The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (75 page)

“Yes, I was thinking only the other day that the recent telegram from the Emperor of Germany could not be much to your liking,” said my father.

M. de Norpois raised his eyes to heaven, as who should say, “Oh, that fellow!” before he replied: “In the first place, it is an act of ingratitude. It is more than a crime, it’s a blunder, and one of a crassness which I can describe only as pyramidal! Indeed, unless someone puts a check on his activities, the man who got rid of Bismarck is quite capable of repudiating by degrees the whole of the Bismarckian policy; after which it will be a leap in the dark.”

“My husband tells me, Monsieur, that you may perhaps take him to Spain one summer. I’m delighted for his sake.”

“Why yes, it’s an idea that greatly appeals to me. I should very much like to make this journey with you, my dear fellow. And you, Madame, have you decided yet how you are going to spend your holidays?”

“I shall perhaps go with my son to Balbec, but I’m not certain.”

“Ah! Balbec is quite charming. I was down that way a few years ago. They are beginning to build some very attractive little villas there; I think you’ll like the place. But may I ask what made you choose Balbec?”

“My son is very anxious to visit some of the churches in that neighbourhood, and Balbec church in particular. I was a little afraid that the tiring journey there and the discomfort of staying in the place might be too much for his health. But I hear that they have just opened an excellent hotel, in which he will be able to get all the comfort that he requires.”

“Indeed! I must make a note of that for a certain person who will not turn up her nose at a comfortable hotel.”

“The church at Balbec is very beautiful, is it not, Monsieur?” I inquired, repressing my sorrow at learning that one of the attractions of Balbec consisted in its pretty little villas.

“No, it’s not bad; but it cannot be compared for a moment with such positive jewels in stone as the cathedrals of Rheims and Chartres, or with what is to my mind the pearl among them all, the Sainte-Chapelle here in Paris.”

“But Balbec church is partly Romanesque, is it not?”

“Why, yes, it is in the Romanesque style, which is to say very cold and lifeless, with not the slightest hint of the grace, the fantasy of the later Gothic builders, who worked their stone as if it had been so much lace. Balbec church is well worth a visit if one is in the neighbourhood; it is decidedly quaint. On a wet day, when you have nothing better to do, you might look inside; you’ll see the tomb of Tourville.”
³

“Tell me, were you at the Foreign Ministry dinner last night?” asked my father. “I couldn’t go.”

“No,” M. de Norpois smiled, “I must confess that I renounced it for a party of a very different sort. I was dining with a lady of whom you may possibly have heard, the beautiful Mme Swann.”

My mother repressed a shudder of apprehension, for, being more rapid in perception than my father, she grew alarmed on his account over things which only began to vex him a moment later. Whatever might cause him annoyance was first noticed by her, just as bad news of France is always known abroad sooner than among ourselves. But being curious to know what sort of people the Swanns might entertain, she inquired of M. de Norpois as to whom he had met there.

“Why, my dear lady, it is a house which (or so it struck me) is especially attractive to … gentlemen. There were several married men there last night, but their wives were all, as it happened, unwell, and so had not come with them,” replied the Ambassador with a slyness veiled by good-humour, casting round the table a glance the gentleness and discretion of which appeared to be tempering while in reality intensifying its malice.

