“She admits that she heard me ring and then knock, that she knew it was me, and that she wanted to see me,” Swann thought to himself. “But that doesn’t fit in with the fact that she didn’t let me in.”
He did not, however, draw her attention to this inconsistency, for he thought that if left to herself Odette might perhaps produce some falsehood which would give him a faint indication of the truth. She went on speaking, and he did not interrupt her, but gathered up, with an eager and sorrowful piety, the words that fell from her lips, feeling (and rightly feeling, since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke) that, like the sacred veil, they retained a vague imprint, traced a faint outline, of that infinitely precious and, alas, undiscoverable reality—what she had been doing that afternoon at three o’clock when he had called—of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications, illegible and divine traces, and which would exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this woman who could contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value but would never yield it up to him. Of course it occurred to him from time to time that Odette’s daily activities were not in themselves passionately interesting, and that such relations as she might have with other men did not exhale naturally, universally and for every rational being a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide. He realised at such moments that that interest, that gloom, existed in him alone, like a disease, and that once he was cured of this disease, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women. But the consciousness that the painful curiosity which he now brought to them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make Swann decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curiosity as important and to take every possible step to satisfy it. The fact was that Swann had reached an age whose philosophy—encouraged, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent much of his life, the group that surrounded the Princesse des Laumes, where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to the degree of scepticism and nothing was considered real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person—is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accumulation of the years already spent a fixed residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann deemed it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived from not knowing what Odette had done, just as he made allowance for the impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate in his budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring, with regard to the daily occupations of Odette, information the lack of which would make him unhappy, just as he reserved a margin for the gratification of other tastes from which he knew that pleasure was to be expected (at least, before he had fallen in love), such as his taste for collecting or for good cooking.
When he proposed to take leave of Odette and return home, she begged him to stay a little longer and even detained him forcibly, seizing him by the arm as he was opening the door to go. But he paid no heed to this, for among the multiplicity of gestures, remarks, little incidents that go to make up a conversation, it is inevitable that we should pass (without noticing anything that attracts our attention) close by those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching, whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed. She kept on saying: “What a dreadful pity—you never come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come I miss you.” He knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit, but since she was good-natured, anxious to make him happy, and often, grieved when she had offended him, he found it quite natural that she should be sorry on this occasion for having deprived him of the pleasure of spending an hour in her company, which was so very great, if not for her, at any rate for him. All the same, it was a matter of so little importance that her air of unrelieved sorrow began at length to astonish him. She reminded him, even more than usual, of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of the “Primavera.” She had at this moment their downcast, heart-broken expression, which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief too heavy to be borne when they are merely allowing the Infant Jesus to play with a pomegranate or watching Moses pour water into a trough. He had seen the same sorrow once before on her face, but when, he could no longer say. Then, suddenly, he remembered: it was when Odette had lied in apologising to Mme Verdurin on the evening after the dinner from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness, but really so that she might be alone with Swann. Surely, even had she been the most scrupulous of women, she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent a lie. But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she felt like weeping from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. Moreover she knew that her lie was usually wounding to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and guilty in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing.
What depressing lie was she now concocting for Swann’s benefit, to give her that doleful expression, that plaintive voice, which seemed to falter beneath the effort she was forcing herself to make, and to plead for mercy? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, something, possibly, that had not yet happened, that was imminent, and that would throw light upon that earlier event. At that moment, he heard the front-door bell ring. Odette went on talking, but her words dwindled into an inarticulate moan. Her regret at not having seen Swann that afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had become a veritable cry of despair.
He could hear the front door being closed, and the sound of a carriage, as though someone were going away—probably the person whom Swann must on no account meet—after being told that Odette was not at home. And then, when he reflected that merely by coming at an hour when he was not in the habit of coming he had managed to disturb so many arrangements of which she did not wish him to know, he was overcome with a feeling of despondency that amounted almost to anguish. But since he was in love with Odette, since he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts towards her, the pity with which he might have been inspired for himself he felt for her instead, and he murmured: “Poor darling!” When finally he left her, she took up several letters which were lying on the table, and asked him to post them for her. He took them away with him, and having reached home realised that they were still in his pocket. He walked back to the post office, took the letters out of his pocket, and, before dropping each of them into the box, scanned its address. They were all to tradesmen, except one which was to Forcheville. He kept it in his hand. “If I saw what was in this,” he argued, “I should know what she calls him, how she talks to him, whether there really is anything between them. Perhaps indeed by not looking inside I’m behaving shoddily towards Odette, since it’s the only way I can rid myself of a suspicion which is perhaps slanderous to her, which must in any case cause her suffering, and which can never possibly be set at rest once the letter is posted.”
He left the post office and went home, but he had kept this last letter with him. He lit a candle and held up close
to its flame the envelope which he had not dared to open. At first he could distinguish nothing, but the envelope was thin, and by pressing it down on to the stiff card which it enclosed he was able, through the transparent paper, to read the concluding words. They consisted of a stiffly formal ending. If, instead of its being he who was looking at a letter addressed to Forcheville, it had been Forcheville who had read a letter addressed to Swann, he would have found words in it of an altogether more affectionate kind! He took a firm hold of the card which was sliding to and fro, the envelope being too large for it, and then, by moving it with his finger and thumb, brought one line after another beneath the part of the envelope where the paper was not doubled, through which alone it was possible to read.
