He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent her time during the day, any more than of her past; so little, indeed, that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge. And so he never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life had been. Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years earlier, when he did not yet know her, people had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette, as of a tart, a kept woman, one of those women to whom he still attributed (having lived but little in their company) the wilful, fundamentally perverse character with which they had so long been endowed by the imagination of certain novelists. He told himself that as often as not one has only to take the opposite view to the reputation created by the world in order to judge a person accurately, when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette, so kind, so simple, so enthusiastic in the pursuit of ideals, so incapable, almost, of not telling the truth that, when he had once begged her, so that they might dine together alone, to write to Mme Verdurin saying that she was unwell, the next day he had seen her, face to face with Mme Verdurin who asked whether she had recovered, blushing, stammering and in spite of herself revealing in every feature how painful, what a torture it was to her to act a lie and, as in her answer she multiplied the fictitious details of her alleged indisposition, seeming to ask forgiveness, by her suppliant look and her stricken accents, for the obvious falsehood of her words.
On certain days, however, though these were rare, she would call upon him in the afternoon, interrupting his musings or the essay on Vermeer to which he had latterly returned. His servant would come in to say that Mme de Crécy was in the small drawing-room. He would go and join her, and when he opened the door, on Odette’s rosy face, as soon as she caught sight of Swann, would appear—changing the curve of her lips, the look in her eyes, the moulding of her cheeks—an all-absorbing smile. Once he was alone he would see that smile again, and also her smile of the day before, and another with which she had greeted him sometime else, and the smile which had been her answer, in the carriage that night, when he had asked her whether she objected to his rearranging her cattleyas; and the life of Odette at all other times, since he knew nothing of it, appeared to him, with its neutral and colourless background, like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees here, there, at every corner and at various angles, traced in three colours upon the buff paper, innumerable smiles. But once in a while, illuminating a chink of that existence which Swann still saw as a complete blank, even if his mind assured him that it was not, because he was unable to visualise it, some friend who knew them both and, suspecting that they were in love, would not have dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least importance, would describe how he had glimpsed Odette that very morning walking up the Rue Abbattucci, in a cape trimmed with skunk, a Rembrandt hat, and a bunch of violets in her bosom. Swann would be bowled over by this simple sketch because it suddenly made him realise that Odette had an existence that was not wholly subordinated to his own; he longed to know whom she had been seeking to impress by this costume in which he had never seen her, and he made up his mind to ask her where she had been going at that intercepted moment, as though, in all the colourless life of his mistress—a life almost non-existent, since it was invisible to him—there had been but a single incident apart from all those smiles directed towards himself: namely, her walking abroad beneath a Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of violets in her bosom.
Except when he asked her for Vinteuil’s little phrase instead of the Valse des Roses, Swann made no effort to induce her to play the things that he himself preferred, or, in literature any more than in music, to correct the manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was not intelligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell her about the great poets, she had imagined that she would immediately get to know whole pages of romantic and heroic verse, in the style of the Vicomte de Borelli, only even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman who had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she had lost all interest in that painter. She would often say: “Poetry, you know—well, of course, there’d be nothing like it if it was all true, if the poets believed everything they say. But as often as not you’ll find there’s no one so calculating as those fellows. I know something about it: I had a friend, once, who was in love with a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love and the sky and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He did her out of more than three hundred thousand francs.”
If, then, Swann tried to show her what artistic beauty consisted in, how one ought to appreciate poetry or painting, after a minute or two she would cease to listen, saying: “Yes … I never thought it would be like that.” And he felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to lie to her, assuring her that what he had said was nothing, that he had only touched the surface, that he had no time to go into it all properly, that there was more in it than that. Then she would interrupt sharply: “More in it? What?… Do tell me!”, but he did not tell her, knowing how feeble it would appear to her, how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching, and fearing lest, disillusioned with art, she might at the same time be disillusioned with love.
