In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  In fact, since Mme Swann, almost every time I went to visit her, would invite me to come to tea with her and her daughter, and told me to send my reply direct to Gilberte, I often had occasion to write to her, sending her notes that I filled not with words which might have won her over, but with words chosen for the sole purpose of letting my sorrow flow free and sweet. Regret, like desire, seeks satisfaction and not self-analysis: in the beginning of love, our time is spent not in finding out what love is made of, but in trying to make sure we can see each other tomorrow; and at the end of love, you do not try to ascertain the nature of your sorrow, but only to voice it in what you hope is its tenderest form to her who is the cause of it. You say things you feel the need to say and which she will not understand; you talk only for your own benefit. So I wrote to Gilberte: I used to believe it couldn’t be possible. But I can see now, alas, it’s not that difficult … Though I added: I expect I’ll never see you again, I was still careful not to adopt a distant tone, which might have made her suspect it was feigned; and as I wrote these words, I was in tears, because I felt they expressed, not what I would have liked to believe, but what was in fact going to happen. I knew that when her next invitation came, I would once again be brave enough not to give in, and that each successive invitation declined would bring me gradually to a time when, having gone without seeing her for so long, I would have no further wish to see her at all. So with tears, courage and consolation, I sacrificed the happiness of being with her to the possibility of one day seeming lovable in her eyes, though knowing it would be a day when the prospect of seeming lovable in her eyes would leave me cold. Even the albeit highly unlikely hypothesis that at this very instant she still loved me, as she had claimed during my last visit to her, that what I saw as the annoyance of having to be with someone whose company is irksome was really only an expression of touchy possessiveness, an affectation of indifference no more genuine in her than mine was in me, served only to make my determination less cruel. And I felt as though, at a time several years hence, when we had completely forgotten one another, when I could look back on this letter I was writing and tell her there had been not one word of sincerity in it, she would say, ‘What? You mean you did love me? Oh, if you only knew how I had been looking forward to getting that letter! How I longed for us to meet! How I cried when I read it!’ As I sat writing to her, having just come home from visiting her mother, the thought that I was possibly there and then in the act of consummating that very misunderstanding, the sadness of it all, the joy of believing Gilberte loved me, made me go on with my letter.

  My thoughts, as I left Mme Swann’s at the end of her tea-time, were all for what I was going to say in my letter to her daughter; but Mme Cottard’s thoughts were full of something very different. As she carried out her little ‘tour of inspection’, she had made a point of congratulating Mme Swann on any new piece of furniture or any recent ‘acquisition’ she had noticed in the drawing-room. Among them she might also have noticed a meagre remnant of the things Odette had once surrounded herself with in the rue La Pérouse house, especially the animals in precious stones and metals, her fetishes.

