The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. “Could anything be more grotesque than the lives of these nonentities, hanging on to one another like that. They’d imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul they would, if they didn’t all meet again tomorrow at Chatou!” Alas! there would also be the painter, the painter who enjoyed match-making, who would invite Forcheville to come with Odette to his studio. He could see Odette in a dress far too smart for a country outing, “because she’s so vulgar, and, poor little thing, such an absolute fool!”
He could hear the jokes that Mme Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the “bore” might be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them, laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. “What fetid humour!” he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar. “How in God’s name can a creature made in his image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The least sensitive nose must turn away in horror from such stale exhalations. It’s really impossible to believe that a human being can fail to understand that, in allowing herself to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is sinking into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I inhabit a plane so infinitely far above the sewers in which these filthy vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!” he shouted, tossing up his head and proudly throwing back his shoulders. “God knows I’ve honestly tried to pull Odette out of that quagmire, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end,” he concluded, as though this sacred mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might perhaps be directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from him.
He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and the grimaces of Mme Verdurin in terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by Beethoven’s music. “Idiot, liar!” he shouted, “and a creature like that imagines that she loves Art!” She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for him: “You can make room for M. de Forcheville, there, can’t you, Odette?” … “ ‘In the dark!’ ” (he remembered the painter’s words) “filthy old procuress!” “Procuress” was the name he applied also to the music which would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze into each other’s eyes, to feel for each other’s hands. He felt that there was much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorious attitude towards the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of education in France.
In a word, the life they led at the Verdurins’, which he had so often described as “the true life,” seemed to him now the worst of all, and their “little nucleus” the lowest of the low. “It really is,” he said, “beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. No doubt about it, the august words of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When you come to think of it, surely people ‘in society’ (with whom one may find fault now and then but who are after all a very different matter from that riff-raff) show a profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or even to soil the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound intuition there is in that ‘Noli me tangere’ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”
He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, had almost reached his own house, and still, having not yet shaken off the intoxication of his misery and pain and the inspired insincerity which the counterfeit tones and artificial sonority of his own voice raised to ever more exhilarating heights, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the night: “Society people have their failings, as no one knows better than I; but there are certain things they simply wouldn’t stoop to. So-and-so” (a fashionable woman whom he had known) “was far from being perfect, but she did after all have a fundamental decency, a sense of honour in her dealings which would have made her incapable, whatever happened, of any sort of treachery and which puts a vast gulf between her and an old hag like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, it must be said that they’re perfect specimens of their disgusting kind! Thank God, it was high time that I stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse with such infamy, such dung.”
But, just as the virtues which he had still attributed to the Verdurins an hour or so earlier would not have sufficed, even if the Verdurins had actually possessed them, if they had not also encouraged and protected his love, to excite Swann to that state of intoxication in which he waxed tender over their magnanimity—an intoxication which, even when disseminated through the medium of other persons, could have come to him from Odette alone—so the immorality (had it really existed) which he now found in the Verdurins would have been powerless, if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to unleash his indignation and make him fulminate against their “infamy.” And doubtless Swann’s voice was more perspicacious than Swann himself when it refused to utter those words full of disgust with the Verdurins and their circle, and of joy at having shaken himself free of it, save in an artificial and rhetorical tone and as though they had been chosen rather to appease his anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact, while he abandoned himself to his invective, were probably, though he did not realise it, occupied with a wholly different matter, for having reached home, no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him than he suddenly struck his forehead, and reopening it, dashed out again exclaiming, in a voice which, this time, was quite natural: “I think I’ve found a way of getting invited to the dinner at Chatou tomorrow!” But it must have been a bad way, for Swann was not invited. Dr Cottard, who, having been summoned to attend a serious case in the country, had not seen the Verdurins for some days and had been prevented from appearing at Chatou, said on the evening after this dinner, as he sat down to table at their house: “But aren’t we going to see M. Swann this evening? He’s quite what you might call a personal friend of …”
“I sincerely trust we shan’t!” cried Mme Verdurin. “Heaven preserve us from him; he’s too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor.”
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth which contradicted everything that he had previously believed but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; and bowing his head over his plate with timorous emotion, he simply replied: “Oh—oh—oh—oh—oh!” traversing, in an orderly withdrawal of his forces into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole compass of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann at the Verdurins’.
