, saddened by the thought that Odette had never climbed it. Ah, with what joy by contrast would he have raced up the dark, evil-smelling, breakneck flights to the little dressmaker’s, in whose attic he would so gladly have paid the price of a weekly stage-box at the Opera for the right to spend the evening there when Odette came, and other days too, for the privilege of talking about her, of living among people whom she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there, and who on that account seemed to be possessed of some part of his mistress’s life that was more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential but longed-for staircase to the old dressmaker’s, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed milk-can set out upon the door-mat in readiness for the morning
round, on the splendid but despised staircase which Swann was now climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled and doing homage for them to the guests, a concierge, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might tomorrow lapse to the bourgeois service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in observing to the letter all the instructions they had been given before being allowed to don the brilliant livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel altogether at their ease, stood each in the arcade of his doorway with a pompous splendour tempered by democratic good-fellowship, like saints in their niches, while a gigantic usher, dressed Swiss Guard fashion like the beadle in a church, struck the floor with his staff as each fresh arrival passed him. Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like a Goya sacristan or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk at which lackeys seated like notaries before their massive register rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a little hall which—like certain rooms that are arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else—displayed at its entrance, like some priceless effigy by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a
young footman, his body slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more crimson face from which gushed torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced with his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze the Aubusson tapestries screening the door of the room in which the music was being given, appeared, with a soldierly impassiveness or a supernatural faith—an allegory of alarums, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of the call to arms—to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for the approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have been if Odette had only permitted it, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat wrung his heart.