So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata really did exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it yet belonged to an order of supernatural beings whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down, from that divine world to which he has access, to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what Vinteuil had done with the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the musical instruments at his disposal) to unveil it, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure that the sound altered at every moment, softening and blurring to indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some bolder projection. And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he believed in the real existence of this phrase, was that anyone with the least discernment would at once have detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to dissemble, by adding a counterfeit touch here and there, the flaws in his vision or the deficiencies of his hand.
The phrase had disappeared. Swann knew that it would come again at the end of the last movement, after a long passage which Mme Verdurin’s pianist always skipped. There were in this passage some admirable ideas which Swann had not distinguished on first hearing the sonata and which he now perceived, as if, in the cloakroom of his memory, they had divested themselves of the uniform disguise of their novelty. Swann listened to all the scattered themes which would enter into the composition of the phrase, as its premisses enter into the inevitable conclusion of a syllogism; he was assisting at the mystery of its birth. “An audacity,” he exclaimed to himself, “as inspired, perhaps, as that of a Lavoisier or an Ampere—the audacity of a Vinteuil experimenting, discovering the secret laws that govern an unknown force, driving, across a region unexplored, towards the one possible goal, the invisible team in which he has placed his trust and which he may never discern!” How beautiful the dialogue which Swann now heard between piano and violin, at the beginning of the last passage! The suppression of human speech, so far from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether; never was spoken language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the beginning of the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on the earth, or rather in this world closed to all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never be any but themselves: the world of this sonata. Was it a bird, was it the soul, as yet not fully formed, of the little phrase, was it a fairy—that being invisibly lamenting, whose plaint the piano heard and tenderly repeated? Its cries were so sudden that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they came. Marvellous bird! The violinist seemed to wish to charm, to tame, to capture it. Already it had passed into his soul, already the little phrase which it evoked shook like a medium’s the body of the violinist, “possessed” indeed. Swann knew that the phrase was going to speak to him once again. And his personality was now so divided that the strain of waiting for the imminent moment when he would find himself face to face with it again shook him with one of those sobs which a beautiful line of poetry or a sad piece of news will wring from us, not when we are alone, but when we impart them to friends in whom we see ourselves reflected like a third person whose probable emotion affects them too. It reappeared, but this time to remain poised in the air, and to sport there for a moment only, as though immobile, and shortly to expire. And so Swann lost nothing of the precious time for which it lingered. It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that floats for a while unbroken. As a rainbow whose brightness is fading seems to subside, then soars again and, before it is extinguished, shines forth with greater splendour than it has ever shown; so to the two colours which the little phrase had hitherto allowed to appear it added others now, chords shot with every hue in the prism, and made them sing. Swann dared not move, and would have liked to compel all the other people in the room to remain still also, as if the slightest movement might imperil the magic presence, supernatural, delicious, frail, that was so soon to vanish. But no one, as it happened, dreamed of speaking. The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil was still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that platform on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. So that when the phrase had unravelled itself at last, and only its fragmentary echoes floated among the subsequent themes which had already taken its place, if Swann at first was irritated to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed for her naiveties, lean over towards him to confide her impressions to him before even the sonata had come to an end, he could not refrain from smiling, and perhaps also found an underlying sense, which she herself was incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used. Dazzled by the virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: “It’s astonishing! I’ve never seen anything to beat it …” But a scrupulous regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she added the reservation: “anything to beat it … since the table-turning!”
From that evening onwards, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now. And on the days on which she happened to be once more kind and affectionate towards him, had shown him some thoughtful attention, he recorded these deceptive signs of a change of feeling on her part with the fond and sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy of people who, nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable illness, relate as facts of infinitely precious insignificance: “Yesterday he went through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake we had made in adding them up; he ate an egg today and seemed quite to enjoy it, and if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet tomorrow”—although they themselves know that these things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. No doubt Swann was assured that if he had now been living at a distance from Odette he would gradually have lost interest in her, so that he would have been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have had the heart to remain there; but he hadn’t the heart to go.
He had often thought of going. Now that he was once again at work upon his essay on Vermeer, he needed to return, for a few days at least, to The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was convinced that a picture of “Diana and her Companions” which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, in order to buttress his conviction. But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when she was not there—for in strange places where our sensations have not been numbed by habit, we revive, we resharpen an old pain—was for him so cruel a project that he felt capable of entertaining it incessantly in his mind only because he knew he was determined never to put it into effect. But it sometimes happened that, while he was asleep, the intention to travel would reawaken in him (without his remembering that it was out of the question) and would actually take place. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a year; leaning from the window of the train towards a young man on the platform who wept as he bade him farewell, he was trying to persuade this young man to come away also. The train began to move, he awoke in alarm, and remembered that he was not going away, that he would see Odette that evening, and the next day and almost every day. And then, being still deeply affected by his dream, he thanked heaven for those special circumstances which made him independent, thanks to which he could remain close to Odette, and could even succeed in getting her to allow him to
see her sometimes; and, recapitulating all his advantages: his social position—his wealth, from which she stood too often in need of assistance not to shrink from the prospect of a definite rupture (having even, so people said, an ulterior plan of getting him to marry her)—his friendship with M. de Charlus, which, it was true, had never won him any very great favour from Odette, but which gave him the consolatory feeling that she was always hearing complimentary things said about him by this friend in common for whom she had so great an esteem—and even his intelligence, which was exclusively occupied in devising each day a fresh scheme which would make his presence, if not agreeable, at any rate necessary to Odette—remembering all this, he thought of what might have become of him if these advantages had been lacking; it struck him that if, like so many other men, he had been poor, humble, deprived, forced to accept any work that might be offered to him, or tied down by parents or by a wife, he might have been obliged to part from Odette, that that dream, the terror of which was still so recent, might well have been true; and he said to himself: “People don’t know when they’re happy. One is never as unhappy as one thinks.” But he reflected that this existence had already lasted for several years, that all he could now hope for was that it would last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expectation of a meeting which, if it occurred, could bring him no happiness; and he asked himself whether he was not mistaken, whether the circumstances that had favoured his liaison and had prevented its final rupture had not done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be desired might not have been that as to which he rejoiced that it had happened only in a dream—his own departure; and he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that one is never as happy as one thinks.
Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, since she was out of doors, in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength and the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold at bay, to outwit all the perils that beset it (which to Swann seemed innumerable since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed mankind to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with the sultan Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her to death in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his peace of mind. Then he would be ashamed of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to deserve no pity now that he himself held Odette’s very life so cheap.
Unable to cut himself off from her irrevocably, if at least he had seen her continuously and without separations his anguish would ultimately have been assuaged, and his love, perhaps, have died. And since she did not wish to leave Paris for ever, he hoped that she would never leave it. As he knew that her one prolonged absence, every year, was in August and September, at least he had abundant opportunity, several months in advance, to dissolve the bitter thought of it in all the Time to come which he stored up inside himself in anticipation, and which, composed of days identical with those of the present, flowed through his mind, transparent and cold, nourishing his sadness but without causing him any intolerable pain. But that inner future, that colourless, free-flowing stream, was suddenly convulsed by a single remark from Odette which, penetrating Swann’s defences, immobilised it like a block of ice, congealed its fluidity, froze it altogether; and Swann felt himself suddenly filled with an enormous and infrangible mass which pressed on the inner walls of his being until it almost burst asunder; for Odette had said to him casually, observing him with a malicious smile: “Forcheville’s going on a fine trip at Whitsun. He’s going to Egypt!” and Swann had at once understood this to mean: “I’m going to Egypt at Whitsun with Forcheville.” And in fact, if, a few days later, Swann said to her: “About that trip you told me you were going to take with Forcheville,” she would answer carelessly: “Yes, my dear boy, we’re starting on the 19th; we’ll send you a view of the Pyramids.” Then he was determined to know whether she was Forcheville’s mistress, to ask her point-blank, to insist upon her telling him. He knew that, superstitious as she was, there were some perjuries which she would not commit, and besides, the fear, which had hitherto restrained his curiosity, of making Odette angry if he questioned her, of making her hate him, had ceased to exist now that he had lost all hope of ever being loved by her.
