Of course by the time morning approached, the brief uncertainty of my waking would long since have dissipated. I knew which room I was actually in, I had reconstructed it around me in the darkness and—either by orienting myself with memory alone, or by making use, as a clue, of a faint glimmer that I perceived, under which I placed the casement curtains—I had reconstructed it entirely and furnished it like an architect and a decorator who retain the original openings of the windows and doors, I had put back the mirrors and restored the chest of drawers to its usual place. But scarcely had the daylight—and no longer the reflection of a last ember on the brass curtain rod which I had mistaken for it—traced on the darkness, as though in chalk, its first white, correcting ray, than the window along with its curtains would leave the doorframe in which I had mistakenly placed it, while, to make room for it, the desk which my memory had clumsily moved there would fly off at top speed, pushing the fireplace before it and thrusting aside the wall of the passageway; a small courtyard would extend in the spot where only a moment before the dressing room had been, and the dwelling I had rebuilt in the darkness would have gone off to join the dwellings glimpsed in the maelstrom of my awakening, put to flight by the pale sign traced above the curtains by the raised finger of the dawn.
PART II
Swann in Love
TO BELONG TO the “little set,” the “little circle,” the “little clan” attached to the Verdurins, one condition was sufficient but necessary: You had to abide tacitly by a Credo one of whose articles was that the young pianist patronized by Mme. Verdurin that year, of whom she would say: “It ought to be against the law to be able to play Wagner like that!,” “was miles above” both Planté1 and Rubinstein2 and that Dr. Cottard was a better diagnostician than Potain.3 Any “new recruit” who could not be persuaded by the Verdurins that the soirées given by people who did not come to the Verdurins’ house were as tiresome as rain was immediately excluded. Because the women were more rebellious in this respect than the men when it came to setting aside their curiosity about society, their desire to find out for themselves how amusing the other salons might be, and because the Verdurins felt that this spirit of investigation and this demon of frivolity could in fact be fatally contagious to the orthodoxy of the little church, they had been led to expel one after another all the “faithful” of the female sex.
Apart from the doctor’s young wife, they were reduced almost exclusively that year (even though Mme. Verdurin herself was virtuous and from a respectable bourgeois family, an extremely rich and entirely obscure one with which she had by degrees and of her own accord ceased to have any contact) to a person almost of the demimonde, Mme. de Crécy, whom Mme. Verdurin called by her first name, Odette, and declared to be “a love,” and to the pianist’s aunt, who must once have been employed as a caretaker; both of them being women ignorant of the world whom, in their naïveté, it had been so easy to delude into believing that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to pay certain poor wretches in order to have any guest at their dinners, that if you had offered to get them invitations to the homes of these two great ladies, the former concierge and the cocotte would disdainfully have refused.
The Verdurins did not invite you to dinner: you had, at their house, a “place set for you.” For the soirée there was no program. The young pianist would play, but only if “he fancied,” because they did not force anyone and, as M. Verdurin said: “Anything for our friends. Here’s to friendship!” If the pianist wanted to play the ride from The Valkyrie or the prelude from Tristan,4 Mme. Verdurin would protest, not because she did not like that music, but on the contrary because it made too strong an impression on her. “Then you want me to have one of my migraines? You know perfectly well the same thing happens every time he plays that. I can count on it! Tomorrow when I try to get up—that’s it, not possible!” If he did not play, people would chat and one of the friends, most often their favorite painter at the time, would “spin,” as M. Verdurin said, “a damn funny tale that would make ’em all shriek with laughter,” especially Mme. Verdurin, for such was her habit of taking literally the figurative expressions for the emotions she was feeling that Dr. Cottard (a young novice at the time) would one day have to set her jaw after she dislocated it from laughing too much.
Evening clothes were forbidden because one was “among friends” and also so as not to look like the “bores” whom they avoided like the plague and invited only to the larger soirées, given as rarely as possible and only if it might amuse the painter or help to promote the musician. The rest of the time, they were content to play charades, have supper in fancy dress, but only among themselves, not mixing any strangers in with the little “clan.”
