Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  The young pianist bowed, and with a smile, stressing the words as if he were making a witty remark:

  “You’re very generous to me,” he said.

  And while Mme. Verdurin was saying to her husband: “Come, give him some orangeade, he certainly deserves it,” Swann was describing to Odette how he had been in love with that little phrase. When Mme. Verdurin, nearby, said: “Well now, it seems to me someone is saying sweet things to you, Odette,” she answered: “Yes, very sweet,” and Swann found her simplicity delightful. Meanwhile, he was asking for information about Vinteuil, about his work, about the period of his life in which he had composed this sonata, about what the little phrase could have meant to him, this was what he would have liked most of all to know.

  But all these people who professed to admire that musician (when Swann had said that his sonata was truly beautiful, Mme. Verdurin had exclaimed: “I should say it’s beautiful! But one simply doesn’t admit that one does not know Vinteuil’s sonata, one is not allowed not to know it,” and the painter had added: “Ah, yes! It’s a work of genius, isn’t it? It may not be what you would call ‘obvious’ or ‘popular,’ is it? But it makes a very great impression on us artists”), these people seemed never to have asked themselves these questions, for they were incapable of answering them.

  Even in answer to one or two particular remarks that Swann made about his favorite phrase, Mme. Verdurin said:

  “Well now, that’s funny, I never paid any attention. I’ll tell you, I don’t very much enjoy nitpicking or discussing fine points; we don’t waste our time splitting hairs here, it’s not that kind of a house,” while Dr. Cottard watched her with blissful admiration and scholarly zeal as she frolicked in this billow of stock expressions. He and Mme. Cottard, however, with a kind of good sense which is also possessed by certain people from humble backgrounds, carefully refrained from offering an opinion or feigning admiration for a sort of music which they confessed to each other, once they were back home, they did not understand any more than the painting of “Monsieur Biche.” Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés, M. and Mme. Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil’s sonata, nor in the painter’s portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting. It seemed to them when the pianist played the sonata that he was randomly attaching to the piano notes that were not in fact connected to the forms they were used to, and that the painter was randomly hurling colors onto his canvases. When they were able to recognize a form in these canvases, they found it heavy and vulgarized (that is, lacking the elegance of the school of painting through which they viewed all living creatures, even in the street), and lacking truth, as if Monsieur Biche did not know how a shoulder was constructed or that women do not have lavender hair.

  However, when the regulars had dispersed, the doctor felt this was a favorable opportunity, and while Mme. Verdurin was saying a last word about Vinteuil’s sonata, like a beginning swimmer who throws himself into the water in order to learn, but chooses a moment when there are not too many people to see him, he exclaimed with sudden determination:

  “Now, this is what one calls a musician di primo cartello!”16

  Swann learned only that the recent appearance of Vinteuil’s sonata had caused quite a stir among the most advanced school of musicians, but was entirely unknown to the larger public.

  “I know someone quite well named Vinteuil,” said Swann, thinking of the piano teacher who had taught my grandmother’s sisters.

  “Perhaps it’s him,” exclaimed Mme. Verdurin.

  “Oh, no!” Swann answered, laughing. “If you had ever spent just a minute or two with him, you wouldn’t ask.”

  “Then, to ask the question is to answer it?” said the doctor.

  “But he could be a relative,” Swann went on. “That would be rather sad, but the fact is, a man of genius can be cousin to an old fool. If this is so, I confess I would submit to any kind of torture to get the old fool to introduce me to the composer of that sonata: starting with the torture of associating with the old fool, which would be frightful.”

  The painter knew that Vinteuil was very ill at the moment and that Dr. Potain was afraid he would not be able to save him.

  “What!” cried Mme. Verdurin. “Are there people who still go to Potain?”

  “Ah, Madame Verdurin!” said Cottard, in a tone of witty repartee. “You forget that you’re talking about one of my colleagues, I should say one of my teachers.”

  The painter had heard that Vinteuil was threatened with mental illness. And he declared that one could perceive it in certain passages of his sonata. Swann did not find this comment absurd, but it bothered him; for since a pure work of music contains none of the logical relationships whose alteration in language reveals madness, madness recognized in a sonata seemed to him something as mysterious as the madness of a bitch, the madness of a horse, though these can indeed be observed.

  “Don’t upset me with talk about your ‘teachers.’ You know ten times as much as he does,” Mme. Verdurin answered Dr. Cottard, in the tone of a person who has the courage of her convictions and stoutly holds her own against those who are not of the same opinion. “At least you don’t kill your patients!”

  “But Madame, he belongs to the Academy,”17 replied the doctor ironically. “If a patient would rather die by the hand of one of the princes of science . . . It’s much more stylish to be able to say: ‘I’m being treated by Potain.’”

