Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  It also sometimes happened that when, after meeting Swann, she saw some man approaching her whom he did not know, he could observe on Odette’s face the sadness she had shown the day he had come to see her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for on the days when, despite everything she had to do and her fear of what other people would think, she managed to see Swann, what now predominated in her attitude was self-assurance: a great contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge or a natural reaction to the timorous emotion which, in the early days when she had known him, she had felt with him, and even far away from him, when she would begin a letter with these words: “My dear, my hand is shaking so hard I can scarcely write” (at least so she claimed, and a little of that emotion must have been sincere for her to want to feign more of it). She liked Swann then. We do not tremble except for ourselves, except for those we love. When our happiness is no longer in their hands, what calm, what ease, what boldness we enjoy in their company! When speaking to him, when writing to him, she no longer used any of those words with which she had sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating occasions for saying “my,” “mine,” when she referred to him—“You are my property, this is the fragrance of our friendship, I’m keeping it”—and for talking to him about the future, about death even, as a single thing that would be shared by the two of them. In those days, to everything he said, she would answer admiringly: “You—you will never be like anyone else”; she would look at his long face, his slightly bald head, about which the people who knew of Swann’s successes with women would think: “He’s not conventionally handsome, granted, but he is smart: that quiff of hair, that monocle, that smile!” and, perhaps with more curiosity to know what he was than desire to become his mistress, she would say: “If only I could know what is in that head!”

  Now, to all of Swann’s remarks she would reply in a tone that was at times irritated, at times indulgent: “Oh, you really never will be like anyone else!” She would look at that head, which was only a little more aged by worry (but about which now everyone thought, with that same aptitude which enables you to discover the intentions of a symphonic piece when you have read the program, and the resemblances of a child when you know its parents: “He’s not positively ugly, granted, but he is absurd; that monocle, that quiff of hair, that smile!” creating in their suggestible imaginations the immaterial demarcation that separates by several months’ distance the head of an adored lover from that of a cuckold), she would say: “Oh, if only I could change what’s in that head, if only I could make it reasonable.”

  Always prepared to believe what he hoped for, if Odette’s behavior toward him left any room at all for doubt, he would fling himself avidly on her words:

  “You can if you want to,” he would say to her.

  And he would try to show her that to soothe him, direct him, make him work, would be a noble task to which many other women might ask nothing better than to devote themselves, though it would only be fair to add that in their hands the noble task would have appeared to him merely an indiscreet and intolerable usurpation of his freedom. “If she did not love me a little,” he would say to himself, “she would not want to transform me. In order to transform me, she will have to see more of me.” Thus he regarded this reproach of hers as a sort of proof of interest, of love perhaps; and indeed, she now gave him so few that he was obliged to regard as such the various prohibitions she imposed on him. One day, she declared that she did not like his coachman, that he was perhaps turning Swann against her, that in any case he did not show the punctuality and the deference to Swann that she wanted. She felt that Swann wanted to hear her say: “Don’t use him anymore when you come to see me,” as he would have wanted a kiss. Since she was in a good mood, she said it; he was touched. That evening, chatting with M. de Charlus, with whom he had the comfort of being able to talk about her openly (for the least bit of conversation he had, even with people who did not know her, always somehow related to her), he said to him: “Yet I believe she loves me; she is so kind to me, what I do is certainly not a matter of indifference to her.” And if, when he was setting off for her house, getting into his carriage with a friend whom he was to drop along the way, the friend said: “Why, that’s not Lorédan on the box,” with what melancholy joy Swann would answer him: “Oh Lord no! I tell you I can’t use Lorédan when I go to the rue La Pérouse. Odette doesn’t like me to use Lorédan, she doesn’t think he suits me. Well, what do you expect! Women, you know, women! I tell you she wouldn’t like it at all. Oh, Lord, yes; if I’d used Rémi, there’d be no end of trouble!”

  This new manner, indifferent, distracted, irritable, which was now Odette’s manner with him, certainly caused Swann to suffer; but he was not aware of his suffering; since it was only gradually, day by day, that Odette had cooled toward him, it was only by comparing what she was now to what she had been in the beginning that he would have been able to fathom the depth of the change that had taken place. Yet that change was his deep, his secret wound which hurt him day and night, and as soon as he felt that his thoughts were straying a little too close to it, he would quickly guide them in another direction for fear of suffering too much. He would certainly say to himself in an abstract way: “There was a time when Odette loved me more,” but he would never look back at that time. Just as there was a bureau in his office which he took pains not to look at, which he made a detour to avoid as he came and went, because in one of its drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum she had given him that first evening on which he had driven her home, and the letters in which she had said: “If you had forgotten your heart here too, I would not have let you take it back,” and “At whatever hour of the day or night you need me, send word and my life will be yours to command,” so too there was a place inside him which he never let his thoughts approach, forcing them if necessary to make the detour of a lengthy argument so that they would not have to pass in front of it: this was the place where his memory of the happy days resided.