In spite of these manoeuvres he could not make it out clearly. Not that it mattered, for he had seen enough to assure himself that the letter was about some trifling incident which had no connexion with amorous relations; it was something to do with an uncle of Odette’s. Swann had read quite plainly at the beginning of the line: “I was right,” but did not understand what Odette had been right in doing, until suddenly a word which he had not been able at first to decipher came to light and made the whole sentence intelligible: “I was right to open the door; it was my uncle.” To open the door! So Forcheville had been there when Swann rang the bell, and she had sent him away, hence the sound that he had heard.
After that he read the whole letter. At the end she apologised for having treated Forcheville with so little ceremony, and reminded him that he had left his cigarette-case at her house, precisely what she had written to Swann after one of his first visits. But to Swann she had added: “If only you had forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have that back.” To Forcheville nothing of that sort: no allusion that might suggest any intrigue between them. And, really, he was obliged to admit that in all this Forcheville had been worse treated than himself, since Odette was writing to him to assure him that the visitor had been her uncle. From which it followed that he, Swann, was the man to whom she attached importance and for whose sake she had sent the other away. And yet, if there was nothing between Odette and Forcheville, why not have opened the door at once, why have said, “I was right to open the door; it was my uncle.” If she was doing nothing wrong at that moment, how could Forcheville possibly have accounted for her not opening the door? For some time Swann stood there, disconsolate, bewildered and yet happy, gazing at this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a qualm, so absolute was her trust in his honour, but through the transparent screen of which had been disclosed to him, together with the secret history of an incident which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of Odette’s life, like a luminous section cut out of the unknown. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of everything that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself. Now it had something to feed on, and Swann could begin to worry every day about the visits Odette received about five o’clock, could seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann’s affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on it from the beginning by his ignorance of how she spent her days and by the mental lethargy which prevented him from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette’s life, but of those moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself firmly to that particular moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.
From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He decided to separate Odette from Forcheville by taking her away for a few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so he who in former days, on journeys, used always to seek out new people and crowded places, might now be seen morosely shunning human society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for Odette? And thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, sensual feeling he had originally experienced for Odette had done to alter Swann’s character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.
A month after the evening on which he had read Odette’s letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of confabulations between Mme Verdurin and several of her guests, and thought he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to a party at Chatou, to which he, Swann, had not been invited.
The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the painter, perhaps without thinking, exclaimed aloud: “There mustn’t be any light, and he must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark so that things can become clear.”
Mme Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed an expression in which the two-fold desire to silence the speaker and to preserve an air of innocence in the eyes of the listener is neutralised into an intense vacuity wherein the motionless sign of intelligent complicity is concealed beneath an ingenuous smile, an expression which, common to everyone who has noticed a gaffe, instantaneously reveals it, if not to its perpetrator, at any rate to its victim. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had given up the struggle against the crushing difficulties of life, and. Swann anxiously counted the minutes that still separated him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he drove her home, he would be able to ask her for an explanation, make her promise either that she would not go to Chatou next day or that she would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her arms the anguish that tormented him. At last the carriages were ordered. Mme Verdurin said to Swann: “Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope,” trying, by the friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have said hitherto: “Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after.”
M. and Mme Verdurin invited Forcheville into their carriage. Swann’s was drawn up behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into his.
“Odette, we’ll take you,” said Mme Verdurin, “we’ve kept a little corner for you, beside M. de Forcheville.”
“Yes, Madame,” said Odette meekly.
“What! I thought I was to take you home,” cried Swann, flinging discretion to the wind, for the carriage-door hung open, the seconds were running out, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.
“But Mme Verdurin has asked me …”
“Come, you can quite well go home alone; we’ve left her with you quite often enough,” said Mme Verdurin.
“But I had something important to say to Mme de Crécy.”
“Very well, you can write it to her instead.”
“Good-bye,” said Odette, holding out her hand.
He tried hard to smile, but looked utterly dejected.
“Did you see the airs Swann is pleased to put on with us?” Mme Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. “I was afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette back. It’s positively indecent! Why doesn’t he say straight out that we keep a bawdy-house? I can’t conceive how Odette can stand such manners. He literally seems to be saying, ‘You belong to me!’ I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about it all, and I hope she’ll have the sense to understand me.”
A moment later she added, inarticulate with rage: “No, but, don’t you agree, the filthy creature …” unwittingly using, perhaps in obedience to the same obscure
need to justify herself—like Françoise at Combray, when the chicken refused to die—the very words which the last convulsions of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the peasant who is engaged in taking its life.
And when Mme Verdurin’s carriage had moved on and Swann’s took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard some bad news.
Swann dismissed him; he wanted to walk, and returned home on foot through the Bois, talking to himself, aloud, in the same slightly artificial tone he used to adopt when enumerating the charms of the “little nucleus” and extolling the magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles, the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found them pleasing, if they were addressed to others, so the Verdurins’ salon, which, not an hour before, had still seemed to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with a sort of moral nobility, exhibited to him all its absurdities, its foolishness, its ignominy, now that it was another than himself whom Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint.
He pictured to himself with disgust the party next evening at Chatou. “Imagine going to Chatou! Like a lot of drapers after shutting up shop! Upon my word, these people are really sublime in their bourgeois mediocrity, they can’t be real, they must all have come out of a Labiche comedy!”
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 38