  However, to Mme Swann, the word ‘sham’, picked up from a friend whom she admired, had opened new horizons by its applicability to things which, years ago, she had called ‘chic’; and one after the other, most of those things had followed into oblivion the gold-painted garden-trellis against which her chrysanthemums had stood, many a bonbonnière from Giroux’s and the note-paper embossed with a coronet (to say nothing of the louis coins in golden cardboard adorning her mantelpieces, which a man of taste had once hinted, long before she met Swann, that she might dispense with). As well, in the artistic disarray, the Bohemian jumble, of her rooms, with their walls still painted dark, making them as different as possible from the white drawing-rooms which she was to have a little later, the Far East was giving ground under the increasing onslaughts of the eighteenth century; and the cushions which Mme Swann plumped up and heaped behind me to make me (as she said in English) ‘comfortable’, were decorated now with Louis XV posies, rather than Chinese dragons. In the room where one usually came upon her, of which she liked to say, ‘Yes, I’m quite fond of it, I’m in here a lot. I couldn’t live among unfriendly things, you see, ugly-pretentious sort of things. This is where I work’ (though she never specified what it was she was working at, a picture, a book perhaps, those being the days when the idea of writing was occurring to the kind of women who like to have something to do, rather than sit idly about), she sat amid Dresden china, of which she would speak with an English accent, and which she liked so much that she was for ever saying, about anything that took her eye, ‘Isn’t it pretty? It’s just like Dresden flowers!’; and as she feared for these pieces even more than she had once feared for her Chinese grotesques and vases, any clumsy servant who alarmed her by handling them the wrong way would be roundly abused in terms which Swann, the mildest and most urbane of masters, would hear but not be shocked by. Affection is undiminished by the clear sight of certain defects; it is what makes them appear charming. Nowadays, to receive guests, Odette less frequently wore a Japanese kimono, preferring the pale foamy silks of her Watteau tea-gowns, floating in them, seeming to caress their flowery froth against her breasts, basking, frolicking, and with such an air of health and well-being, of refreshment of the skin and deep breathing, that they looked as though their function was not just the decorative one of being a setting for her, but as necessary a one as her daily ‘tub’ or her ‘constitutional’, satisfying both the demands of her looks and the finer requirements of the healthful life. She was in the habit of maintaining that she would go without bread sooner than be deprived of art and cleanliness, and that she would have been more upset by the burning of the Mona Lisa than by the annihilation of ‘swarms’ of people of her acquaintance. These conceptions appeared paradoxical to her lady-friends, giving her among them the renown of a high-minded woman, and brought the Belgian ambassador to visit her once a week; and in the little world which revolved about her Sun, everybody would have been astounded to learn that elsewhere, at the Verdurins’ for example, she was seen as stupid. It was this spirit of spontaneous repartee in Mme Swann that made her prefer men’s company to women’s. And when she had something to say against certain women, it was always the former courtesan who drew attention to defects which might tell against them with men, thick wrists and ankles, a stale complexion, bad spelling, hairy legs, a dreadful smell, false eyebrows. She could, however, be kinder in speaking of any woman who had been friendly or indulgent towards her, especially if it was someone who had known happier days. Odette would be shrewd in defence of the woman: ‘Oh, they say awful things about her. But she’s really a nice person, I can assure you’

  It was not only the interior decoration of Odette’s drawing-room that Mme Cottard and all who had known Mme de Crécy would have had difficulty in recognizing if they had not seen her for a long time, it was Odette herself. She seemed to have grown so many years younger! This was in part no doubt because she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed; and in part because the new sleeker hair-styles gave more room to her face, which was enlivened by a little pink powder and in which the former flagrancy of her eyes and profile seemed to have been toned down. But another reason for this change was that Odette had now reached the middle years of life, where she found in herself, or invented for herself, a personal style of face, full of a fixed character, a recognized pattern of beauty; and on her formerly undesigned features (which for so many years had been left to the random whims of the responsive flesh, briefly ageing by years at the slightest indisposition, managing somehow to collaborate with her moods and daily demeanours in the composition of her variable face, unfocussed, unshaped and charming) she now wore this immutable model of eternal youth.

  In Swann’s own bedroom, instead of the grand photographs taken nowadays of his wife, in which, however unalike her different hats and dresses were, the
same enigmatically imperious expression identified her triumphant figure and features, he kept a modest little old daguerreotype dating from the days before this unvarying model of Odette’s, in which she seemed devoid of her new youth and beauty, as yet undiscovered by her. In this no doubt he clung, or had reverted, to a different conception of her, doting for ever on the Botticellian graces of a slender young woman with pensive eyes and a forlorn look, caught in a posture between stride and stillness. The fact was he could still see her as a Botticelli. Odette herself, who always tried to conceal things she did not like about her own person, or at least to compensate for them, rather than bring them out, things which a painter might have seen as her ‘type’, but which as a woman she saw as defects, had no time for Botticelli. Swann owned a wonderful Oriental stole, in blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly the one worn by the Virgin in the Magnificat. Mme Swann would not wear it. Once only, she relented and let him give her an outfit based on la Primavera’s garlands of daisies, bellworts, cornflowers and forget-me-nots. In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel’s inkwell, before writing in the holy book where the word Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, ‘Be sure not to mention it to her! One word – and she’d make sure it wouldn’t happen again!’