With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed. “You’re always so reserved; I can’t make you out.” She was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact. And indeed it happens, often enough, to greater men than Swann, to a scientist or an artist, when he is not misunderstood by the people among whom he lives, that the feeling on their part which proves that they have been convinced of the superiority of his intellect is not their admiration for his ideas—for these are beyond them—but their respect for his kindness. Swann’s position in society also inspired Odette with respect, but she had no desire that he should attempt to secure invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such attempts would be bound to fail; perhaps she even feared that, merely by speaking of her to his friends, he might provoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind. At all events she had made him promise never to mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into society was, she had told him, a quarrel she had once had with a friend who had avenged herself subsequently by speaking ill of her. “But surely,” Swann objected, “not everyone knew your friend.” “Yes, but don’t you see, it spreads like wildfire; people are so horrid.” Swann found this story frankly incomprehensible; on the other hand, he knew that such generalisations as “People are so horrid,” and “A word of scandal spreads like wildfire,” were generally accepted as true; there must be cases to which they were applicable. Could Odette’s be one of these? He teased himself with the question, though not for long, for he too was subject to that mental torpor that had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced by a difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which so frightened Odette did not, perhaps, inspire her with any great longings, since it was too far removed from the world she knew for her to be able to form any clear conception of it. At the same time, while in certain aspects she had retained a genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether the same as that of society people. For the latter, it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index. Society people know this index by heart; they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they have extracted a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation
that Swann, for example, without needing to draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. But Odette was one of those persons (an extremely numerous category, whatever the fashionable world may think, and to be found in every class of society) who do not share these notions, but imagine smartness to be something quite other, which assumes different aspects according to the circle to which they themselves belong, but has the special characteristic—common alike to the fashion of which Odette dreamed and to that before which Mme Cottard bowed—of being directly accessible to all. The other kind, the smartness of society people, is, it must be admitted, accessible also; but there is a time-lag. Odette would say of someone: “He only goes to smart places.”
And if Swann asked her what she meant by that, she would answer with a touch of contempt: “Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy, at your age, having to be told what the smart places are! Well, on Sunday mornings there’s the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and round the lake at five o’clock, and on Thursdays, the Eden Théâtre, and the Races on Fridays; then there are the balls …”
“What balls?”
“Why, silly, the balls people give in Paris; the smart ones, I mean. For instance, Herbinger, you know who I mean, the fellow who’s in one of the jobbers’ offices. Yes, of course you must know him, he’s one of the best-known men in Paris, that great big fair-haired boy who’s such a toff—always has a flower in his buttonhole, a parting at the back, light-coloured overcoats. He goes about with that old frump, takes her to all the first-nights. Well, he gave a ball the other night, and all the smart people in Paris were there. I should have loved to go! But you had to show your invitation at the door, and I couldn’t get one anywhere. Still, I’m just as glad, now, that I didn’t go; I should have been killed in the crush, and seen nothing. It’s really just to be able to say you’ve been to Herbinger’s ball. You know what a braggart I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the people who tell you they were there are lying … But I’m surprised you weren’t there, a regular ‘swell’ like you.”
Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashionable life; feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous and trivial, he saw no point in imparting it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except as a means of obtaining tickets for the paddock at race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre. She hoped that he would continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances, but in other respects she was inclined to regard them as anything but smart, ever since she had passed the Marquise de Villeparisis in the street, wearing a black woollen dress and a bonnet with strings.
“But she looks like an usherette, like an old concierge, darling! A marquise, her! Goodness knows I’m not a marquise, but you’d have to pay me a lot of money before you’d get me to go round Paris rigged out like that!”
Nor could she understand Swann’s continuing to live in his house on the Quai d’Orleans, which, though she dared not tell him so, she considered unworthy of him.