  But his meticulous prudence was foiled one evening when he had gone out into society, to a party.

  It was at the home of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, on the last, for that year, of the evenings on which she invited people to hear the musicians whom she would afterward use for her charity concerts. Swann, who had wanted to go to each of the preceding evenings in turn and had not been able to resolve to do so, had received, while he was dressing for this one, a visit from the Baron de Charlus, who was coming with an offer to return with him to the home of the Marquise, if his company would help him to be a little less bored there, a little less sad. But Swann had answered:

  “You can’t doubt how much pleasure I would take in being with you. But the greatest pleasure you could give me would be to go to see Odette instead. You know what an excellent influence you have on her. I believe she’s not going out this evening before she goes to see her old dressmaker, and I’m sure she’d be delighted to have you accompany her there. In any case you’ll find her at home before that. Try to amuse her and also to talk some sense to her. If you could arrange something for tomorrow that she enjoys and that we could all three do together . . . Also, try to begin planning for this summer, see if there’s something she might want to do, a cruise we might all three take, I don’t know. I’m not counting on seeing her tonight myself; still, if she wanted to see me or if you were to find a way, you would only need to send me word at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s up to midnight, and afterward at home. Thank you for all that you do for me—you know how fond I am of you.”

  The Baron promised to go and pay the visit that Swann wanted after he had driven him to the door of the Saint-Euverte house, where Swann arrived soothed by the thought that M. de Charlus would be spending the evening in the rue La Pérouse, but in a state of melancholy indifference to everything that did not concern Odette, and in particular to the accoutrements of fashionable life, which gave them the charm that is to be found in anything which, being no longer an object of our desire,
appears to us in its own guise. As soon as he descended from the carriage, in the foreground of that fictitious summary of their domestic life which hostesses like to offer their guests on ceremonial occasions and in which they seek to respect accuracy of costume and setting, Swann enjoyed the sight of those descendants of Balzac’s “tigers,”89 the grooms, who normally followed along on the daily outing, now hatted and booted and posted outside in front of the house on the soil of the avenue, or in front of the stables, like gardeners lined up at the entrances to their flower beds. The particular tendency he had always had to look for analogies between living people and portraits in museums was still active but in a more constant and general way; it was society as a whole, now that he was detached from it, which presented itself to him as a series of pictures. In the hall which in the old days, when he went out regularly into society, he would walk into wrapped in his overcoat and leave in his tails, but without knowing what had happened there, his mind having been, during the few moments he had stayed there, either still at the party he had just left, or already at the party he was about to be shown into, for the first time he noticed, woken by the unexpected arrival of the late guest, the scattered pack of magnificent, tall, idle footmen sleeping here and there on benches and chests who, raising their sharp, noble, greyhound profiles, stood up and gathered in a circle around him.

  One of them, of a particularly ferocious aspect and rather like the executioner in certain Renaissance paintings which depicts scenes of torture, advanced upon him with an implacable air to take his things. But the hardness of his steely gaze was compensated by the softness of his cotton gloves, so that as he approached Swann he seemed to be showing contempt for his person and consideration for his hat. He took it with a care to which the exactness of his balance gave something meticulous, and with a delicacy rendered almost touching by the evidence of his strength. He then passed it to one of his assistants, new and timid, who expressed the terror he felt by casting wild glances in all directions and displayed the agitation of a captive animal in the first hours of its domestication.

  A few steps away, a sturdy fellow in livery mused motionless, statuesque, useless, like the purely decorative warrior one sees in the most tumultuous paintings by Mantegna,90 lost in thought, leaning on his shield, while others beside him rush forward and slaughter one another; detached from his group of companions as they pressed around Swann, he seemed as resolved to take no part in this scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel sea-green eyes, as if it were the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint John. He seemed in fact to belong to that race which has vanished—or which perhaps never existed except in the altarpiece of San Zeno and the frescoes of the Erimitani, where Swann had encountered it and where it dreams on still—and which issued from the impregnation of an ancient statue by one of the Master’s Paduan models or some Albrecht Dürer Saxon.91 And the locks of his red hair, crimped by nature but glued by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in the Greek sculpture which the painter from Mantua studied so constantly and which, if out of all creation it depicts only man, is at least able to derive from his simple forms richnesses so varied, as though borrowed from all of living nature, that a head of hair, in the smooth rolls and sharp beaks of its curls, or in the superimposition of the threefold flowering diadem of its tresses, looks at once like a bundle of seaweed, a nestful of doves, a band of hyacinths, and a coil of snakes.

