But he did not point out this contradiction to her, because he thought that, left to herself, Odette would perhaps produce some lie that would be a faint indication of the truth; she would talk; he would not interrupt her, he would collect with an avid and painful piety the words she said to him, feeling (precisely because she was hiding it behind them as she talked to him) that, like the sacred veil, they retained the vague imprint, sketched the uncertain features, of that reality so infinitely precious and, alas! undiscoverable—what she had been doing that afternoon at three o’clock, when he came—of which he would never possess more than these lies, illegible and divine vestiges, and which now existed only in the memory of this woman, who would conceal it like stolen goods and contemplate it without being able to appreciate it, but would not hand it over to him. Of course, he fully suspected at times that in themselves Odette’s daily actions were not passionately interesting, and that the relationships she might have with other men did not naturally, universally, and for every intelligent creature exhale a morbid sadness capable of infecting one with a feverish desire to commit suicide. He would then realize that this interest, this sadness existed only in him like a disease, and that, once this disease was cured, Odette’s actions, the kisses she might have given would become once again as harmless as those of so many other women. But the fact that the painful curiosity which Swann brought to them now had its origin only in himself was not enough to make him think it was unreasonable to consider this curiosity important and to use every possible means to satisfy it. For Swann was reaching an age the philosophy of which—encouraged, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, and also by that of the circle in which he had spent so much of his life, that of the social set attached to the Princess des Laumes, where one’s intelligence was understood to be in direct ratio to one’s skepticism and nothing was real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person—is no longer that of youth, but the positive, almost medical philosophy of men who, instead of externalizing the objects of their aspirations, try to derive from the years they have already lived a stable residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and to which, deliberately, they will take care before anything else that the kind of life they adopt may provide satisfaction. Swann thought it prudent to make allowance in his life for the pain he felt at not knowing what Odette had been doing, just as he made allowance for the fresh outbreak which a damp climate might cause in his eczema; to provide in his budget for a sizable sum of available funds for obtaining information about how Odette spent her days, without which he would feel unhappy, just as he reserved the same for other partialities from which he knew he could expect to derive pleasure, at least before he had fallen in love, like his partiality for collections and for good food.
When he tried to say good-bye to Odette in order to leave for home, she asked him to stay longer and even held him back suddenly, by taking his arm, when he was about to open the door to go out. But he took no notice of this, because among the multitude of gestures, remarks, minor incidents that fill a conversation, it is inevitable that we should come close, without detecting anything in them to attract our attention, to those that hide a truth our suspicions are blindly seeking, and that we should stop, on the other hand, at those behind which there is nothing. She kept saying to him: “How unfortunate—you never come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come, I don’t see you.” He knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed at having missed his visit, but, because she was good, desirous of pleasing him, and often sad when she had vexed him, he found it quite natural that she should be sad this time at having deprived him of the pleasure of spending an hour together, a very great pleasure, not for her, but for him. Yet it was a thing unimportant enough so that the pained air she continued to have ended by surprising him. She reminded him even more than usual, when she looked this way, of the faces of the women portrayed by the painter of the Primavera.68 She had at this moment their downcast and heartbroken expression which seems to be succumbing beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them, when they are merely letting the child Jesus play with a pomegranate or watching Moses pour water into a trough.69 He had once before seen the same sadness on her face, but he no longer knew when. And suddenly he remembered: it was when Odette had lied in talking to Mme. Verdurin the day after that dinner to which she had not come on the pretext that she was ill and in reality so that she could stay with Swann. Of course, even if she had been the most scrupulous of women, she might not have felt remorse over a lie as innocent. But the lies Odette generally told were less innocent and served to prevent discoveries that might have created for her, with one person or another, terrible difficulties. And so when she lied, struck by fear, aware that she was feebly armed to defend herself, uncertain of success, she wanted to cry, from exhaustion, like certain children who have not slept. And she also knew that her lie was usually doing serious harm to the man to whom she was telling it, and into whose power she was perhaps going to fall if she lied badly. And so she felt at once humble and guilty in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant social lie, the association of sensations and memories would leave her with the faintness that follows overexertion and the regret that follows an act of malevolence.
What depressing lie was she telling Swann that gave her this pained look, this plaintive voice which seemed to falter under the effort she demanded of herself and to ask for forgiveness? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about the incident in the afternoon that she was endeavoring to hide from him, but something more immediate, that had perhaps not yet transpired and was quite imminent, something that might enlighten him about this truth. At that moment, he heard the bell ring. Odette did not stop talking, but her words were now no more than a long lament: her regret at not having seen Swann in the afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had turned into true despair.
