Swann's Way

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by Proust, Marcel


  The fact was that she had not even thought of him. And occasions such as this when she forgot Swann’s very existence were more useful to Odette, did more to attach Swann to her, than all her coquetry. Because in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had already been powerful enough to make his love blossom on the night when he had not found Odette at the Verdurins’ and had searched for her all evening. And he did not have, as I had at Combray in my childhood, happy days during which to forget the sufferings that will return at night. Swann spent his days without Odette; and now and then he said to himself that to allow such a pretty woman to go out alone in Paris like that was as imprudent as to put a case full of jewels in the middle of the street. Then he would become indignant at all the people passing by as at so many thieves. But their faces, formless, collective, escaped the grasp of his imagination and did not feed his jealousy. Swann’s mind would become exhausted, until, passing his hand over his eyes, he would exclaim: “We must trust in God,” like those who, after having persisted in embracing the problem of the reality of the external world or the immortality of the soul, grant their tired brains the relief of an act of faith. But always the thought of the absent woman was indissolubly mingled with the simplest actions of Swann’s life—having lunch, receiving his mail, leaving the house, going to bed—by the very sadness he felt over performing them without her, like the initials of Philibert le Beau, which, in the church at Brou,79 because of the longing she felt for him, Margaret of Austria intertwined everywhere with her own. On certain days, instead of staying at home, he would go and have his lunch in a restaurant not far from his house whose good cooking he had appreciated once upon a time and to which he now went only for one of those reasons, at once mystical and preposterous, that we call romantic; in fact this restaurant (which still exists) bore the same name as the street in which Odette lived: Lapérouse.80 Sometimes, when she had gone away briefly, it was only after several days that she thought of letting him know she had returned to Paris. And she would say to him quite simply, no longer taking the precaution as she once had of covering herself, just in case, with a little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just returned that moment by the morning train. These words were mendacious; at least for Odette they were mendacious, insubstantial, not having, as they would have had if they had been true, a basis in her memory of arriving at the station; in fact, she was even prevented from picturing them herself at the moment she uttered them, by the contradictory image of what she had been doing that was quite different at the moment she was claiming she had stepped off the train. But in Swann’s mind it was just the opposite, these words, encountering no obstacle, encrusted themselves and assumed the immobility of a truth so indubitable that if a friend told him he had come by that train and had not seen Odette, Swann would be convinced it was the friend who was mistaken about the day or the hour, since his account did not agree with Odette’s. Her words would have seemed to him false only if he had suspected beforehand that they were. For him to believe she was lying, a previous suspicion was a necessary condition. In fact it was also a sufficient condition. Then everything Odette said to him would appear suspect. If he heard her mention a name, it was certainly the name of one of her lovers; the supposition once forged, he would spend weeks grieving; he even contacted a private investigation agency once in order to find out the address and the daily routine of the stranger who would not let him breathe easy except when he went off on a trip, and who, he learned in the end, was an uncle of Odette’s dead for the past twenty years.

  Even though in general she did not permit him to meet her in public places, saying that people would talk, sometimes at an evening party to which he and she both had been invited—at Forcheville’s, at the painter’s, or at a charity ball in one of the ministries—he would find himself there at the same time as she. He would see her but did not dare stay for fear of irritating her by appearing to spy on the pleasures she was enjoying with other people, pleasures which—as he drove home alone, went to bed as anxious as I myself was to be some years later on the evenings when he would come to dine at the house, at Combray—seemed unlimited to him because he had not seen them come to an end. And once or twice on such evenings he experienced the sort of happiness which, had it not been so violently affected by the recoil from the abrupt cessation of anxiety, one would be tempted to call a tranquil happiness, because it consisted of a return to a peaceful state of mind: he had dropped in on a party at the painter’s home and was preparing to go off again; behind him he was leaving Odette transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to speak of some sensuous pleasure that would be enjoyed there or elsewhere (maybe at the “Bal des Incohérents,”81 where he trembled at the idea that she would go afterward) and that caused Swann more jealousy than the carnal act itself because he had more difficulty imagining it; he was already on the point of passing through the studio door, when he heard himself being called back with these words (which, by cutting off from the party that end which had terrified him so, made the party seem in retrospect innocent, made Odette’s return a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but sweet and familiar and abiding next to him, like a bit of his everyday life, in his carriage, and divested Odette herself of her too brilliant and too gay appearance, showed that it was only a disguise which she had put on for a moment, for its own sake, not with a view to mysterious pleasures, and that she was already tired of it), with these words that Odette tossed at him, as he was already on the threshold: “Wouldn’t you wait five minutes for me? I’m leaving, we’ll go back together, you can take me home.”