And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle in the way of their meeting. She no longer said to him, as in the early days of their love: “We shall meet, anyhow, tomorrow evening; there’s a supper-party at the Verdurins’,” but “We shan’t be able to meet tomorrow evening; there’s a supper-party at the Verdurins’.” Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the Opéra-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cléopâtre, and Swann could read in her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go, which not long since he could not have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him. “Yet it’s not really anger,” he assured himself, “that I feel when I see how she longs to go and scratch around in that dunghill of music. It’s disappointment, not of course for myself but for her; I’m disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in daily contact with me, she hasn’t changed enough to be able spontaneously to reject Victor Massé—above all, that she ha
sn’t yet reached the stage of understanding that there are evenings when anyone with the least delicacy of feeling should be willing to forgo a pleasure when asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to say ‘I won’t go,’ if only from policy, since it is by her answer that the quality of her heart will be judged once and for all.” And having persuaded himself that it was solely, after all, in order that he might arrive at a favourable estimate of Odette’s spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted the same line of reasoning with her, with the same degree of insincerity as he had used with himself, or even a degree more, for in her case he was yielding also to the desire to capture her through her own self-esteem.
“I swear to you,” he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening and I shall feel trapped myself, and rather annoyed, if, after all, you tell me you’re not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you too. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your Nuit de Cléopâtre (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing a pleasure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect but at least perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water. Do you realise that your answer will have the effect—I won’t say of making me cease loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher. Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up your Nuit de Cléopâtre (since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a name) in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I considered it more honourable to give you due warning.”
Meanwhile, Odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of this speech was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included in the category of “harangues” and scenes of reproach or supplication, which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that they would not make unless they were in love, and that since they were in love, it was unnecessary to obey them, as they would only be more in love later on. And so she would have heard Swann out with the utmost tranquillity had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on talking much longer she would, as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate if slightly abashed, “end by missing the Overture.”
On other occasions he told her that the one thing that would make him cease to love her more than anything else would be her refusal to abandon the habit of lying. “Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple,” he said to her, “can’t you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying? Think how many faults you might redeem by a frank admission! You really are far less intelligent than I supposed!” In vain, however, did Swann expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have sueceeded in overthrowing a general system of mendacity, but Odette had no such system; she was simply content, whenever she wished Swann to remain in ignorance of anything she had done, not to tell him of it. So that lying was for her an expedient of a specific order, and the only thing that could make her decide whether she should avail herself of it or confess the truth was a reason that was also of a specific or contingent order, namely the chance of Swann’s discovering that she had not told him the truth.
Physically, she was going through a bad phase; she was putting on weight, and the expressive, sorrowful charm, the surprised, wistful expression of old seemed to have vanished with her first youth. So that she had become most precious to Swann as it were just at the moment when he found her distinctly less good-looking. He would gaze at her searchingly, trying to recapture the charm which he had once seen in her, and no longer finding it. And yet the knowledge that within this new chrysalis it was still Odette who lurked, still the same fleeting, sly, elusive will, was enough to keep Swann seeking as passionately as ever to capture her. Then he would look at photographs of her taken two years before, and would remember how exquisite she had been. And that would console him a little for all the agony he suffered on her account.
When the Verdurins took her off to Saint-Germain, or to Chatou, or to Meulan, as often as not, if the weather was fine, they would decide to stay the night and return next day. Mme Verdurin would endeavour to set at rest the scruples of the pianist, whose aunt had remained in Paris: “She’ll be only too glad to be rid of you for a day. Why on earth should she be anxious, when she knows you’re with us? Anyhow, I’ll take full responsibility.”
If this attempt failed, M. Verdurin would set off across country to find a telegraph office or a messenger, after first finding out which of the “faithful” had someone they must notify. But Odette would thank him and assure him that she had no message for anyone, for she had told Swann once and for all that she could not possibly send messages to him, in front of all those people, without compromising herself. Sometimes she would be absent for several days on end, when the Verdurins took her to see the tombs at Dreux, or to Compiègne, on the painter’s advice, to watch the sunsets in the forest—after which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.
“To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly bombarded by people who really count to take them to Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of that she trundles off with the most abject brutes to go into ecstasies over the excrements of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge of art, I should say, to do that; surely, even without a particularly refined sense of smell, one doesn’t deliberately choose to spend a holiday in the latrines so as to be within range of their fragrant exhalations.”