  “Ah! It’s more stylish?” said Mme. Verdurin. “So there’s such a thing as style in illness now? I wasn’t aware of that . . . How funny you are!” she exclaimed suddenly, dropping her face in her hands. “And I was such a silly fool, talking about it seriously without seeing that you were pulling my leg.”

  As for M. Verdurin, finding it rather a strain to force a laugh over such a trifle, he contented himself with drawing on his pipe, musing sadly that he would never be able to rival his wife in a contest of amiability.

  “You know, we like your friend very much,” said Mme. Verdurin to Odette when the latter was wishing her a good night. “He’s so unaffected, he’s so charming; if all the friends you think of introducing to us are like him, you may certainly bring them.”

  M. Verdurin pointed out that Swann had not, however, appreciated the pianist’s aunt.

  “The man felt a little out of his element,” answered Mme. Verdurin. “Now you wouldn’t expect him to have caught the tone of the house already, the very first time, like Cottard, who has been one of our little clan for years. The first time doesn’t count; it was useful for breaking the ice. Odette, it’s agreed that he’ll meet us tomorrow at the Châtelet. Will you pick him up?”

  “No, he doesn’t want me to.”

  “Ah! Whatever you like, then. As long as he doesn’t go and abandon us at the last minute!”

  To Mme. Verdurin’s great surprise, he never abandoned them. He went to meet them wherever they were, sometimes in restaurants in the outlying districts where no one went much yet, because it was not the season, more often to the theater, which Mme. Verdurin liked very much; and because one day, at her house, she said in his presence that on evenings when there were premieres, or galas, a pass would have been very useful to them, that it had inconvenienced them very much not to have one the day of Gambetta’s funeral,18 Swann, who never talked about his distinguished connections, but only about those which were not very highly esteemed, which he thought it indelicate to conceal, and among which he had, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, fallen into the habit of including his relations with the official world, answered:

  “I promise to take care of it, you’ll have it in time for the revival of Les Danicheff.19 As it happens, I’m having lunch with the prefect of police tomorrow at the Élysée Palace.”

  “What? At the Élysée Palace?” sh
outed Dr. Cottard in a thunderous voice.

  “Yes, at M. Grévy’s,”20 answered Swann, a little embarrassed by the effect his remark had produced.

  And the painter said to the doctor as a joke:

  “Do you have these attacks very often?”

  Generally, once an explanation had been given, Cottard would say: “Oh, I see, that’s all right then,” and not show a trace more of emotion. But this time, Swann’s last words, instead of procuring him the usual peace of mind, raised to a fever pitch his astonishment that a man with whom he had dined, who had no official position, no celebrity of any sort, would hobnob with the Head of State.

  “What do you mean, M. Grévy? You know M. Grévy?” he said to Swann with the stupid and incredulous look of a policeman on guard at the palace who is asked by a stranger to see the President of the Republic, and who, realizing from these words “what sort of person he is dealing with,” as the newspapers say, assures the poor lunatic that he will be received immediately and leads him to the special infirmary of the central police station.

  “I know him slightly, we have friends in common.” (He did not dare say that one of them was the Prince of Wales.) “Actually, he entertains a good deal, and I assure you these lunches aren’t in the least amusing, they’re also very simple, there are never more than eight at table,” answered Swann, trying to expunge what had seemed to be too dazzling, in the doctor’s eyes, about his relations with the President of the Republic.

  Immediately Cottard, trusting in the truth of what Swann had said, adopted the opinion, concerning the value of an invitation to M. Grévy’s, that it was not a very desirable thing and could be picked up anywhere. From then on, he was no longer surprised that Swann, or anyone else, should visit the Élysée Palace, and he was even a little sorry for him because he had to go to lunches which Swann himself admitted were boring.

  “Oh, I see, that’s quite all right then,” he said in the tone of a customs inspector who, though suspicious a moment before, after hearing your explanations stamps your passport and lets you go through without opening your bags.

  “Oh, I believe you, I’m sure those lunches must not be very amusing, and it’s good of you to go to them,” said Mme. Verdurin, who saw the President of the Republic as a bore to be especially dreaded because he had at his disposal various means of seduction and compulsion which, if employed upon the faithful, would be quite capable of making them desert her. “Apparently he’s as deaf as a doorpost and eats with his fingers.”

  “In that case, certainly it must not be much fun to go there,” said the doctor with a touch of commiseration; and, recalling that eight was the number of guests at table: “Are these intimate lunches?” he asked sharply with a linguist’s zeal more than a snoop’s curiosity.

