He could hear the jokes that Mme. Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the bore might be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he saw Odette laughing, laughing with him, almost inside him. Now he felt that perhaps they would be making Odette laugh at him. “What fetid humor!” he said, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so powerful that he felt the muscular sensation of his grimace even in his neck, flung back against the collar of his shirt. “And how can a creature whose face is made in the image of God find anything to laugh about in those nauseating jokes? Any nose of any delicacy at all would turn away with horror so as not to allow itself to be offended by such musty odors. It’s really incredible to think that a human being could fail to understand that, by permitting herself to smile at the expense of a fellow human being who has loyally reached out his hand to her, she is sinking down into a mire from which it will be impossible, even with the best will in the world, to rescue her. I live too many miles above the swamp in which these vermin are gabbling and wallowing to be splattered by the jokes of a Verdurin,” he cried, lifting his head, proudly throwing back his shoulders. “As God is my witness, I have honestly tried to pull Odette up out of there, and lift her into a nobler and purer atmosphere. But no human being has more than just so much patience, and mine is exhausted,” he said to himself, as if this mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasm dated from further back than the last few minutes and as if he had not taken it upon himself only when he thought perhaps these sarcasms were aimed at him and were attempting to separate Odette from him.
He could see the pianist preparing to play the “Moonlight Sonata” and the faces Mme. Verdurin would make as she grew dismayed at the harm that Beethoven’s music was going to do to her nerves: “Idiot, liar!” he exclaimed. “And the woman pretends to love Art!” She would tell Odette, after having adroitly insinuated a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for him: “Make a little room next to you for M. de Forcheville.” “In the dark! The pimp, the procuress!” Procuress was also the name he applied to the music that would invite them to be quiet, to dream together, to look at each other, to take each other by the hand. He found there was some good to be said for the severity toward the arts displayed by Plato, by Bossuet,72 and by the old school of French education.
In fact, the life one led at the Verdurins’ and which he had so often called “real life” seemed to him the worst of all, and their little clan the lowest of social circles. “It really is,” he said, “the lowest thing on the social ladder, Dante’s last circle.73 No doubt about it, the venerable text refers to the Verdurins! Really, the fashionable folk, whom one may vilify, but who all the same are different from these gangs of riffraff, show a most profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them! What sound intuition there is in the Faubourg Saint- Germain’s Noli me tangere!”74 He had long since left the avenues of the Bois, he had nearly reached his house, and still, not yet sobered from his pain and from the insincere exuberance with which the deceitful intonations, the artificial sonority of his own voice, pouring into him more abundantly every minute, had intoxicated him, he continued to perorate out loud in the silence of the night: “Society people have their faults, as no one knows better than I do, but all the same really these are people for whom certain things are out of the question. For instance, one fashionable woman I knew was far from perfect, but all the same really she had a basic decency, a sense of honor in her dealings that would have made her incapable, whatever the circumstances, of any sort of treachery and which is quite sufficient to put a vast gulf between her and a vixen like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, one may truly say they are the ultimate, perfect specimens of their kind! Thank God—it was high time I stopped condescending to mix in utter promiscuousness with such infamy, such excrement.”
But, just as the virtues he had attributed that same afternoon to the Verdurins would not have been enough, had they even really possessed them but had not encouraged and protected his love, to provoke in Swann that intoxication in which he was moved by their magnanimity and which, even if it was propagated through other people, could only come to him from Odette—in the same way, the immorality that he now saw in the Verdurins, had it been real, would have been powerless, had they not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to unleash his indignation and cause him to vilify “their infamy.” And no doubt Swann’s voice was more perceptive than he was himself, when it refused to pronounce these words filled with disgust for the Verdurin social circle and joy at being done with it, otherwise than in an artificial tone and as if they were chosen to appease his anger rather than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact, while he was indulging in these invectives, were probably, without his noticing it, occupied with a completely different object, for, once he reached home, scarcely had he closed the carriage gate behind him than suddenly he struck himself on the forehead, and, opening the gate again, went out exclaiming in a natural voice this time: “I think I know a way of getting invited to the dinner at Chatou tomorrow!” But the way must have been a poor one, for Swann was not invited: Dr. Cottard, who, summoned to the country on a serious case, had not seen the Verdurins for several days and had not been able to go to Chatou, said, the day after that dinner, as he sat down at the table at their house:
“Why, won’t we be seeing M. Swann this evening? He is certainly what you would call a personal friend of . . .”