But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds—alas, without allowing him to turn up there, as though by chance, for that, she said, “would create a deplorable impression”—he would plunge into the most intoxicating romance in the lover’s library, the railway time-table, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the afternoon, in the evening, even that very morning. The ways? More than that, the authority, the right to join her. For after all, the time-table, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the public was informed, by means of the printed word, that at eight o’clock in the morning a train left for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette would be superfluous; an act, moreover, which might be performed from a motive altogether different from the desire to see Odette, since persons who had never even heard of her performed it daily, and in such numbers as justified the trouble of stoking the engines.
All things considered, she could not really prevent him from going to Pierrefonds if he felt inclined to do so. And as it happened, he did feel so inclined, and had he not known Odette, would certainly have gone. For a long time past he had wanted to form a more definite impression of Viollet-le-Duc’s work as a restorer. And the weather being what it was, he felt an overwhelmin
g desire to go for a walk in the forest of Compiègne.
It really was bad luck that she had forbidden him access to the one spot that tempted him today. Today! Why, if he went there in defiance of her prohibition, he would be able to see her that very day! But whereas, if she had met at Pierrefonds someone who did not matter to her, she would have hailed him with obvious pleasure: “What, you here?” and would have invited him to come and see her at the hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if on the other hand it was himself, Swann, that she ran into, she would be offended, would complain that she was being followed, would love him less in consequence, might even turn away in anger when she caught sight of him. “So, I’m not allowed to travel any more!” she would say to him on her return, whereas in fact it was he who was not allowed to travel!
At one moment he had had the idea, in order to be able to visit Compiègne and Pierrefonds without letting it be supposed that his object was to meet Odette, of securing an invitation from one of his friends, the Marquis de Forestelle, who had a country house in that neighbourhood. The latter, whom he apprised of his plan without disclosing its ulterior purpose, was beside himself with joy and astonishment at Swann’s consenting at last, after fifteen years, to come down and visit his property, and since he did not (he had told him) wish to stay there, promising at least to spend some days going for walks and excursions with him. Swann imagined himself already down there with M. de Forestelle. Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil, where not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her sudden apparition: in the courtyard of the Château, now beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he had gone to visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset—innumerable and alternative sanctuaries, in which, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided heart would simultaneously take refuge. “We mustn’t on any account,” he would warn M. de Forestelle, “run across Odette and the Verdurins. I’ve just heard that they’re at Pierrefonds, of all places, today. One has plenty of time to see them in Paris; it would hardly be worth while coming down here if one couldn’t go a yard without meeting them.” And his host would fail to understand why, once they were there, Swann would change his plans twenty times in an hour, inspect the dining-rooms of all the hotels in Compiègne without being able to make up his mind to settle down in any of them, although they had seen no trace anywhere of the Verdurins, seeming to be in search of what he claimed to be most anxious to avoid, and would in fact avoid the moment he found it, for if he had come upon the little “group” he would have hastened away at once with studied indifference, satisfied that he had seen Odette and she him, especially that she had seen him not bothering his head about her. But no; she would guess at once that it was for her sake that he was there. And when M. de Forestelle came to fetch him, and it was time to start, he excused himself: “No, I’m afraid I can’t go to Pierrefonds today. You see, Odette is there.” And Swann was happy in spite of everything to feel that if he, alone among mortals, had not the right to go to Pierrefonds that day, it was because he was in fact, for Odette, someone different from all other mortals, her lover, and because that restriction imposed for him alone on the universal right to freedom of movement was but one of the many forms of the slavery, the love that was so dear to him. Decidedly, it was better not to risk a quarrel with her, to be patient, to wait for her return. He spent his days poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne as though it had been that of the “Pays du Tendre,”13 and surrounded himself with photographs of the Château of Pierrefonds. When the day dawned on which it was possible that she might return, he opened the time-table again, calculated what train she must have taken, and, should she have postponed her departure, what trains were still left for her to take. He did not leave the house for fear of missing a telegram, did not go to bed in case, having come by the last train, she decided to surprise him with a midnight visit. Yes! The front-door bell rang. There seemed some delay in opening the door, he wanted to awaken the porter, he leaned out of the window to shout to Odette if it was she, for in spite of the orders which he had gone downstairs a dozen times to deliver in person, they were quite capable of telling her that he was not at home. It was only a servant coming in. He noticed the incessant rumble of passing carriages, to which he had never paid any attention before. He could hear them, one after another, a long way off, coming nearer, passing his door without stopping, and bearing away into the distance a message which was not for him. He waited all night, to no purpose, for the Verdurins had decided to return early, and Odette had been in Paris since midday. It had not occurred to her to tell him, and not knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was asleep.
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