“In all fairness,” he went on, “I must add that women do go to the house, but women who … belong rather—what shall I say—to the Republican world than to Swann’s” (he pronounced it “Svann’s”) “circle. Who knows? Perhaps it will turn into a political or a literary salon some day. Anyhow, they appear to be quite content as they are. Indeed, I feel that Swann advertises his contentment just a trifle too blatantly. He told us the names of all the people who had asked him and his wife out for the next week, people whose friendship there is no reason to be proud of, with a want of reserve, of taste, almost of tact, which I was astonished to remark in so refined a man. He kept on repeating, ‘We haven’t a free evening!’ as though that was a thing to boast of, positively like a parvenu, and he is certainly not that. For Swann had always plenty of friends, women as well as men, and without seeming over-bold, without the least wish to appear indiscreet, I think I may safely say that not all of them, of course, nor even the majority of them, but one at least, who is a lady of the very highest rank, would perhaps not have shown herself inexorably averse from the idea of entering into relations with Mme Swann, in which case it is safe to assume that more than one sheep of the social flock would have followed her lead. But it seems that there has been no indication of any approach on Swann’s part in that direction … What do I see? A Nesselrode pudding! As well! I declare I shall need a course at Carlsbad after such a Lucullan feast as this … Possibly Swann felt that there would be too much resistance to overcome. The marriage—so much is certain—was not well received. There has been some talk of his wife’s having money, but that’s the grossest fallacy. At all events, the whole affair has been looked upon with disfavour. And then, Swann has an aunt who is excessively rich and in an admirable position socially, married to a man who, financially speaking, is a power in the land. Not only did she refuse to meet Mme Swann, she conducted an out-and-out campaign to force her friends and acquaintances to do the same. I don’t mean to say that any well-bred Parisian has shown actual incivility to Mme Swann … No! A hundred times no! Quite apart from her husband’s being eminently a man to take up the gauntlet. At all events, the odd thing is to see the alacrity with which Swann, who knows so many of the most select people, cultivates a society of which the best that can be said is that it is extremely mixed. I myself, who knew him in the old days, must admit that I felt more astonished than amused at seeing a man so well-bred as he, so much at home in the most exclusive circles, effusively thanking the Principal Private Secretary to the Minister of Posts for coming to their house, and asking him whether Mme Swann might
take the liberty
of calling upon his wife. He must feel like a fish out of water, don’t you know; obviously, it’s quite a different world. All the same, I don’t think Swann is unhappy. It’s true that for some years before the marriage she was always trying to blackmail him in a rather disgraceful way; she would take the child away whenever Swann refused her anything. Poor Swann, who is as ingenuous as he is in other ways discerning, believed every time that the child’s disappearance was a coincidence, and declined to face the facts. Apart from that, she made such continual scenes that everyone expected that, as soon as she achieved her object and was safely married, nothing could possibly restrain her and that their life would be a hell on earth. Instead of which, just the opposite has happened. People are inclined to laugh at the way Swann speaks of his wife; it’s become a standing joke. Of course one hardly expected that, more or less aware of being … (you know Molière’s word),
⁴
he would go and proclaim it
urbi et orbi
; all the same, people find it a little excessive when he says that she’s an excellent wife. And yet that is not so far from the truth as people imagine. In her own way—which is not, perhaps, what all husbands would choose, but then, between you and me, I find it difficult to believe that Swann, who has known her for a long time and is far from being an utter fool, did not know what to expect—there can be no denying that she does seem to have a certain regard for him. I don’t say she isn’t flighty, and Swann himself is not noted for his constancy, if one is to believe the charitable tongues which, as you may suppose, continue to wag. But she is grateful to him for what he has done for her, and, contrary to the fears that were generally expressed, her temper seems to have become angelic.”

This alteration was perhaps not so extraordinary as M. de Norpois professed to find it. Odette had not believed that Swann would ever consent to marry her; each time she made the tendentious announcement that some man about town had just married his mistress she had seen him stiffen into a glacial silence, or at the most, if she challenged him directly by asking: “Don’t you think it’s very good and very right, what he’s done for a woman who sacrificed all her youth to him?” had heard him answer dryly: “But I don’t say that there’s anything wrong in it. Everyone does as he thinks fit.” She came very near, indeed, to believing that (as he used to threaten in moments of anger) he would leave her altogether, for she had heard it said, not long since, by a woman sculptor, that “You can’t be surprised at anything men do, they’re such cads,” and impressed by the profundity of this pessimistic maxim she had appropriated it for herself, and repeated it on every possible occasion with a despondent air that seemed to imply: “After all, it’s not at all impossible; it would be just my luck.” Meanwhile all the virtue had gone from the optimistic maxim which had hitherto guided Odette through life: “You can do anything with men when they’re in love with you, they’re such idiots!”, a doctrine which was expressed on her face by the same flicker of the eyelids that might have accompanied such words as: “Don’t be frightened; he won’t break anything.” While she waited, Odette was tormented by the thought of what such and such a friend of hers, who had been married by a man who had not lived with her for nearly so long as she herself had lived with Swann, and had no child by him, and who was now relatively esteemed, invited to balls at the Elysée and so forth, must think of Swann’s behaviour. A consultant more discerning than M. de Norpois would doubtless have been able to diagnose that it was this feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the infernal temper she displayed was not an essential part of her nature, was not an incurable disease, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed come to pass, namely that a new regimen, that of matrimony, would put an end with almost magic swiftness to those painful incidents, of daily occurrence but in no sense organic. Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising. No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a person comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the person that they see. It would seem, none the less, that so far as Odette was concerned people could have taken into account the fact that if, indeed, she had never entirely understood Swann’s mentality, at least she was acquainted with the titles and with all the details of his studies, so much so that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as that of her own dressmaker; while as for Swann himself, she knew intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world is ignorant or which it scoffs at, and of which only a mistress or a sister possesses the true and cherished image; and so strongly are we attached to such idiosyncrasies, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity with them, such as we ourselves or our relatives have, that love affairs of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections. And among these special traits there were others, besides, which belonged as much to Swann’s intellect as to his character, but which nevertheless, because they had their roots in the latter, Odette had been able more easily to discern. She complained that when Swann turned author, when he published his essays, these characteristics were not to be found in them to the same extent as in his letters or in his conversation, where they abounded. She urged him to give them a more prominent place. She wanted this because it was these things that she herself most liked in him, but since she liked them because they were the things most typical of him, she was perhaps not wrong in wishing that they might be found in his writings. Perhaps also she thought that his work, if endowed with more vitality, so that it ultimately brought him success, might enable her also to form what at the Verdurins’ she had been taught to value above everything else in the world—a salon.