  Except at such yielding moments of unselfconscious languor, when Swann could hope to catch a glimpse of Botticelli’s melancholy attitudes, Odette’s body was now blocked out as a single profile, a unitary shape which took its outline from the woman within and ignored the former fashions with their fussy broken lines, the artificiality of their protrusions and indentations, their jutting angles and criss-crossings, their composite effect of disparate complexity, but which could also, if that anatomy within erred and made unwanted departures from the ideal design, correct these mistakes of nature with a firm stroke, redrawing whole sections of the contour so as to make good any deficiencies, whether of flesh or cloth. All the padding, the appalling ‘dress-improvers’ and bustles, had gone; as had the long vest bodices which for so many years, overlapping the skirt and rigid with whalebone, had added a false abdomen to Odette and made her look like a creature of separate parts unlinked by any individuality. The vertical fringes of jet and the stiff curves of the ruches had been replaced by the suppleness of a body which, having freed itself like an independent and organized life-form from the long opacity and chrysaloid chaos of the outworn modes, now rippled silk as a mermaid ripples water and gave a human look to the gloss of percaline. Mme Swann had managed to retain a vestige of some of these modes, amid the others which had replaced them. Some evenings, when I was unable to work, and when I was quite sure that Gilberte had gone to the theatre with a party of friends, I would call unannounced at her parents’ house, where I was often greeted by Mme Swann in one of her handsome house-dresses, the skirt of which, in one of those magnificent dark shades, a deep red or orange, which seemed to have a special meaning because they were no longer fashionable, showed through a broad diagonal panel of black lace reminiscent of an outmoded flounce. Before Gilberte and I had fallen out, on one of those wintry spring days when Mme Swann had taken me to the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, the indented edging of her blouse, under the jacket which she would unbutton a little as the walk warmed her up, had looked just like the absent lapel of the vest bodices she had once worn and which she always preferred with such a slight zigzag edge; and she had been wearing a necklet (in a tartan pattern which she had never abandoned, though she had by now so toned down its colours, the red having shaded into pink and the blue into lilac, that it could almost have been taken for one of those dove-coloured taffetas which had just come in) knotted in a bow under the chin in a way that, because one could not see how it was fastened, instantly reminded one of those hats with long bands tied round the throat which nobody now wore. Before very long, young men, trying to define her ways of dressing, would be saying to each other, ‘Mme Swann is a real period-piece, you know!’ In her ways of dressing, as in a fine written style which embraces different forms of expression and is enriched by a concealed tradition, these semi-reminiscences of bodices and bows, an occasional instantly repressed hint of the ‘monkey-jacket’, and even a faint whisper of an allusion to long ‘follow-me-lads’ hat-ribbons, filled the actual forms of what she did wear with a constant unformed suggestion of older ones, which no real seamstress or milliner could have contrived, but which hung about her all the time, surrounding her with something noble – possibly because the very uselessness of these trappings made them appear designed for a more than utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the remnant they preserved of former times, or even because of a kind of individuality in dress, peculiar to herself, which gave to what she wore, however dissimilar her ensembles, a sort of family resemblance. One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization.