  True, one day Forcheville had asked to be taken back at the same time but, when they had arrived at Odette’s door and he had asked permission to come in too, Odette had answered him, pointing to Swann: “Ah! That depends on this gentleman here, ask him. Well, all right, come in for a moment if you want, but not for long because I warn you he likes to talk quietly with me, and he doesn’t much like having visitors when he comes. Oh, if you knew this fellow as well as I know him! Isn’t that so, my love,82 I’m the only one who really knows you?”

  And Swann was perhaps even more touched to see her addressing him thus, in front of Forcheville, not only these tender words of predilection, but also certain criticisms such as: “I’m sure you haven’t answered your friends yet about that dinner on Sunday. Don’t go if you don’t want to, but at least be polite,” or: “Now, have you left your essay on Vermeer here so that you can do a little more on it tomorrow? How lazy you are! I’ll make you work—you’ll see!,” which proved that Odette kept up with his social engagements and his literary work, that the two of them really had a life together. And as she said this she gave him a smile in whose depths he felt she was entirely his.

  And so at these moments, while she was making orangeade for them, suddenly, as when a poorly adjusted reflector at first casts on the wall around an object large fantastic shadows which then fold and disappear into it, all the terrible shifting ideas he had formed for himself about Odette would vanish, would rejoin the charming body that stood there in front of him. He would have the sudden suspicion that this hour spent at Odette’s house, in the lamplight, was perhaps not an artificial hour, invented for his own use (intended to mask that dismaying and delightful thing which he thought about endlessly without being able really to picture it, an hour in Odette’s real life, in Odette’s life when he himself was not there), with stage-set accessories and cardboard fruit, but was perhaps a real hour in Odette’s life, that if he had not been there, she would have set out the same armchair for Forcheville and poured him not some unfamiliar drink, but that very same orangeade, that the world inhabited by Odette was not that other frightful and supernatural world where he spent his time locating her and which perhaps existed only in his imagination, but rather the real world, radiating no special sadness, comprising that table where he was going to be able to write and that drink whi
ch he would be permitted to taste, all those objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if by absorbing his dreams they had delivered him from them, they in return had been enriched by them, they showed him the palpable realization of his dreams, and they interested his mind, they assumed substance and shape before his eyes at the same time that they soothed his heart. Ah! If fate had permitted him to have but a single home with Odette so that in her house he would be in his own, if when he asked the servant what was planned for lunch, it was Odette’s menu that he had learned in answer, if when Odette wanted to go out in the morning to walk down the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, even if he did not want to go out, to accompany her, carrying her coat when she was too warm, and at night after dinner if she wanted to stay at home informally dressed, if he had been forced to stay there with her, to do what she wanted; then how completely all those trifles in Swann’s life which seemed to him so sad, would, on the contrary, because they were at the same time part of Odette’s life, have taken on, even the most familiar of them—like that lamp, that orangeade, that armchair which contained so much of his dreams, which materialized so much desire—a sort of superabundant sweetness and mysterious density.

  Yet he actually suspected that what he thus longed for was a calm, a peace that would not have been a favorable atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, longed for, imaginary, when the feeling he had for her was no longer the same mysterious disturbance caused in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection, gratitude, when normal relations were established between them that would put an end to his madness and his gloom, then no doubt the actions of Odette’s daily life would appear to him of little interest in themselves—as he had several times already suspected they were, for example on the day he had read through its envelope the letter addressed to Forcheville. Considering his disease with as much discernment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study it, he told himself that when he had recovered his health what Odette might be doing would leave him indifferent. But, from within his morbid state, in truth he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would in fact have been the death of all that he was at present.

  After these peaceful evenings, Swann’s suspicions would be calmed; he would bless Odette and the next day, first thing in the morning, he would send around to her house the most beautiful jewels, because those kind attentions the night before had excited either his gratitude, or the desire to see them repeated, or a paroxysm of love that needed to expend itself.

  But at other times his pain would seize him again, he would imagine that Odette was Forcheville’s mistress and that when the two of them had seen him, from the depths of the Verdurins’ landau, at the Bois, the day before the Chatou party to which he had not been invited, entreat her vainly, with that look of despair which even his coachman had noticed, to go back with him, then return home on his own, alone and defeated, she must have had, as she pointed him out to Forcheville and said to him: “Look! How furious he is!” the same expression in her eyes, glittering, malicious, haughty, and sly, as on the day when Forcheville had driven Saniette from the Verdurins’.

  Then Swann detested her. “But also, I’m too stupid,” he would tell himself, “I’m paying with my own money for other people’s pleasures. All the same, she ought to take care and not pull too hard on her bowstring, because I might very well not give anything more at all. In any case, let’s forgo the supplementary favors for the time being! To think that only yesterday, when she said she wanted to attend the season at Bayreuth,83 I was stupid enough to propose renting for the two of us one of the King of Bavaria’s pretty castles in the vicinity. And anyway she did not seem all that delighted, she hasn’t yet said either yes or no; let’s hope she will decide against it. Good Lord! To spend two weeks listening to Wagner with her when she cares as much for it as a fish for an apple—what fun that would be!” And because his hatred, like his love, needed to manifest itself and to act, he took pleasure in pursuing his evil fantasies further and further, since, because of the perfidies he imputed to Odette, he detested her still more and could, if—something he tried to picture to himself—they were found to be true, have an occasion for punishing her and for satiating on her his increasing rage. Thus he went so far as to suppose that he was going to receive a letter from her in which she would ask him for money to rent that castle near Bayreuth, but warning him that he could not go there himself, because she had promised Forcheville and the Verdurins that she would invite them. Ah! How he would have liked her to be so bold! What joy he would feel as he refused, as he drafted the vengeful answer, the terms of which he took satisfaction in choosing, in uttering out loud, as if he had actually received the letter!

  Yet this was in fact what happened the very next day. She wrote that the Verdurins and their friends had expressed a desire to attend these performances of Wagner and that, if he would be so good as to send her the money, she would at last, after having so often been entertained at their home, have the pleasure of inviting them in her turn. About him, she said not a word, it was implied that their presence would exclude his own.

  And so that terrible answer, whose every word he had determined the day before without daring to hope that it would ever be used, he could now have the joy of sending off to her. Alas! He was quite aware that, all the same, with the money she had, or that she might easily find, she could rent something at Bayreuth since she wanted to, she who was incapable of telling the difference between Bach and Clapisson.84 But still, she would live there more frugally. There would be no way, as there would have been had he sent her a few thousand-franc bills this time, of organizing every evening, in a castle, those exquisite suppers after which she would perhaps have indulged the whim—which it was possible she had never yet had—of falling into Forcheville’s arms. And then at least he, Swann, was not the one who would be paying for this detested journey! Oh, if only he could have prevented it! If only she could have sprained her ankle before she left, if the coachman of the carriage that would take her to the station had agreed, whatever the price, to drive her to a place where for some time she would remain sequestered—this perfidious woman, her eyes glittering with a smile of complicity addressed to Forcheville, which Odette had become for Swann in the past forty-eight hours!

  But she was never that for very long; after a few days the gleaming hypocritical gaze would lose some of its luster and duplicity, the image of a despised Odette saying to Forcheville: “How furious he is!” would begin to grow pale, fade away. Then, gradually the face of the other Odette would reappear and rise up, shining softly, the Odette who also offered a smile to Forcheville, but a smile in which there was nothing but affection for Swann, when she said: “Don’t stay long, because this gentleman does not much like me to have visitors when he wants to be with me. Oh, if you knew this fellow as well as I know him!,” the same smile she wore when thanking Swann for some instance of his courtesy, which she prized so highly, for some advice she had asked of him in one of those serious circumstances in which she had confidence only in him.

  Then, thinking of this Odette, he would ask himself how he could have written her that outrageous letter of which no doubt until now she had not thought him capable, and which must have brought him down from the high, the unique rank which by his goodness, his honesty, he had won in her esteem. He would now become less dear to her, because it was for those particular qualities, which she did not find in either Forcheville or any other man, that she loved him. It was because of them that Odette so often showed a graciousness toward him that he counted for nothing when he was jealous, because it was not a sign of desire, and even gave proof of affection rather than love, but whose importance he began to feel again in proportion as the spontaneous relaxation of his suspicions, a relaxation often increased by the distraction he found in reading about art or talking to a friend, caused his passion to become less demanding of r
eciprocities.

 

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