Among the people to whom this sort of marriage appeared ridiculous, people who in their own case would ask themselves, “What will M. de Guermantes think, what will Bréauté say, when I marry Mlle de Montmorency?”, among the people who cherished that sort of social ideal, would have figured, twenty years earlier, Swann himself, the Swann who had taken endless pains to get himself elected to the Jockey Club and had reckoned at that time on making a brilliant marriage which, by consolidating his position, would have made him one of the most prominent figures in Paris. However, the visions which such a marriage suggests to the mind of the interested party need, like all visions, if they are not to fade away and be altogether lost, to receive sustenance from without. Your most ardent longing is to humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear of him any more, having removed to some other place, your enemy will come to have no longer the slightest importance to you. If for twenty years one has lost sight of all the people on whose account one would have liked to be elected to the Jockey Club or the Institute, the prospect of becoming a member of one or other of those establishments will have ceased to tempt one. Now, fully as much as retirement, ill-health or religious conversion, a protracted love affair will substitute fresh visions for the old. There was no renunciation on Swann’s part, when he married Odette, of his social ambitions, for from those ambitions Odette had long ago, in the spiritual sense of the word, detached him. Besides, had he not been so detached, his marriage would have been all the more creditable. It is because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, ignominious marriages are the most estimable of all. (One cannot very well include among ignominious marriages those that are made for money, there being no instance on record of a couple, of whom the wife or else the husband has thus sold himself, who have not sooner or later been admitted into society, if only by tradition, and on the strength of so many precedents, and so as not to have, as it were, one law for the rich and another for the poor.) Perhaps, on the other hand, the artistic, if not the perverse side of Swann’s nature would in any event have derived a certain pleasure from coupling himself, in one of those crossings of species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, with a creature of a different race, archduchess or prostitute—from contracting a royal alliance or marrying beneath him. There had been but one person in all the world whose opinion he took into consideration whenever he thought of his possible marriage with Odette; this was, and from no snobbish motive, the Duchesse de Guermantes—with whom Odette, on the contrary, was but little concerned, thinking only of those people whose position was immediately above her own rather than in so vague an empyrean. But when Swann in his day-dreams saw Odette as already his wife he invariably pictured to himself the moment when he would take her—her, and above all his daughter—to call upon the Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her father-in-law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes). He had no desire to introduce them anywhere else, but his heart would soften as he imagined—articulating to himself their actual words—all the things that the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the affection that she would show for Gilberte, spoiling her, making him proud of his child. He enacted to himself the scene of this introduction with the same precision in each of its imaginary details that people show when they consider how they would spend, supposing they were to win it, a lottery prize the amount of which they have arbitrarily determined. In so far as a mental picture which accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to motivate it, so it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to introduce her, together with Gilberte, without anyone else being present, without, if need be, anyone else ever coming to know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely the one whose realisation proved to be forbidden him, by a veto so absolute that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess could never come to know them. We shall see too that, on the contrary, the Duchesse de Guermantes did strike up a friendship with Odette and Gilberte after Swann’s death. And doubtless he would have been wiser—in so far as he could attach such importance to so small a matter—not to have formed too dark a picture of the future in this connexion, but to have consoled himself with the hope that the desired meeting might indeed take place when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one had believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, and was there not already in his lifetime—as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death—a posthumous happiness in this marriage with Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not attracted him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the person who, in Swann, had so longed to live and so despaired of living all his life with Odette, when that person was dead?