  Still others, also colossal, stood on the steps of a monumental staircase to which their decorative presence and marmoreal immobility might have induced one to give the same name as the one in the Ducal Palace—“Staircase of the Giants”—and which Swann began to climb with the sad thought that Odette had never ascended it. Oh, with what joy by contrast would he have gone up the dark, evil-smelling, and rickety flights to the little retired dressmaker’s, in whose “fifth floor” he would have been so happy to pay more than the price of a weekly stage box at the Opéra for the right to spend the evening when Odette came there, and even on the other days, so as to be able to talk about her, to live among the people she was in the habit of seeing when he was not there and who because of that seemed to him to harbor something, of his mistress’s life, that was more real, more inaccessible, and more mysterious. Whereas in the old dressmaker’s pestilential and longed-for staircase, since there was no second, service stair, one saw in the evening in front of each door an empty, dirty milk can set out in readiness on the mat, on the magnificent and disdained staircase which Swann was mounting at that moment, on either side, at different levels, in front of each anfractuosity formed in the wall by the window of the lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the domestic service which they directed and paying homage to the guests on their behalf, a concierge, a majordomo, a steward (good people who lived the rest of the week somewhat independent in their domains, dined there at home like small shopkeepers, and by tomorrow would perhaps be in the bourgeois service of a doctor or manufacturer), heedful not to fail to carry out the instructions they had been given before being allowed to put on the dazzling livery which they wore only at rare intervals and in which they did not feel very much at ease, stood under the arcature of their portals with a stately glitter tempered by common good nature, like saints in their niches, and an enormous usher, dressed as though he were in church, struck the flagstones with his staff as each new arrival passed. Having reached the top of the staircase up the length of which he had been followed by a wan-faced servant with a little bunch of hair tied in a cadogan92 at the back of his head, like a Goya93 sexton or a scrivener in an old play, Swann passed in front of a desk where valets, seated like notaries in front of great registers, stood up and inscribed his name. He then crossed a little vestibule which—like certain rooms arranged by their owners to serve as the setting for a single work of art, from which they take their name and, deliberately bare, contain nothing else—displayed at its entrance, like some precious effigy by Benvenuto Cellini94 representing a watchman, a young footman, his body bent slightly forward, lifting from his red gorget a face even redder from which burst forth torrents of fire, timidity, and zeal, and who, piercing with his impetuous, vigilant, distracted gaze the Aubusson tapestries hung before the drawing room where people were listening to music, appeared, with a military impassivity or a supernatural faith—an allegory of alarm, an incarnation of alertness, a commemoration of the call to arms—to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for the appearance of the enemy or the hour of Judgment. Now Swann had only to enter the concert room, whose doors an usher loaded with chains was opening for him with a bow, as he would have handed over to him the keys to a city. But he thought of the house in which he might have been at this very moment, if Odette had permitted it, and the memory he glimpsed of an empty milk can on a doormat wrung his heart.

  Swann rapidly recovered his sense of how ugly men could be, when, beyond the tapestry hangings, the spectacle of the servants was followed by that of the guests. But even the ugliness of these faces, though he knew it so well, seemed new to him since their features—instead of being signs usable in a practical way for the identification of a certain person who had until then represented a cluster of pleasures to pursue, worries to avoid, or courtesies to pay—now remained coordinated only by aesthetic relations, within the autonomy of their lines. And of these men in whose midst Swann found himself hemmed in, even the monocles which many wore (and which, formerly, would at the very most have allowed Swann to say that they wore a monocle), having now been released from signifying a habit, the same for everyone, appeared to him each with a sort of individuality. Maybe because he did not regard Général de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréauté, who were talking to each other just inside the door, as more than two figures in a painting, whereas for a long time they had been useful friends who had introduced him to the Jockey Club and supported him in duels, the general’s monocle, stuck between his eyelids like a shell splinter in his vulgar, scarred, overbearing f
ace, in the middle of a forehead which it blinded like the Cyclops’ single eye, appeared to Swann like a monstrous wound that might have been glorious to receive, but was indecent to show off; whereas the one that M. de Bréauté added, as a badge of festivity, to the pearl-gray gloves, the opera hat, and the white tie, and substituted for the familiar lorgnette (as Swann himself did) for going out in society, bore, glued to its other side, like a natural history specimen under a microscope, an infinitesimal gaze teeming with friendliness that smiled constantly at the loftiness of the ceilings, the beauty of the preparations, the interest of the programs, and the excellence of the refreshments.

  “Well now, here you are! Why, it’s been an eternity since we last saw you,” said the general to Swann and, noticing his drawn features and concluding from this that it was perhaps a grave illness that had kept him away from society, he added: “You look quite well, you know!” while M. de Bréauté asked: “My dear, what in the world are you doing here?” of a society novelist who had just positioned in the corner of his eye a monocle which was his only organ of psychological investigation and pitiless analysis and who answered with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the r: