Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  “She’s such an excellent woman,” he answered. “I grant you she’s not brilliant; but I assure you she can be most agreeable when you talk to her on your own.” “I don’t doubt it,” Swann hastened to concede. “I meant to say she did not seem to me ‘eminent,’ ” he added, isolating the adjective, “and really that’s rather a compliment!” “Well, now,” said M. Verdurin, “this will surprise you: she writes charmingly. You’ve never heard her nephew? He’s wonderful, isn’t he, Doctor? Would you like me to ask him to play something, Monsieur Swann?” “Why, it would be a joy . . .” Swann was beginning to answer, when the doctor interrupted him with a mocking look. In fact, having acquired the notion that in conversation, to be emphatic, to employ formal expressions was old-fashioned, as soon as he heard a solemn word used seriously, as the word joy had just been used, he thought the person who haduttered it had just been guilty of pomposity. And if, in addition, the word happened to occur in what he called an old cliché, however current it might be in other respects, the doctor would assume that the sentence that had been begun was ridiculous and would finish it ironically using the platitude he seemed to be accusing the speaker of having wanted to deploy, although the latter had never thought of it.

  “A joy forever!” he cried mischievously, raising his arms for emphasis.

  M. Verdurin could not help laughing.

  “What are those good people laughing about! You don’t seem to be having such a bad time over there in your corner,” cried Mme. Verdurin. “I hope you don’t think I’m enjoying myself here in disgrace all alone,” she added in a tone of childish chagrin.

  Mme. Verdurin was sitting on a high Swedish chair of waxed pine, which she had been given by a violinist from that country and which she had kept, though it looked rather like a stool and was at odds with the beautiful old furniture that she had, but she insisted on keeping in evidence the gifts which the faithful regulars were in the habit of giving her from time to time, so that the givers would have the pleasure of spotting them when they came. And so she tried to persuade them to give her nothing but flowers and sweets, which are at least perishable; but she was not successful, and her home contained a collection of foot warmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers, and urns, in an accumulation of useless, repetitive, and incongruous offerings.

  From this elevated spot she took energetic part in the conversation of the faithful and revelled in their practical jokes, but after the accident involving her jaw, she no longer took pains to explode in true laughter and performed instead a conventionalized pantomime that signified, without fatigue or risk for her, that she was laughing to the point of tears. At the mildest remark fired off by a regular against a bore or against a former regular who had been flung back into the camp of the bores—and to the greatest despair of M. Verdurin, who for a long time had had pretensions of being as affable as his wife, but who, when laughing in earnest, would soon get out of breath and so had been outdistanced and defeated by this ruse of incessant and fictive hilarity—she would utter a little cry, entirely close her birdlike eyes, which were slightly dimmed by leucoma, and abruptly, as if she had only just had time to avoid some indecent spectacle or avert a fatal blow, plunging her face in her hands, which covered it and allowed nothing of it to be seen, would appear to be doing her best to suppress, to annihilate a fit of laughter which, had she given way to it, would have caused her to faint. So, dazed by the gaiety of the faithful, drunk with good-fellowship, scandal-mongering, and approbation, Mme. Verdurin, poised on her perch, like a bird whose seedcake has been soaked in warm wine, sobbed with affability.

  Meanwhile, M. Verdurin, after asking Swann’s permission to light his pipe (“we don’t stand on ceremony here, we’re among friends”), begged the young musician to sit down at the piano.

  “Now don’t bother him, he didn’t come here to be tormented,” exclaimed Mme. Verdurin, “I won’t have him tormented!”

  “But why on earth should it bother him?” said M. Verdurin. “Perhaps M. Swann doesn’t know the Sonata in F-sharp which we’ve discovered. He’ll play the piano arrangement for us.”

  “Oh, no, no, not my sonata!” cried Mme. Verdurin. “I don’t want to be made to weep till I get a cold in my head and neuralgia in my face, like the last time. Thanks for your offer, but I don’t intend to repeat that performance. You’re so kind, all of you; it’s easy to see you’re not the ones who’ll be spending the next week in bed!”

  This little scene, which was reenacted each time the pianist prepared to play, enchanted her friends as much as if it had been brand-new, because it was proof of the “Patronne’s” 13 charming originality and sensitivity to music. Those who were near her signaled to those farther away who were smoking or playing cards to come closer, that something was happening, saying to them, as they do in the Reichstag14 at interesting moments: “Listen, listen.” And the next day they would tell those who had not been able to be there how sorry they were, reporting that the scene had been even more entertaining than usual.

  “Well, all right then,” said M. Verdurin. “He’ll just play the andante.”

  “Just the andante! What are you saying!” exclaimed Mme. Verdurin. “It’s precisely the andante that completely paralyzes me. Listen to the Patron! He’s really marvelous! It’s as if he said: In the Ninth we’ll just hear the finale, or in The Meistersingers15 we’ll just hear the overture.”

  The doctor, however, urged Mme. Verdurin to let the pianist play, not because he thought the troubling effects the music had on her were feigned—he recognized certain neurasthenic symptoms in them—but from a habit which many doctors have, of immediately relaxing the severity of their prescriptions when something is involved that seems much more important to them, like some social gathering at which they are present and in which the person they are advising for once to forget his dyspepsia or his grippe is an essential factor.

  “You won’t become ill this time, you’ll see,” he told her, trying to hypnotize her with his eyes. “And if you do, we’ll look after you.”

  “Really and truly?” answered Mme. Verdurin, as if the hope of such a favor left her no alternative but to capitulate. Perhaps also, because she said she would be ill, there were times when she did not recall that it was a lie and took on the character of an ill person. For invalids, tired of always having to make the rarity of their attacks dependent on their prudence, like to indulge in the belief that they can with impunity do all of the things that give them pleasure and usually hurt them, as long as they put themselves in the hands of a powerful person who, without their having to take any pains, with a word or a pill will put them back on their feet.

  Odette had gone to sit on a tapestry-covered couch near the piano:

  “You know I have my own little spot,” she said to Mme. Verdurin.

  The latter, seeing Swann on a chair, made him get up:

  “You’re not very comfortable there: now go and sit next to Odette. You’ll make room for M. Swann there, won’t you, Odette?”

  “What a pretty Beauvais,” said Swann before he sat down, trying to be pleasant.

  “Oh, I’m glad you appreciate my couch,” answered Mme. Verdurin. “And let me tell you, if you think you’re ever going to see another one as beautiful, you may abandon the idea at once. They never did anything else like it. The little chairs are marvels too. You can look at them in a moment. Each bronze is an emblem that corresponds to the little subject on the chair; you know, you’ll have a great deal to entertain you if you want to look at them. I can promise you a good time. Even the little friezes around the edges—look at that, look at the little vine against the red background in the Bear and the Grapes. Isn’t it well drawn? What do you say? I think they really knew how to draw! Doesn’t that vine make your mouth water? My husband claims I don’t like the fruit you get from it, because I don’t eat as many as he does. The fact is, actually, I’m more of a glutton than any of you, but I don’t need to put them in my mouth because I enjoy them with my eyes. What are
you all laughing about, now? Ask the doctor, he’ll tell you—for me those grapes are a regular purgative. Other people take the cure at Fontainebleau, I take my little Beauvais cure. But, Monsieur Swann, you won’t go away without feeling the little bronzes on the backs! Isn’t the patina soft? No, no—with your whole hand: feel them properly.”

  “Ah, if Madame Verdurin begins fondling the bronzes, we won’t hear any music tonight,” said the painter.

  “You be quiet. You’re a rascal. In fact,” she said, turning to Swann, “we women are forbidden to do things far less voluptuous than this. But no flesh can compare to it! When M. Verdurin did me the honor of being jealous of me—come now, be polite at least, don’t say you never were . . .”

  “But I said absolutely nothing. Doctor, be my witness: did I say anything?”

  Swann was feeling the bronzes to be polite and did not dare stop right away.

  “Come, you can caress them later; now you’re the one who’s going to be caressed. Your ears are going to be caressed; you’ll like that, I think; here’s the dear young man who’ll be doing it.”

  Now after the pianist had played, Swann was even friendlier to him than to the others who were present. This is why:

  The year before, at a soiree, he had heard a piece of music performed on the piano and violin. At first, he had experienced only the physical quality of the sounds secreted by the instruments. And it had been a keen pleasure when, below the little line of the violin, slender, unyielding, compact, and commanding, he had seen the mass of the piano part all at once struggling to rise in a liquid swell, multiform, undivided, smooth, and colliding like the purple tumult of the waves when the moonlight charms them and lowers their pitch by half a tone. But at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish an outline clearly, or give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly charmed, he had tried to gather up and hold on to the phrase or harmony—he himself did not know which—that was passing by him and that had opened his soul so much wider, the way the smells of certain roses circulating in the damp evening air have the property of dilating our nostrils. Maybe it was because of his ignorance of music that he had been capable of receiving so confused an impression, the kind of impression that is, however, perhaps the only one which is purely musical, immaterial, entirely original, irreducible to any other order of impression. An impression of this kind is, for an instant, so to speak, sine materia. No doubt the notes we hear then tend already, depending on their loudness and their quantity, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us sensations of breadth, tenuousness, stability, whimsy. But the notes vanish before these sensations are sufficiently formed in us not to be submerged by those already excited by the succeeding or even simultaneous notes. And this impression would continue to envelop with its liquidity and its “mellowness” the motifs that at times emerge from it, barely discernible, immediately to dive under and disappear, known only by the particular pleasure they give, impossible to describe, to recall, to name, ineffable—if memory, like a laborer working to put down lasting foundations in the midst of the waves, by fabricating for us facsimiles of these fleeting phrases, did not allow us to compare them to those that follow them and to differentiate them. And so, scarcely had the delicious sensation which Swann had felt died away than his memory at once furnished him with a transcription that was summary and temporary but at which he could glance while the piece continued, so that already, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer impossible to grasp. He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical groupings, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him this thing which is no longer pure music, which is drawing, architecture, thought, and which allows us to recall the music. This time he had clearly distinguished one phrase rising for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had immediately proposed to him particular sensual pleasures which he had never imagined before hearing it, which he felt could be introduced to him by nothing else, and he had experienced for it something like an unfamiliar love.