  But the prestige of the President of the Republic in the eyes of the doctor ended by prevailing over both Swann’s modesty and Mme. Verdurin’s animosity, and at each dinner Cottard would ask with interest: “Will we be seeing M. Swann this evening? He’s on personal terms with M. Grévy. Is he in fact what one would call a gentleman?”21 He even went so far as to present him with an invitation card for the dentistry exhibition.

  “This will admit you, along with anyone you might like to bring with you, but they won’t let dogs in. You understand, I tell you this because some friends of mine didn’t know and kicked themselves for it afterward.”

  As for M. Verdurin, he noticed the bad effect produced on his wife by the discovery that Swann had influential friends whom he had never mentioned.

  If they had not arranged a party somewhere, it was at the Verdurins’ that Swann would join the little clan, but he came only in the evening, and almost never agreed to have dinner there despite Odette’s earnest requests.

  “I could even have dinner alone with you, if you would like that better,” she would tell him.

  “And what about Mme. Verdurin?”

  “Oh, that would be easy enough. I would simply tell her my dress wasn’t ready, or my cab came late. There’s always a way to manage it.”

  “You’re very sweet.”

  But Swann said to himself that if he showed Odette (by agreeing only to meet her after dinner) that there were other pleasures he preferred to the pleasure of being with her, a long time would pass before her appetite for him was surfeited. And, too, since he infinitely preferred to Odette’s kind of beauty the beauty of a little working girl as fresh and plump as a rose with whom he was smitten, he chose to spend the beginning of the evening with her, being sure of seeing Odette afterward. It was for the same reasons that he never agreed to have Odette pick him up on her way to the Verdurins’. The little working girl would wait for him near his house at a corner known to his coachman Rémi, she would get in beside Swann and stay there in his arms until the moment the carriage drew up in front of the Verdurins’. When he came in, as Mme. Verdurin, pointing to some roses he had sent that morning, said to him: “You deserve a scolding” and showed him a spot next to Odette, the pianist would play for the two of them the little phrase by Vinteuil that was like the anthem of their love. He would begin with the sustained violin tremolos that are heard alone for a few measures, occupying the entire foreground, then all of a sudden they seemed to move away and, as in those paintings by Pieter de Hooch,22 which assume greater depth because of the narrow frame of a half-open door, away in the distance, in a different color, in the velvet of an interposed light, the little phrase would appear, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world. It rippled past, simple and immortal, distributing here and there the gifts of its grace, with the same ineffable smile; but Swann thought he could now distinguish within it some disenchantment. It seemed to realize how futile this happiness was to which it showed the way. In its light grace, there was something finished about it, like the detachment that follows regret. But this hardly mattered to him; he considered the phrase less in itself—in what it could express to a musician who was unaware of his existence or of Odette’s when he composed it, and to all those who would hear it in the centuries to come—than as a token, a memory of his love which, even for the Verdurins, even for the young pianist, would remind them of Odette and him at the same time, would join them together; so much so that when Odette, capriciously, had begged him to, he had given up the idea of having some pianist play him the entire sonata, of which he knew as yet only this passage. “Why would you need the rest?” she said to him. “This is our piece.” And in fact, pained by the thought that, at the moment when it passed so close and yet infinitely far away, though it was addressed to them it did not know them, he was almost sorry it had any meaning, any intrinsic and unalterable beauty, alien to them, just as in the jewels given to us, or even the letters written to us by a woman we love, we resent the water of the gem and the words of the language, because they are not created exclusively from the essence of a passing love affair and a particular person.

  It often happened that he had lingered so late with the young working girl before going to the Verdurins’ that after the little phrase had been played by the pianist, Swann would notice that it would soon be time for Odette to go home. He would drive her back as far as the door of her little house in the rue La Pérouse behind the Arc de Triomphe. And it was perhaps because of this, in order not to demand all her favors, that he sacrificed the less necessary pleasure of seeing her earlier, of arriving at the Verdurins’ with her, to the exercise of this right to leave together which she recognized as his and to which he attached a greater value, since, because of it, he had the impression that no one else saw her, no one else came between them, stopped her from being with him still, after he left her.

  And so she would go back in Swann’s carriage; one night, when she had just stepped down from it and he was saying he would see her tomorrow, she rushed to pick a last chrysanthemum from the little garden in front of the house and gave it to him before he went off. He held it pressed against his lips on the way home, and when after a few days the flower withered
, he locked it with great care in his secretary desk.