One day he received an anonymous letter telling him that Odette had been the mistress of countless men (several of whom it named, among them Forcheville, M. de Bréauté and the painter) and women, and that she frequented houses of ill-fame. He was tormented by the discovery that there was to be numbered among his friends a creature capable of sending him such a letter (for certain details betrayed in the writer a familiarity with his private life). He wondered who it could be. But he had never had any suspicion with regard to the unknown actions of other people, those which had no visible connexion with what they said. And when he pondered whether it was beneath the ostensible character of M. de Charlus, or of M. des Laumes, or of M. d’Orsan that he must seek the uncharted region in which this ignoble action had had its birth, since none of these men had ever, in conversation with Swann, given any indication of approving of anonymous letters, and since everything they had ever said to him implied that they strongly disapproved, he saw no reason for associating this infamy with the character of any one of them rather than the others. M. de Charlus was somewhat inclined to eccentricity, but he was fundamentally good and kind; M. des Laumes was a trifle hard, but sound and straightforward. As for M. d’Orsan, Swann had never met anyone who, even in the most depressing circumstances, would approach him with more heartfelt words, in a more tactful and judicious manner. So much so that he was unable to understand the rather indelicate role commonly attributed to M. d’Orsan in his relations with a certain wealthy woman, and whenever he thought of him he was obliged to set that evil reputation on one side, as being irreconcilable with so many unmistakable proofs of his fastidiousness. For a moment Swann felt that his mind was becoming clouded, and he thought of something else so as to recover a little light, until he had the strength to return to these reflections. But then, having been unable to suspect anyone, he was forced to suspect everyone. After all, though M. de Charlus was fond of him, was extremely good-hearted, he was also a neurotic; tomorrow, perhaps, he would burst into tears on hearing that Swann was ill, and today, from jealousy, or anger, or carried away by a sudden whim, he might have wished to do him harm. Really, that kind of man was the worst of all. The Prince des Laumes was certainly far less devoted to Swann than was M. de Charlus. But for that very reason he did not suffer from the same susceptibilities with regard to him; and besides, his was a nature which, though no doubt cold, was as incapable of base as of magnanimous actions. Swann regretted not having formed attachments only to such people. Then he reflected that what prevents men from doing harm to their neighbours is fellow-feeling, that he could only, in the last resort, answer for men whose natures were analogous to his own, as was, so far as the heart went, that of M. de Charlus. The mere thought of causing Swann so much distress would have revolted him. But with an insensitive man, of another order of humanity, as was the Prince des Laumes, how was one to foresee the actions to which he might be led by the promptings of a different nature? To have a kind heart was everything, and M. de Charlus had one. M. d’Orsan was not lacking in heart either, and his relations with Swann—cordial if not intimate, arising from the pleasure which, holding the same views about everything, they found in talking together—were more restful than the overwrought affection of M. de Charlus, capable of being led into acts of passion, good or evil. If there was anyone by whom Swann had always feit himself understood and discriminatingly liked, it was M. d’Orsan. Yes, but what of t
he disreputable life he led? Swann regretted that he had never taken any notice of those rumours, had often admitted jestingly that he had never felt so keen a sense of sympathy and respect as in the company of a scoundrel. “It’s not for nothing,” he now assured himself, “that whenever people pass judgment on their fellows, it’s always on their actions. It’s only what we do that counts, and not at all what we say or what we think. Charlus and des Laumes may have this or that fault, but they are men of honour. Orsan may not have these faults, but he’s not a man of honour. He may have acted dishonourably once again.” Then Swann suspected Rémi, who, it was true, could only have inspired the letter, but he now felt himself for a moment to be on the right track. To begin with, Loredan had reasons for bearing a grudge against Odette. And then, how could one not suppose that servants, living in a situation inferior to our own, adding to our wealth and our weaknesses imaginary riches and vices for which they envy and despise us, must inevitably be led to act in a manner abhorrent to people of our own class? He also suspected my grandfather. Every time Swann had asked a favour of him, had he not invariably refused? Besides, with his ideas of middle-class respectability, he might have thought that he was acting for Swann’s good. He went on to suspect Bergotte, the painter, the Verdurins, pausing for a moment to admire once again the wisdom of society people in refusing to mix with those artistic circles in which such things were possible, perhaps even openly avowed as good jokes; but then he recalled the traits of honesty that were to be observed in those Bohemians and contrasted them with the life of expedients, often bordering on fraudulence, to which the want of money, the craving for luxury, the corrupting influence of their pleasures often drove members of the aristocracy.
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