“Why, I should hope not!” cried Mme. Verdurin. “May the Lord preserve us from him, he is deadly dull, stupid, and ill-mannered.”
At these words Cottard showed surprise and submission at the same time, as though confronted with a truth contrary to everything he had believed up to then, but irresistibly obvious; and, lowering his nose nervously and timidly into his plate, confined himself to answering: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!,” traversing along a descending scale, in his forced but orderly retreat into the depths of himself, the entire register of his voice. And at the Verdurins’, Swann was never mentioned again.
So the salon which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle to their meetings. She no longer said to him as she had in the early days of their love: “We’ll see each other tomorrow night anyway, there’s a supper at the Verdurins’,” but: “We won’t be able to see each other tomorrow night, there’s a supper at the Verdurins’.” Or else the Verdurins were to take her to the Opéra-Comique to see Une Nuit de Cléopatre75 and Swann would read in Odette’s eyes a fear that he would ask her not to go, which once upon a time he would not have been able to keep himself from kissing as it passed over his mistress’s face, and which now exasperated him. “It’s not anger, however,” he said to himself, “that I feel when I see that she wants to go and scratch about in that excremental music. It’s sorrow, not for myself certainly, but for her; sorrow at seeing that after more than six months of living in daily contact with me, she has not managed to change enough to eliminate Victor Massé spontaneously! Especially for not having come to understand that there are evenings when a person of any subtlety must know how to give up a pleasure, when one asks it of her. She ought to know how to say ‘I won’t go,’ if only by using her intelligence, since it is on the basis of her answer that one will rate once and for all the quality of her soul.” And having persuaded himself that it really was only in order to be able to pass a more favorable judgment on Odette’s spiritual value that he wanted her to stay with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he presented her with the same reasoning, with the same degree of insincerity as he had presented it to himself, and even with one degree more, for now he was also responding to a desire to capture her through her self-love.
“I swear,” he said to her a few moments before she left for the theater, “that in asking you not to go out, my every wish, if I were selfish, would be for you to refuse me, because I have a thousand things to do this evening and I will find myself trapped and thus quit
e annoyed if against all expectations you answer me that you won’t go. But my own occupations, my own pleasures, aren’t everything, I have to think of you. There may come a day when, seeing me gone from you forever, you will be justified in reproaching me for not having warned you in the crucial moments when I sensed that I was going to bring down upon you one of those severe judgments against which love cannot resist for long. You see, Une Nuit de Cléopatre (what a title!) doesn’t really matter. What we must find out is whether you are really that creature which ranks lowest in mentality, and even in charm, the contemptible creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasant thing. Now, if this is what you are, how could anyone love you, for you’re not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible? You’re only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope one offers it, a fish without memory or reflection which, as long as it lives in its aquarium, continuing to mistake the glass for water, will bump against it a hundred times a day. Do you understand that your answer will have the effect—I won’t say of making me stop loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realize that you’re not a person, that you’re lower than all other things, that I can’t place you above any of them? Obviously I would have preferred to ask you as a thing of no importance to give up Une Nuit de Cléopatre (since you oblige me to soil my lips with that despicable name) in hopes that you would go anyway. But since I’ve decided to tally such an account, to derive such consequences from your answer, I thought it would be more honest to let you know.”