  Though Gilberte usually held her tea-parties on her mother’s at-home days, she sometimes went out instead; and when that happened I could go to one of Mme Swann’s ‘afternoon jamborees’. I would find her wearing a magnificent dress, sometimes of taffeta, sometimes of faille, or else of velvet, crêpe de Chine, satin or silk, not a loose garment like the house-dresses she usually wore at home, but with something of the walking-dress in it, which somehow gave to her afternoon idleness indoors a quality of readiness and activity. The dashing simplicity of their cut suited her figure and her movements, which seemed to colour her sleeves variously each day: on blue velvet days, the material was full of sudden decisiveness, which became simple good nature when it was the turn of white taffeta; and, so as to become visible, a sort of supreme and distinguished reserve in her way of holding out her arm had taken on the glowing smile of self-sacrifice that shines in black crêpe de Chine. But at the same time, her complicated ‘accessories’, which had no visible purpose or practical usefulness, added something to these brilliant dresses, something disinterested, thoughtful and secret, that matched the melancholy still to be seen round her eyes and in the delicate joints of her hands. Under the dangle of sapphire-studded lucky charms, enamelled four-leafed clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, fine ruby chains, chestnutsized topazes, there would be a coloured pattern patched on to the dress itself, a borrowed panel enjoying a new lease of life, a row of little satin buttons which could neither button anything nor ever be unbuttoned, a length of matching braid trying to please with the unobtrusive aptness of a subtle reminder; and all of them, like the jewels, seemed to be there – for otherwise they had no conceivable function – to hint at a purpose, to be a token of tenderness, to keep a secret, exercise a superstition, commemorate a cure, a vow, a lover or a philippine. Sometimes a hint of a Plantagenet slash in the blue velvet of a bodice, or a slight bulge in a black satin dress, either high on the sleeve suggesting the 1830s and their leg-of-mutton, or under the skirt suggesting Louis XV hoop-petticoats, would almost make it look as though she was in fancy dress; and by slipping this sort of barely recognizable allusion to the past into the life of the present, they added to the person of Mme Swann the charm of certain historical or fictional heroines. If I said this to her, she replied, ‘Unlike some of my friends, I do not play golf. Unlike me, they have an excuse for being swaddled in sweaters.’

  Amid the jostle of people in her drawing-room, as she came back in from seeing someone out or handed round a plate of cakes, Mme Swann would take me aside for a moment: ‘Gilberte has most particularly urged me to invite you to lunch the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know whether I would see you or not, so I was going to drop you a note about it if you didn’t come today.’ I persisted in my resistance to Gilberte’s invitations. This resistance was now costing me less and less: however much one may savour one’s poison, when one has been forcibly deprived of
it for any length of time, one is bound to be struck by how restful it can be to do without it, by the absence of excitements and sorrows. We may be not entirely sincere in hoping never again to see the woman we love; but the same may well be true when we say we do hope to see her again. Of course, any absence from her can only be bearable if we mean it to be brief, if we keep thinking of being together again with her one day; but against that, we are aware of how much less disturbing these daily dreams of prompt but ever deferred reunion are than a real encounter with her would be, with its likely resurgence of jealousy; and so the knowledge that one is going to see her again could cause a recurrence of upsetting emotions. And what we keep postponing now day after day is no longer an end to the unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable memory of her seems: instead of the real meeting with her, in your solitude you can dramatize a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavoured with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and even her unforeseeable animosity. To be no longer in love is to know that forgetting – or even a fading memory – causes much less pain than the unhappiness of loving. What I preferred, without admitting it to myself, was the reposeful promise of that foreshadowed forgetting.

  There is another reason why the pains of this treatment by isolation and emotional withdrawal may be gradually lessened, which is that, as a preliminary to curing us of the obsessive preoccupation of our love, it weakens the force of it. My own love was still strong enough for me to want Gilberte to look at me again with the eyes of admiration. So with every day that passed, it seemed to me that my prestige, because of my self-imposed separation from her, must be slowly growing in her eyes; and that each of these days of calm sadness when I saw nothing of her, in their gradual accumulation, with neither interruption nor expected expiry-time (unless some ill-advised person interfered with my arrangements), was a day gained, and not lost, to my love. A day pointlessly gained, perhaps, as I might soon be pronounced cured. Resignation, which is one of the modes of habit, favours the indefinite growth of some of our resources. By now, the puny forces which, on the evening of my first breach with Gilberte, were all I had at my command to help me bear my heartbreak, had been raised to an incalculable power. However, the tendency of all existing things to go on existing is sometimes interrupted by sudden impulses, which we obey without great qualms at breaking our own rule, since we know, from all those days and months when we have already managed to abstain, for how many more of them we would be able to make our abstention last. It is often when the purse in which we have been putting by our savings is nearly full that we suddenly decide to spend them all; it is when we have become used to a course of treatment, rather than when it has had its full effect, that we abandon it. One day, as Mme Swann spoke the usual words about how pleased Gilberte would be to see me, setting within my reach the happiness I had deprived myself of for so long, all at once I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that it was still possible to have it. I could hardly wait for the next day – I had just decided to surprise Gilberte by turning up at her house the following afternoon, before dinner-time.