  With a slow rhythm it led him first here, then there, then elsewhere, toward a happiness that was noble, unintelligible, and precise. And then suddenly, having reached a point from which he was preparing to follow it, after an instant’s pause, abruptly it changed direction, and with a new movement, quicker, slighter, more melancholy, incessant, and sweet, it carried him off with it toward unfamiliar vistas. Then it disappeared. He wished passionately to see it a third time. And it did indeed reappear but without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a sensual pleasure that was less profound. But once he was back at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman he has glimpsed for only a moment as she passed by has introduced the image of a new sort of a beauty that increases the value of his own sensibility, without his even knowing if he will ever see this woman again whom he loves already and of whom he knows nothing, not even her name.

  It even seemed, for a moment, that this love for a phrase of music would have to open in Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation. He had for so long given up directing his life toward an ideal goal and limited it to the pursuit of everyday satisfactions that he believed, without ever saying so formally to himself, that this would not change as long as he lived; much worse, since his mind no longer entertained any lofty ideas, he had ceased to believe in their reality, though without being able to deny it altogether. Thus he had acquired the habit of taking refuge in unimportant thoughts that allowed him to ignore the fundamental essence of things. Just as he did not ask himself if it would have been better for him not to go into society, but on the other hand knew quite certainly that if he had accepted an invitation he ought to go and that if he did not pay a call afterward he must at least leave cards, so in his conversation he endeavored never to express with any warmth a personal opinion about things, but to furnish material details that had some sort of value in themselves and allowed him not to show his real capacities. He was extremely precise when it came to the recipe for a dish, the date of a painter’s birth or death, the nomenclature of his works. Now and then, despite everything, he went so far as to utter a judgment on a work, on someone’s interpretation of life, but he would then give his remarks an ironic tone, as if he did not entirely subscribe to what he was saying. Now, like certain confirmed invalids in whom, suddenly, a country they have arrived in, a different diet, sometimes a spontaneous and mysterious organic development seem to bring on such a regression of their ailment that they begin to envisage the unhoped-for possibility of belatedly starting a completely different life, Swann found within himself, in the recollection of the phrase he had heard, in certain sonatas he asked people to play for him, to see if he would not discover it in them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe and to which, as if the music had had a sort of sympathetic influence on the moral dryness from which he suffered, he felt in himself once again the desire and almost the strength to devote his life. But, since he had not succeeded in finding out who had composed the work he had heard, he had not been able to acquire it for himself and had ended by forgetting it. True, during the week he had encountered several people who had been with him at that party and he had asked them about it; but many had arrived after the music or left before; some were indeed there while it was performed but had gone into the other drawing room to talk, and others, who had stayed to listen, had heard no more of it than had the first group. As for the master and mistress of the house, they knew it was a recent work which the musicians whom they had hired had asked to play; since the latter had gone off on a tour, Swann could not find out anything more. He had many friends who were musicians, but though he recalled the special and inexpressible pleasure the phrase had given him, and saw before his eyes the shapes it outlined, he was not able to sing it for them. Then he stopped thinking about it.

  Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme. Verdurin’s, suddenly, after a high
note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring, and, divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend’s drawing room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again. In the end, diligent, purposeful, it receded through the ramifications of its perfume, leaving on Swann’s face the reflection of its smile. But now he could ask the name of his stranger (they told him it was the andante from the Sonata for Piano and Violin by Vinteuil), he possessed it, he could have it in his house as often as he liked, try to learn its language and its secret.

  And so when the pianist had finished, Swann went up to him to express a gratitude whose warmth was very pleasing to Mme. Verdurin.

  “He’s a charmer, isn’t he?” she said to Swann. “You might say he knows a thing or two about that sonata, the little devil. You didn’t know the piano could achieve such things. It’s everything—except a piano! My word! I’m startled by it every time; I think I’m hearing an orchestra. Though it’s even more beautiful than an orchestra, more complete.”