The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (61 page)

On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him an amenity of which she would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage, under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come; he must instantly accompany her home, to “do a cattleya,” and the desire which she claimed to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so imperious, the caresses which
she lavished on him were so demonstrative and so unwonted, that this brutal and improbable fondness made Swann just as unhappy as any lie or unkindness. One evening when he had thus, in obedience to her command, gone home with her, and she was interspersing her kisses with passionate words, in strange contrast to her habitual coldness, he suddenly thought he heard a sound; he rose, searched everywhere and found nobody, but hadn’t the heart to return to his place by her side; whereupon, in the height of fury, she broke a vase and said to him: “One can never do anything right with you!” And he was left uncertain whether she had not actually had some man concealed in the room, whose jealousy she had wished to exacerbate or his senses to inflame.

Sometimes he repaired to brothels in the hope of learning something about Odette, although he dared not mention her name. “I have a little thing you’re sure to like,” the bawd would greet him, and he would stay for an hour or so chatting gloomily to some poor girl who sat there astonished that he went no further. One of them, who was quite young and very pretty, said to him once: “Of course, what I’d like would be to find a real friend—then he might be quite certain I’d never go with any other men again.”

“Really, do you think it possible for a woman to be touched by a man’s loving her, and never to be unfaithful to him?” asked Swann anxiously.

“Why, of course! It all depends on people’s characters!”

Swann could not help saying to these girls the sort of things that would have delighted the Princesse des Laumes. To the one who was in search of a friend he said
with a smile: “But how nice, you’ve put on blue eyes to go with your sash.”

“And you too, you’ve got blue cuffs on.”

“What a charming conversation we’re having for a place of this sort! I’m not boring you, am I; or keeping you?”

“No, I’m not in a hurry. If you’d have bored me I’d have said so. But I like hearing you talk.”

“I’m very flattered … Aren’t we having a nice chat?” he asked the bawd who had just looked in.

“Why, yes, that’s just what I was saying to myself, how good they’re being! But there it is! People come to my house now just to talk. The Prince was telling me only the other day that it’s far nicer here than at home with his wife. It seems that, nowadays, all the society ladies are so flighty; a real scandal, I call it. But I’ll leave you in peace now,” she ended discreetly, and left Swann with the girl who had the blue eyes. But presently he rose and said good-bye to her. She had ceased to interest him. She did not know Odette.

The painter having been ill, Dr Cottard recommended a sea-voyage. Several of the “faithful” spoke of accompanying him. The Verdurins could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris, so first of all hired and finally purchased a yacht; thus Odette went on frequent cruises. Whenever she had been away for any length of time, Swann would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her, but as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, when they had gone away ostensibly for a month only, either
they succumbed to a series of temptations, or else M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged everything beforehand to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to the “faithful” only as time went on; at all events, from Algiers they flitted to Tunis; then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had been absent for nearly a year, and Swann felt perfectly at ease and almost happy. Although Mme Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the pianist and Dr Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no need of them, and that in any event it was most rash to allow Mme Cottard to return to Paris which, so M. Verdurin affirmed, was in the throes of revolution, she was obliged to grant them their liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One day, shortly after the return of these four travellers, Swann, seeing an omnibus for the Luxembourg approaching and having some business there, had jumped on it and found himself sitting opposite Mme Cottard, who was paying a round of visits to people whose “day” it was, in full fig, with a plume in her hat, a silk dress, a muff, an umbrella-sunshade, a card-case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the cleaners. Clothed in these regalia, she would, in fine weather, go on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the natural amiability of the woman broke through the starched surface of the doctor’s-wife, not being certain, moreover, whether she ought to talk to Swann about the Verdurins, she proceeded to hold forth, in her slow, awkward and soft-spoken voice, which every now and then was completely drowned by the rattling of the
omnibus, on topics selected from those which she had picked up and would repeat in each of the score of houses up the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an afternoon.

“I needn’t ask you, M. Swann, whether a man so much in the swim as yourself has been to the Mirlitons to see the portrait by Machard which the whole of Paris is rushing to see. Well and what do you think of it? Whose camp are you in, those who approve or those who don’t? It’s the same in every house in Paris now, no one talks about anything else but Machard’s portrait. You aren’t smart, you aren’t really cultured, you aren’t up-to-date unless you give an opinion on Machard’s portrait.”

Swann having replied that he had not seen this portrait, Mme Cottard was afraid that she might have hurt his feelings by obliging him to confess the omission.