For some time, Odette had shown signs of agitation and uncertainty. Although she failed to grasp the meaning of this speech, she did understand that it might belong to the category of “scoldings” and scenes of reproach or supplication, and her familiarity with men enabled her, without paying attention to the details of what they said, to conclude that they would not make such scenes if they were not in love, that since they were in love it was pointless to obey them, that they would be only more in love afterward. And so she would have listened to Swann with the utmost calm if she had not seen that time was passing and that if he talked much longer, she would, as she told him with a smile that was tender, obstinate, and abashed, “end by missing the overture!”
On other occasions he told her that the one thing that was more likely than anything else to make him stop loving her was that she would not give up lying. “Even from the point of view of your desire to be attractive,” he told her, “don’t you understand how much of your charm you lose when you stoop to lying? With one confession, think how many faults you could redeem! Really you are much less intelligent than I thought!” But it was in vain that Swann expounded for her thus all the reasons she had for not lying; they might have undermined some general and systematic approach to lying; but Odette had none; she merely contented herself, whenever she wanted Swann not to know about something she had done, with not telling him about it. And so lying was for her an expedient of a particular order; and the only thing that could decide whether she ought to make use of it or confess the truth was a reason of a particular order too, the greater or lesser likelihood that Swann might discover she had not told the truth.
Physically, she was going through a bad phase: she was growing stout; and the expressive and doleful charm, the surprised and dreamy glances she had once had seemed to have disappeared with her first youth. So that she had become so dear to Swann at the moment, as it were, when he found her in fact much less pretty. He would look at her for a long time trying to recover the charm he had once seen in her, and he would not find it. But knowing that under the new chrysalis, what lived on was still Odette, still the same will, evanescent, elusive, and guileful, was enough to make Swann continue to put the same passion into trying to capture her. Then he would look at a photograph from two years before, he would remember how exquisite she had been. And that would console him a little for taking such pains over her.
When the Verdurins carried her off to Saint-Germain, Chatou, Meulan, often, if it was the warm season, they would propose, on the spot, staying there to sleep and not coming back until the next day. Mme. Verdurin would try to quiet the scruples of the pianist, whose aunt had remained in Paris.
“She’ll be delighted to be rid of you for a day. And how could she worry, she knows you’re with us; anyway, she can put the blame on me.”
But if she was not successful, M. Verdurin would spring into action, find a telegraph office or a messenger, and inquire as to which of the faithful had someone they needed to inform. But Odette would thank him and say that she did not need to send anyone a telegram, because she had told Swann once and for all that by sending him one in front of everybody, she would be compromising herself. Sometimes she would be gone for several days, the Verdurins would take her to see the tombs at Dreux, or, on the advice of the painter, to Compiègne to admire sunsets as viewed from inside a forest, and then they would push on as far as the Château de Pierrefonds.76
“To think that she could visit real historic buildings with me. I’ve studied architecture for ten years and I’m forever being implored to take people of the highest standing to Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud 77 and would do it only for her, and instead she goes with the lowest of simpletons to wax ecstatic first over the dejecta of Louis-Philippe and then over those of Viollet-le-Duc! It seems to me you don’t need to be an artist for that and even without a particularly delicate nose, you don’t choose to go holiday making in latrines in order to be closer to the smell of excrement.”
But when she had left for Dreux or Pierrefonds—without, alas, allowing him to go too, as though by chance, on his own account, because “that would make a deplorable impression,” she said—he would plunge into that most intoxicating of romances, the railway timetable, which would present him with all the ways he might join her, in the afternoon, in the evening, that same morning! Not only the ways, but even more, almost: the authorization. Because after all, the timetable and the trains themselves were not meant for dogs. If one informed the public, via printed matter, that at eight o’clock in the morning a train left which arrived in Pierrefonds at ten o’clock, it was because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette was superfluous; and it was also an act that could have a motive completely different from the desire to meet Odette, since people who did not know her performed it each day, in large enough numbers for it to be worth the trouble of stoking the locomotives.
So she really couldn’t stop him from going to Pierrefonds if he wanted to! Now, in fact, he felt that he did want to, and that, if he had not known Odette, he certainly would have gone. For a long time now he had wanted to form a clearer idea for himself of Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration work. And in this weather, he was moved by an imperious desire for a walk in the forest of Compiègne.