He could hear the front door closing again and the sound of a carriage, as if someone was going away again—probably the one Swann was not supposed to meet—after being told that Odette was out. Then, when he reflected that merely by coming at an hour when he was not in the habit of coming he had managed to disturb so many arrangements she did not want him to discover, he was overcome with a feeling of discouragement, almost despondency. But because he loved Odette, because he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts toward her, the pity he might have inspired in himself he felt for her instead, and he murmured: “Poor darling!” As he was leaving her, she picked up several letters that she had on her table and asked him if he would put them in the post. He took them away with him and, once he was home, saw that he had kept the letters on him. He returned as far as the post office, drew them from his pocket, and before tossing them into the box looked at the addresses. They were all for tradesmen except one which was for Forcheville. He held it in his hand. He said to himself: “If I saw what was inside it, I would know what she calls him, how she talks to him, if there’s anything between them. It may even be that by not looking, I’m behaving with a lack of delicacy toward Odette, because this is the only way to free myself of a suspicion which is perhaps calumnious for her, which is in any case bound to hurt her, and which nothing would be able to destroy, once the letter was gone.”
He returned home after leaving the post office, but he had kept that last letter with him. He lit a candle and held up close to it the envelope he had not dared to open. At first he could not read anything, but the envelope was thin and, by making it adhere to the stiff card that was enclosed in it, he could read, through its transparency, the last words. It was a very cold, formal ending. If he had not been the one looking at a letter addressed to Forcheville, but instead Forcheville reading a letter addressed to Swann, Forcheville would have seen words that were far more affectionate! He took firm hold of the card that danced in the envelope, which was larger than it was, then, sliding it with his thumb, brought its different lines one
after another under the part of the envelope where the paper was not doubled, the only part through which one could read.
Despite this he could not distinguish anything very well. But it did not matter, because he had seen enough to realize that its subject was a minor, unimportant event that had nothing to do with a love affair; it was something relating to an uncle of Odette’s. Swann had read clearly at the beginning of the line: “I was right,” but had not understood what Odette had been right in doing, when suddenly, a word he had not at first been able to decipher appeared and illuminated the meaning of the entire sentence: “I was right to open the door, it was my uncle.” Open the door! So Forcheville had been there that afternoon when Swann rang the bell, and she had made him leave, which was the source of the noise Swann had heard.
Then he read the whole letter; at the end she apologized for having acted so unceremoniously toward him and said he had forgotten his cigarettes at her house, the same sentence she had written to Swann one of the first times he had come. But in Swann’s case she had added: “If you had left your heart here, I would not have let you take it away again.” For Forcheville nothing like that: no allusion that might suggest that they were having an affair. And in fact, Forcheville was more deceived in all this than he, since Odette was writing to him to assure him that the visitor had been her uncle. In the end he, Swann, was the one she considered important, the one for whom she had dismissed the other. And yet, if there was nothing between Odette and Forcheville, why had she not opened the door right away, why had she said, “I did the right thing to open the door, it was my uncle”? if she was doing nothing wrong at that moment, how would Forcheville even be able to explain to himself the fact that she had not opened the door? Swann remained there, disconsolate, embarrassed and yet happy, with this envelope which Odette had handed over to him quite fearlessly, so absolute was her confidence in his discretion, but through the transparent glazing of which was revealed to him, along with the secret of an incident which he would never have believed it possible to discover, a little of Odette’s life, as in a narrow illuminated section cut directly out of the unknown. Then his jealousy rejoiced over it, as if that jealousy had an independent, selfish vitality, voracious for anything that would feed it, even at Swann’s own expense. Now it had something to feed on and Swann was going to be able to begin worrying each day over the visitors Odette might have received at about five o’clock, and begin trying to learn where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann’s affection continued to preserve the same character imprinted on it from the very beginning by his ignorance as to how Odette spent her days and by the mental laziness that stopped him from compensating for his ignorance with his imagination. He had not been jealous at first of Odette’s whole life, but only of the times when some circumstances, perhaps wrongly interpreted, led him to suppose that Odette might have deceived him. His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another. But Swann was not capable of inventing his sufferings. They were merely the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from outside himself.
From outside, however, everything brought him more suffering. He wanted to separate Odette from Forcheville, take her away to spend a few days in the south. But he believed all the men who happened to be in the hotel desired her and that she desired them. And so he who in former days, when traveling, had sought out new people, large groups, now appeared unsociable, appeared to be fleeing the company of men as if it had cruelly wounded him. And how could he not be misanthropic, when he saw every man as a possible lover of Odette’s? And so his jealousy, even more than the sensuous and lighthearted feeling he had at first had for Odette, altered Swann’s character and changed entirely, in the eyes of other people, the very appearance of the external signs by which that character was manifested.