  But he never went into her house. Only twice, he had gone there in the afternoon to participate in that operation which was of such capital importance for her: “having tea.” The isolation and emptiness of the short streets (almost all of them lined with small contiguous private houses, whose monotony would suddenly be interrupted by some sinister street stall, the historic sign and sordid vestige of a time when these districts were still in bad repute), the snow lingering in the garden and on the trees, the slovenliness of the season, the proximity of nature, lent something more mysterious to the warmth, the flowers that he had found when he went in.

  Leaving to the left, on the raised ground floor, Odette’s bedroom, which looked out on a little parallel street in the back, a straight staircase between walls painted a dark color and hung with Oriental cloths, strings of Turkish beads, and a large Japanese lantern suspended from a slender silk cord (but which, so as not to deprive visitors of the latest comforts of Western civilization, was lit with gas) led up to the drawing room and the morning room. These were preceded by a narrow vestibule whose wall, checkered by a garden trellis, but a gilded one, was lined down its entire length by a rectangular box in which bloomed, as in a greenhouse, a row of those fat chrysanthemums which were still rare at that time, yet nothing like the ones that horticulturalists later succeeded in obtaining. Swann was irritated by the fashion that had favored them since the previous year, but he had taken pleasure, this time, in seeing the half-light of the room striped with pink, orange, and white by the fragrant rays of those ephemeral stars which light up on gray days. Odette had received him in a morning gown of pink silk, her neck and arms bare. She had had him sit next to her in one of the many mysterious alcoves that were contrived in the bays of the drawing room, protected by immense palm trees contained in china cachepots, or by screens festooned with photographs, bows of ribbon, and fans. She had said to him: “You aren’t comfortable like that, wait, I’ll fix you up,” and with the conceited little laugh she would have given at some invention of her own, had settled behind Swann’s head, and under his feet, cushions of Japanese silk which she kneaded as if she were lavish with these riches and careless of their value. But when the valet came bringing one after another the many lamps which, nearly all enclosed in large Chinese vases, burned singly or in pairs, all on different pieces of furniture as though on altars, and which had summoned back to the already almost nocturnal twilight of that late afternoon in winter a more lasting sunset, rosier and more human—perhaps making some lover stop and daydream in the street before the mystery of the presence that was at once disclosed and concealed by the glowing panes—she had watched the servant severely from the corner of her eye to see whether he was setting them down properly in their consecrated places. She thought that if even one were put where it should not be, the overall effect of her drawing room would be ruined, and her portrait, placed on a sloping stand draped in plush, would be poorly lit. And so she fervently followed the movements of the ungainly man and reprimanded him sharply when he went too close to two flower stands which she took care to clean herself for fear they would be damaged and which she now went over to examine to see if he had chipped them. She thought all her Chinese knickknacks had “amusing” shapes, as did the orchids, the cattleyas23 especially, which were, along with the chrysanthemums, her favorite flowers, because they had the great merit of not resembling flowers, but of being made of silk, or satin. “This one looks as though it were cut from the lining of my coat,” she said to Swann, showing him an orchid, with a suggestion of respect for this very “chic” flower, for this elegant and unexpected sister which nature had given her, so far removed from her on the scale of living creatures and yet so refined, more deserving than many women of being given a place in her drawing room. As she showed him, first, chimeras with tongues of fire decorating a vase or embroidered on a screen, then the corollas of a bouquet of orchids, then a dromedary of silver inlaid with niello with eyes encrusted with rubies that stood on the mantelpiece next to a jade toad, she affected, first, fear of the wickedness, or laughter at the oddity, of the monsters, then blushes at the indecency of the flowers and then an irresistible desire to go and kiss the dromedary and the toad, which she called “dears.” And these affectations contrasted with the sincerity of certain of her devotions, notably to Our Lady of Laghet,24 who had once, when she lived in Nice, cured her of a fatal illness, and whose gold medal she always wore, attributing to it unlimited powers. Odette made Swann “her” tea, asking him: “Lemon or cream?” and when he answered “Cream,” said to him laughing: “A cloud!” And when he found it good: “You see I know what you like.” This tea, in fact, seemed as precious a thing to Swann as it did to her, and love has such need to find for itself a justification, a guarantee that it will last, in pleasures which in fact would not be pleasures without it and which end when it ends, that when he left her at seven o’clock to go home and dress, during the whole trip that he made in his coupé, unable to contain the joy which the afternoon had given him, he kept repeating to himself: “How nice it would be to have a little woman like that in whose home one could always find that rare thing, a good cup of tea.” An hour later, he received a note from Odette and immediately recognized the large handwriting, in which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an appearance of discipline on ill-formed letters that would perhaps have signified, to less prejudiced eyes, an untidiness of mind, an insufficient education, a lack of frankness and resolution. Swann had forgotten his cigarette case at Odette’s. “If you had forgotten your heart here too, I would not have let you have it back.”