It was true that she claimed to be fond of “antiques,” and used to assume a rapturous and knowing air when she confessed how she loved to spend the whole day “rummaging” in curio shops, hunting for “bric-à-brac” and “period” things. Although it was a point of honour to which she obstinately clung, as though obeying some old family precept, that she should never answer questions or “account for” how she spent her days, she spoke to Swann once about a friend to whose house she had been invited, and had found that everything in it was “of the period.” Swann could not get her to tell him what the period was. But after thinking the matter over she replied that it was “mediaeval”; by which she meant that the walls were panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and added, in the hesitant tone and with the knowing air one adopts in referring to a person one has met at dinner the night before and of whom one had never heard until then, but whom one’s hosts seemed to regard as someone so celebrated and important that one hopes that one’s listener will know who is meant and be duly impressed: “Her dining-room … is … eighteenth century!” She herself had thought it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She mentioned it again, a third time, when she showed Swann a card with the name and address of the man who had designed the dining-room, and whom she wanted to send for when she had enough money, to see whether he couldn’t do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one of the sort she used to dream of and which unfortunately her little house wasn’t large enough to contain, with tall sideboards, Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the château at Blois. It was on this occasion that she blurted out to Swann what she really thought of his abode on the Quai d’Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming, but in the “sham-antique.”
“You wouldn’t have her live like you among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!” she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the bourgeois housewife getting the better of the acquired dilettantism of the cocotte.
People who enjoyed picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them; when a man had told her at dinner that he loved to wander about and get his hands covered with dust in old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in this commercial age since he was not interested in its concerns, and that he belonged to another generation altogether, she would come home saying: “Why, he’s an adorable creature, so sensitive, I had no idea,” and she would conceive for him an immediate bond of friendship. But on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had these tastes but did not speak of them, left her cold. She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: “It’s not the same thing, you see, with him,” and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.
Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to counteract those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, and which in fact he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which enchanted him even, for were they not so many characteristic features by virtue of which the essence of this woman revealed itself to him? And so, when she was in a happy mood because she was going to see the Reine Topaze,10 or when her expression grew serious, worried, petulant because she was afraid of missing the flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable in order to set the seal upon a woman’s certificate of elegance, Swann, enraptured as we all are at times by the naturalness of a child or the verisimilitude of a portrait which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to the surface of her face that he could not refrain from touching it with his lips. “Ah, so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower-show, does she? She wants to be admired, does she? Very well, we’ll take her there, we can but obey.” As Swann was a little short-sighted, he had to resign himself to wearing spectacles at home when working, while to face the world he adopted a monocle as being less disfiguring. The first time that she saw it in his eye, she could not contain her joy: “I really do think—for a man, that is to say—it’s tremendously smart! How nice you look wi
th it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!” she concluded with a tinge of regret. He liked Odette to say these things, just as if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops independently of their sensuality, a weird disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to both simultaneously; yielding to the seductions of more and more rarefied works of art in the company of more and more vulgar women, taking a little servant-girl to a screened box at the theatre for the performance of a decadent piece he particularly wanted to see, or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, convinced, moreover, that a cultivated society woman would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to remain so prettily silent. But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love, for the sake of which he had preferred them to his own. If he went again to Serge Panine, if he looked out for opportunities of going to see Olivier Métra conduct,11 it was for the pleasure of being initiated into every one of Odette’s ideas and fancies, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes. This charm, which her favourite plays and pictures and places possessed, of drawing him closer to her, struck him as being more mysterious than the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places with which she had no connection. Besides, having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to languish, and his man-of-the-world scepticism having permeated them without his being aware of it, he felt (or at least he had felt for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined. And as he considered that the importance Odette attached to receiving an invitation to a private view was not in itself any more ridiculous than the pleasure he himself had at one time felt in lunching with the Prince of Wales, so he did not think that the admiration she professed for Monte-Carlo or for the Righi was any more unreasonable than his own liking for Holland (which she imagined to be ugly) and for Versailles (which bored her to tears). And so he denied himself the pleasure of visiting those places, delighted to tell himself that it was for her sake, that he wished only to feel, to enjoy things with her.
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