A month after the day on which he had read the letter addressed by Odette to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were giving in the Bois. As they were preparing to leave, he noticed some confabulations between Mme. Verdurin and several of the guests and thought he heard them reminding the pianist to come to a party at Chatou70 the next day; yet, he, Swann, had not been invited.
The Verdurins had spoken in low voices and in vague terms, but the painter, probably inattentive, exclaimed:
“There must be no lights on and he must play the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ in the dark so we can watch how things become illuminated.”
Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was two steps away, now wore that expression in which the desire to make the person who is talking be quiet and the desire to maintain a look of innocence in the eyes of the person who is hearing neutralize each other in an intense nullity of gaze, in which the motionless sign of intelligence and complicity is concealed beneath an innocent smile, and which in the end, being common to all those who find themselves making a social blunder, reveals it instantly, if not to those making it, at least to the one who is its victim. Odette suddenly had the desperate look of one who has given up fighting the crushing difficulties of life, and Swann anxiously counted the minutes that separated him from the time when, after leaving the restaurant, during the drive home with her, he would be able to ask her for an explanation, persuade her not to go to Chatou the next day or to see that he was invited, and to soothe in her arms the anguish he was feeling. At last the carriages were sent for. Mme. Verdurin said to Swann:
“Well now, good-bye, we’ll see you soon, I trust?” attempting by the amiableness of her gaze and the constraint of her smile to keep him from realizing that she was not saying to him, as she had always done until now: “Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, the day after at my house.”
M. and Mme. Verdurin made Forcheville get in with them, Swann’s carriage had pulled up behind theirs, and he was waiting for theirs to leave so that he could help Odette into his.
“Odette, we’re taking you home,” said Mme. Verdurin, “we have a little spot for you here next to M. de Forcheville.”
“Yes, madame,” answered Odette.
“What? I thought I was driving you home,” cried Swann, saying what had to be said without dissembling, because the carriage door was open, the seconds were numbered, and he could not go home without her in his present state.
“But Mme. Verdurin asked me . . .”
“Now, you can certainly go home alone, we’ve let you have her to yourself often enough,” said Mme. Verdurin.
“But I had something important to say to Madame.”
“Well, you can write it to her in a letter . . .”
“Good-bye,” Odette said, holding out her hand.
He tried to smile but looked utterly crushed.
“Did you see the way Swann permits himself to behave with us now?” said Mme. Verdurin to her husband when they were back at home. “I thought he was going to eat me alive because we were taking Odette with us. It’s quite unseemly, really! Let him just say right out that we’re running a house of assignation! I don’t understand how Odette can tolerate such behavior. He absolutely seems to be saying: You belong to me. I’m going to tell Odette what I think, I hope she’ll understand.”
And she also added, a moment later, angrily:
“No, really, the vile creature!” using, without realizing it, and perhaps responding to the same obscure need to justify herself—like Françoise at Combray when the chicken did not want to die—the same words which the last twitches of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the countryman who is killing it.
And when Mme. Verdurin’s carriage had left and Swann’s came forward, his coachman looked at him and asked if he was not ill or if there had not been an accident.
Swann sent him away, he wanted to walk, and he returned home on foot through the Bois. He talked to himself out loud, in the same slightly artificial tone he had always used when he enumerated the charms of the little clan and extolled the m
agnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as Odette’s conversation, smiles, kisses became as odious to him as he had once found them sweet, if they were addressed to another man, in the same way the Verdurins’ salon, which only recently had still seemed to him amusing, inspired with a real enthusiasm for art and even a sort of moral nobility, now that a man other than himself was the one Odette was going there to meet, to love without restraint, exhibited to him its absurdities, its foolishness, its ignominy.
He pictured to himself with disgust the next day’s soiree at Chatou. “The idea of going to Chatou anyway! Like drapers after shutting up shop! These people really are sublimely bourgeois, they can’t really exist, they must have come out of a Labiche comedy!”71
The Cottards would be there, maybe Brichot. “It’s quite grotesque, the lives of these nonentities, always in each other’s pockets like this. They would feel utterly lost, I swear, if they didn’t all meet up again tomorrow at Chatou!” Alas! the painter would be there too, the painter who enjoyed “matchmaking,” who would invite Forcheville to come to his studio with Odette. He could see Odette in clothes far too formal for this country outing, “because she’s so vulgar and worst of all, poor little thing, such a fool!!!”
Swann's Way Page 36