It was truly hard luck that she was forbidding him the only spot that tempted him today. Today! If he went despite her prohibition, he might see her today! But whereas, if at Pierrefonds she had met someone who did not matter, she would have said joyfully: “Imagine finding you here!” and would have asked him to come see her at the hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if she met him, Swann, there, she would be offended, she would say to herself that she was being followed, she would love him less, perhaps she would turn away angrily when she saw him. “So, I no longer have the right to travel!” she would say to him when they returned, whereas really he was the one who no longer had the right to travel!
For a while he had had the idea, so as to be able to go to Compiègne and Pierrefonds without appearing to be doing it in order to meet Odette, of contriving to be taken there by one of his friends, the Marquis de Forestelle, who had a château in the vicinity. The Marquis, to whom he had communicated his plan without letting him know the reason for it, was beside himself with joy and marveled that Swann, for the first time in fifteen years, was at last consenting to come see his estate and, since he did not want to stay there, as he had to
ld him, at least promised to take walks and go on excursions with him for a few days. Swann pictured himself already down there with M. de Forestelle. Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance: in the courtyard of the château, now beautiful to him because it was for her sake that he had gone to see it; in every street of the town, which seemed to him romantic; on every road in the forest, rosy in the deep and tender sunset—numberless alternative asylums, where, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his multiplied heart simultaneously came to take refuge, happy and vagabond. “Whatever we do,” he would say to M. de Forestelle, “let’s take care we don’t stumble on Odette and the Verdurins; I’ve just learned they’re in Pierrefonds today, in fact. There’s time enough for us to see one another in Paris, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of leaving Paris if they couldn’t take a step without me or I without them.” And his friend would not understand why, once he was there, Swann would change a plan twenty times, inspect the dining rooms of all the hotels in Compiègne without making up his mind to sit down in any of them even though no trace of the Verdurins had been seen, looking as though he were searching for the very thing he had said he wanted to avoid and then avoiding it as soon as he found it, because if he had encountered the little group, he would pointedly have gone off, glad he had seen Odette and that she had seen him, especially that she had seen him not bothering about her. But no, she would certainly guess that it was for her sake he was there. And when M. de Forestelle came to pick him up so that they could set off, he said to him: “Alas, no, I can’t go to Pierrefonds today, Odette is there, as it turns out.” And Swann was happy despite everything to feel that, if alone of all mortals that day he was not allowed to go to Pierrefonds, it was because for Odette he was someone different from the others, her lover, and that this restriction which was applied in his case alone to the universal right to freedom of movement was merely one of the forms of that slavery, of that love which was so dear to him. Decidedly it was better not to risk quarreling with her, to be patient, to wait for her to come back. He spent his days bent over a map of the Compiègne forest as if it were the Map of Love,78 and surrounded himself with photographs of the château at Pierrefonds. As soon as the day arrived on which it was possible that she would be coming back, he opened the timetable again, calculated which train she must have taken and, if she had been delayed, those that were still available to her. He did not go out for fear of missing a telegram, did not go to bed in case, having returned on the last train, she wanted to surprise him by coming to see him in the middle of the night. In fact he heard the bell at the carriage gate, it seemed to him they were slow opening it, he wanted to wake up the concierge, went to the window to call out to Odette if it was she, for despite the instructions he had gone downstairs to give the servants himself more than ten times, they were still capable of telling her he was not there. It was a servant coming home. He noticed the incessant stream of passing carriages, to which he had never paid attention in the past. He listened to each one come from far off, draw near, pass his gate without stopping, and go on into the distance bearing a message that was not for him. He waited all night, quite uselessly, because the Verdurins had decided to return early, and Odette had been in Paris since noon; it had not occurred to her to tell him; not knowing what to do, she had gone and spent her evening alone at the theater and long ago, by now, had returned home to bed and gone to sleep.
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