But as the “pals” had assumed more of a place in Mme. Verdurin’s life, the “bores,” the “pariahs” were anything that kept the friends away from her, anything that now and then kept them from being free, whether it was the mother of one, the profession of another, the country house or the bad health of a third. If Dr. Cottard thought he ought to leave just after he got up from the table in order to return to a patient who was dangerously ill, “Who knows,” Mme. Verdurin would say to him, “he might be better off if you don’t go disturbing him again this evening; without you, he’ll have a good night; tomorrow morning early you’ll go there and find him quite recovered.” At the beginning of December, she would be sick at the thought that the faithful would “let them down” on Christmas Day and the first of January. The pianist’s aunt insisted that he come to dinner with the family that day at her mother’s home:
“You seem to think your mother might die,” Mme. Verdurin exclaimed harshly, “if you don’t have dinner with her on New Year’s Day the way they do in the provinces!”
Her worries revived during Holy Week:
“Doctor, since you’re such a scholar and freethinker, may I assume you will be coming on Good Friday just as you would on any other day?” she said confidently to Cottard the first year, as if she were sure what the answer would be. But she trembled as she waited for him to utter it, because if he did not come, she might find herself alone.
“I will come on Good Friday . . . to say good-bye to you, because we’re going to be spending the Easter holiday in Auvergne.”
“In Auvergne? You’ll be eaten alive by fleas and vermin! Much good may it do you!”
And after a silence:
“If only you had told us, we would have tried to organize something; we could have made the trip together in comfort.”
Likewise, if one of the “faithful” had a friend or if one of the ladies had a beau who might make them “desert” occasionally, the Verdurins, who were not afraid of a woman having a lover provided she had him at their house, loved him in their midst, and did not prefer his company to theirs, would say: “Well, bring your friend along!” And they would engage him on trial, to see if he was capable of having no secrets from Mme. Verdurin, if he was worthy of being enrolled in the “little clan.” If he was not, the “regular” who had introduced him would be taken aside and helped to break with his friend or his mistress. In the opposite case, the “newcomer” would in his turn become one of the faithful. And so when, that year, the demimondaine told M. Verdurin she had made the acquaintance of a charming man, M. Swann, and insinuated that he would be very pleased to be received at their home, M. Verdurin transmitted the request to his wife then and there. (He never formed an opinion until she had formed hers, his particular role being to carry out her wishes, along with those of the faithful, with great and resourceful ingenuity.)
“My dear, Mme. de Crécy has something to ask you. She would like to introduce one of her friends to you, a M. Swann. What do you think?”
“Well, now, who could refuse anything to a little angel like that? Quiet, no one asked your opinion. I tell you you’re an angel.”
“Well, if you say so,” answered Odette in a mincing tone, and she added: “You know I’m not fishing for compliments.” 5
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br /> “All right! Bring your friend, if he’s nice.”
Of course the “little clan” had no connection to the society in which Swann moved, and true men of fashion would have felt there was little point in enjoying, as he did, an exceptional position only to end up with an introduction to the Verdurins. But Swann was so fond of women that once he had come to know more or less all the women in aristocratic circles and they had nothing more to teach him, he had ceased to regard those naturalization papers, almost a patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon him, except as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no value in itself but which allowed him to improvise a status for himself in some little provincial hole or obscure circle of Paris where the daughter of a squire or clerk had struck him as pretty. For at such times desire or love would revive in him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday life (although it was doubtless this feeling that had originally pointed him toward the career as man of fashion in which he had wasted his intellectual gifts in frivolous pleasures and allowed his erudition in matters of art to be used to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses), and which made him want to shine, in the eyes of any unknown woman with whom he was infatuated, with an elegance which the name Swann in itself did not imply. He wanted this most especially if the unknown woman was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by another man of intelligence that an intelligent man will be afraid of being thought stupid, so it is not by a great lord but by a country bumpkin that a man of fashion will be afraid of seeing his elegance go unappreciated. Three-quarters of the expenditure of wit and the lies told out of vanity that have been squandered since the world began by people who in doing so merely diminish themselves have been squandered on inferiors. And though Swann was unaffected and casual with a duchess, he trembled at being scorned by a chamber-maid, and posed in front of her.