“Oh, that’s quite all right! At least you admit it frankly. You don’t consider yourself disgraced because you haven’t seen Machard’s portrait. I find that most commendable. Well now, I have seen it. Opinion is divided, you know, there are some people who find it a bit over-finical, like whipped cream, they say; but I think it’s just ideal. Of course, she’s not a bit like the blue and yellow ladies of our friend Biche. But I must tell you quite frankly (you’ll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, but I always say just what I think), that I don’t understand his work. I can quite see the good points in his portrait of my husband, oh, dear me, yes, and it’s certainly less odd than most of what he does, but even then he had to give the poor man a blue moustache! But Machard! Just listen to this now, the husband of the friend I’m on my way to see at this very moment (which has given me the very great
pleasure of your company), has promised her that if he is elected to the Academy (he’s one of the Doctor’s colleagues) he’ll get Machard to paint her portrait.
There’s
something to look forward to! I have another friend who insists that she’d rather have Leloir. I’m only a wretched Philistine, and for all I know Leloir may be technically superior to Machard. But I do think that the most important thing about a portrait, especially when it’s going to cost ten thousand francs, is that it should be like, and an agreeable likeness.”

Having delivered these words, to which she had been inspired by the loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card-case, the little number inked inside each of her gloves by the cleaner, and the embarrassment of speaking to Swann about the Verdurins, Mme Cottard, seeing that they had still a long way to go before they would reach the corner of the Rue Bonaparte where the conductor was to set her down, listened to the promptings of her heart, which counselled other words than these.

“Your ears must have been burning,” she ventured, “while we were on the yacht with Mme Verdurin. We talked about you all the time.”

Swann was genuinely astonished, for he supposed that his name was never uttered in the Verdurins’ presence.

“You see,” Mme Cottard went on, “Mme de Crécy was there; need I say more? Wherever Odette is, it’s never long before she begins talking about you. And you can imagine that it’s never unfavourably. What, you don’t believe me!” she went on, noticing that Swann looked sceptical.

And, carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, without putting any sly meaning into the word, which she
used purely in the sense in which one employs it to speak of the affection that unites a pair of friends: “Why, she
adores
you! No, indeed, I’m sure it would never do to say anything against you when she was about; one would soon be put in one’s place! Whatever we might be doing, if we were looking at a picture, for instance, she would say, ‘If only we had him here, he’s the man who could tell us whether it’s genuine or not. There’s no one like him for that.’ And all day long she would be saying, ‘What can he be doing just now? I do hope he’s doing a little work! It’s too dreadful that a fellow with such gifts as he has should be so lazy.’ (Forgive me, won’t you.) ‘I can see him this very moment; he’s thinking of us, he’s wondering where we are.’ Indeed, she made a remark which I found absolutely charming. M. Verdurin asked her, ‘How in the world can you see what he’s doing, when he’s a thousand miles away?’ And Odette answered, ‘Nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend.’ No, I assure you, I’m not saying it just to flatter you; you have a true friend in her, such as one doesn’t often find. I can tell you, besides, that if you don’t know it you’re the only one who doesn’t. Mme Verdurin told me as much herself on our last day with them (one talks freely, don’t you know, before a parting), ‘I don’t say that Odette isn’t fond of us, but anything that we may say to her counts for very little beside what Swann might say.’ Oh, mercy, there’s the conductor stopping for me. Here I’ve been chatting away to you, and would have gone right past the Rue Bonaparte and never noticed … Will you be so very kind as to tell me if my plume is straight?”

And Mme Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a white-gloved hand from which there
floated, together with a transfer-ticket, a vision of high life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with the fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself overflowing with affection towards her, as well as towards Mme Verdurin (and almost towards Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her, being no longer tinged with pain, could scarcely be described, now, as love) as from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with fond eyes as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte, her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she clasped her umbrella and her card-case with its monogram exposed to view, her muff dancing up and down in front of her as she went.

To counterbalance the morbid feelings that Swann cherished for Odette, Mme Cottard, a wiser physician, in this case, than ever her husband would have been, had grafted on to them others more normal, feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann’s mind would make Odette seem more human (more like other women, since other women could inspire the same feelings in him), would hasten her final transformation back into the Odette, loved with an undisturbed affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the painter’s to drink a glass of orangeade with Forcheville, the Odette with whom Swann had glimpsed the possibility of living in happiness.

In the past, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it and hold it back. But now, to the diminution of his love there corresponded a simultaneous diminution in
his desire to remain in love. For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name glimpsed in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been Odette’s lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very mild, and, inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from that period in which he had so greatly suffered—but in which he had also known so voluptuous a way of feeling—and that the hazards of the road ahead might still enable him to catch an occasional furtive, distant glimpse of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable thrill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it is so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy traveller who pulls his hat down over his eyes to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster
and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to slip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed, like the same traveller if he does not awake until he has crossed the frontier and is back in France, when Swann chanced to alight, close at hand, on proof that Forcheville had been Odette’s lover, he realised that it caused him no pain, that love was now far behind, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the moment when he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar before it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have wished—in thought at least—to have been able to bid farewell, while she still existed, to the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy, to the Odette who had caused him to suffer, and whom now he would never see again.