He was not like so many people who from laziness or a resigned sense of the obligation created by social grandeur to remain moored to a certain shore, abstain from the pleasures real life offers them outside the high-society position in which they live billeted and encamped until their death, contenting themselves in the end with describing as pleasures, for lack of any better, once they have managed to become used to them, the mediocre amusements or bearable tedium it contains. Swann did not try to convince himself that the women with whom he spent his time were pretty, but to spend his time with women he already knew were pretty. And these were often women of a rather vulgar beauty, for the physical qualities that he looked for without realizing it were the direct opposite of those he admired in the women sculpted or painted by his favorite masters. Depth of expression, melancholy, would freeze his senses, which were, however, immediately aroused by flesh that was healthy, plump, and pink.
If when travelling he met a family whom it would have been more stylish not to seek to cultivate, but in which one woman presented herself to his eyes adorned with a charm he had never experienced before, to “stand on his dignity” and cheat the desire she had awoken in him, to substitute a different pleasure for the pleasure he might have experienced with her, by writing to a former mistress to come and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication before life, as stupid a renunciation of a new happiness as if instead of touring the countryside, he had shut himself up in his room and looked at pictures of Paris. He did not enclose himself in the edifice of his relationships, but had transformed that edifice, in order to be able to raise it again effortlessly on site wherever he found a woman who pleased him, into one of those collapsible tents of the kind explorers carry with them. As for what was not transportable or exchangeable for a new pleasure, he would have given it away for nothing, however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit with a duchess, built up from the desire she had been accumulating over the years to do something kind for him without having found the occasion, been spent all at once by his sending her an indiscreet message asking for a recommendation by telegraph that would put him in touch, immediately, with one of her stewards whose daughter he had noticed in the country, just as a starving man would barter a diamond for a piece of bread! He had even, after the fact, been amused by it, for there existed in him, compensated for by uncommon refinements, a certain boorishness. Then, too, he belonged to that category of intelligent men who have lived idle lives and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the idea that this idleness offers their intelligence objects just as worthy of interest as art or scholarship could offer, that “Life” contains situations more interesting, more novelistic than any novel. So he declared, at least, and easily convinced even the sharpest of his society friends, in particular the Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to entertain with tales of the racy adventures he had had, such as when he had met a woman on the railway train and afterward taken her back home with him, and then discovered that she was the sister of a monarch who at that time held in his hands all the mingled threads of European politics, thus finding he was kept abreast of them in a most agreeable way, or when, through a complex play of circumstances, the choice about to be made by the conclave6 was going to determine whether or not he succeeded in sleeping with somebody’s cook.
And it was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals, and academicians with whom he was particularly close, whom Swann compelled with such cynicism to serve him as go-betweens. All his friends were used to receiving periodic letters from him in which a word of recommendation or introduction was asked of them with a diplomatic skill that, persisting as it did through his successive love affairs and different pretexts, revealed, more than moments of awkwardness would have done, a permanent trait in his character and an unvarying quest. I often asked to hear, many years later when I began to take an interest in his character because of the resemblances it offered to my own in completely different respects, how when he wrote to my grandfather (who was not my grandfather yet, for it was about the time of my birth that Swann’s great love affair began, and it interrupted these habits for a long time), the latter, recognizing his friend’s handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim: “It’s Swann, about to ask for something: on guard!” And either from mistrust, or from the unconsciously diabolical spirit that incites us to offer a thing only to the people who do not want it, my grandparents would issue a blunt refusal to the most easily satisfied requests he addressed to them, as for instance to introduce him to a girl who dined at the house every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, each time Swann mentioned it to them again, to pretend they were no longer seeing, whereas all week long they would wonder who in the world they could invite with her, often finding no one in the end, because they would not ask the one who would have been so happy to come.
Sometimes a certain couple, friends of my grandparents who until then had complained of never seeing Swann, would announce to them with satisfaction and perhaps a little desire to arouse their envy that he had become as charming as could be, that he was never out of their house. My grandfather did not want to cloud their pleasure but would look at my grandmother and hum:What is then this mystery?
I cannot understand.7
or:Fleeting vision . . .8
or: In these affairs
’Tis better to be blind.9
A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann’s new friend: “And Swann—do you still see as much of him as ever?” the face of the man he was talking to would grow long: “Never mention his name to me again!” “But I thought you were so close . . .” For several months he had, for instance, been intimate friends with cousins of my grandmother, dining almost every day at their house. Suddenly, and without letting them know, he stopped coming. They thought he was ill, and my grandmother’s cousin was about to send word asking for news of him, when in the pantry she found a letter from him left inadvertently in the cook’s account book. In it he told the woman he was leaving Paris, that he would not be able to continue seeing her. She was his mistress, and
when he broke it off with her, she was the only one he thought he needed to tell.
But when his mistress of the moment was a woman of rank or at least one whose background was not too humble or her situation too irregular for him to arrange for her to be received in society, then for her he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her. “No use depending on Swann for this evening,” they would say. “Don’t you remember? It’s his American’s night at the Opera.” He would see to it that she was invited to the particularly exclusive salons where he was a constant guest, where he had his weekly dinners, his poker; every evening, after a slight crimp was added to the brush cut of his red hair, tempering with some gentleness the vivacity of his green eyes, he would choose a flower for his buttonhole and go off to join his mistress at dinner at the home of one or another of the women of his circle; and then, thinking of the admiration and affection which the fashionable people for whom he was the be-all and end-all and whom he was going to see there would lavish on him in the presence of the woman he loved, he would once again find some charm in this worldly life to which he had become indifferent but whose substance, penetrated and warmly colored by a flame that had been insinuated into it and flickered there, seemed to him precious and beautiful as soon as he had incorporated into it a new love.
But, while each of these love affairs, or each of these flirtations, had been the more or less complete fulfillment of a dream inspired by the sight of a face or body that Swann had spontaneously, without making any effort to do so, found charming, on the contrary when he was introduced to Odette de Crécy one day at the theater by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her as an entrancing woman with whom he might perhaps have some success, but making her out to be more difficult than she really was in order to appear to have done him a bigger favor by introducing her to him, she had seemed to Swann not without beauty, certainly, but of a type of beauty that left him indifferent, that aroused no desire in him, even caused him a sort of physical repulsion, one of those women such as everyone has his own, different for each, who are the opposite of the kind our senses crave. Her profile was too pronounced for his taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too pinched. Her eyes were lovely, but so large they bent under their own mass, exhausted the rest of her face, and always gave her a look of being in ill health or ill humor. Sometime after this introduction at the theater she had written to ask if she could see his collections, which interested her so, “she, an ignoramus with a taste for pretty things,” saying that it seemed to her she would understand him better when she had seen him in “his home,”10 where she imagined him to be “so comfortable with his tea and his books,” though she had not hidden her surprise that he should live in that part of town, which must be so dreary and “which was so un-smart for a man who was so very smart himself.” And after he had allowed her to come, as she left she had told him how sorry she was to have spent such a short time in a house that she had been so glad to enter, speaking of him as though he meant something more to her than the other people she knew, and seeming to establish between their two persons a sort of romantic bond that had made him smile. But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one’s earliest youth, the goal toward which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure, that the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being—love of the most physical kind—without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire. At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.
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