In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  Why should he think that she would enjoy out there with Forcheville or with other men intoxicating pleasures which she had never experienced with him, and which his jealousy alone had fabricated out of nothing? At Bayreuth, as in Paris, if it should happen that Forcheville thought of him at all, it would only be as of someone who counted for a great deal in Odette’s life, someone for whom he was obliged to make way when they met at her house. If Forcheville and she gloated at the idea of being there together in spite of him, it was he who would have engineered it by striving in vain to prevent her from going, whereas if he had approved of her plan, which for that matter was quite defensible, she would have had the appearance of being there on his advice, she would have felt that she had been sent there, housed there by him, would have been beholden to him for the pleasure which she derived from entertaining those people who had so often entertained her.

  And if—instead of letting her go off on bad terms with him, without having seen him again—he were to send her this money, if he were to encourage her to undertake this journey and go out of his way to make it agreeable for her, she would come running to him, happy and grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her which he had not known for nearly a week and which nothing else could replace. For once Swann could picture her to himself without revulsion, could see once again the friendliness in her smile, once the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love became once again, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure he took in admiring as a spectacle, or in examining as a phenomenon, the dawn of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the emission of a particular vocal cadence. And this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone by her presence or by her letters could assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse, as another need which characterised this new period in Swann’s life, when the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual overflowing, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his inner life, any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery. This other need, which developed independently of the visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and improve his knowledge of it.

  And so, through the chemical action of his malady, after he had created jealousy out of his love, he began again to manufacture tenderness and pity for Odette. She had become once more the old Odette, charming and kind. He was full of remorse for having treated her harshly. He wished her to come to him, and, before she came, he wished to have already procured for her some pleasure, so as to watch her gratitude taking shape in her face and moulding her smile.

  And consequently Odette, certain of seeing him come to her after a few days, as tender and submissive as before, to plead with her for a reconciliation, became inured, was no longer afraid of displeasing him or even of making him angry, and refused him, whenever it suited her, the favours by which he set most store.

  Perhaps she did not realise how sincere he had been with her during their quarrel, when he had told her that he would not send her any money and would do everything he could to hurt her. Perhaps she did not realise, either, how sincere he was, if not with her, at any rate with himself, on other occasions when, for the sake of the future of their relationship, to show Odette that he was capable of doing without her, that a rupture was still possible between them, he decided to wait some time before going to see her again.

  Sometimes it would be after several days during which she had caused him no fresh anxiety; and since he knew that he was likely to derive no very great pleasure from his impending visits, but more probably some annoyance which would put an end to his present state of calm, he would write to her saying that he was very busy, and would not be able to see her on any of the days that he had suggested. Meanwhile, a letter from her, crossing his, asked him to postpone one of those very meetings. He wondered why; his suspicions, his anguish, again took hold of him. He could no longer abide, in the new state of agitation into which he found himself plunged, by the arrangements which he had made in his preceding state of comparative calm; he would hurry round to her, and would insist upon seeing her on each of the following days. And even if she had not written first, if she merely acknowledged his letter, agreeing to his request for a brief separation, it was enough to make him unable to rest without seeing her. For, contrary to his calculations, Odette’s acquiescence had entirely changed his attitude. Like everyone who possesses something precious, in order to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there. But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a derangement of all the other parts, a new state which it was impossible to foresee in the old.

  But at other times—when Odette was on the point of going away for a holiday—it was after some trifling quarrel for which he had chosen the pretext that he resolved not to write to her and not to see her until her return, thus giving the appearance (and expecting the reward) of a serious rupture, which she would perhaps regard as final, to a separation the greater part of which was the inevitable consequence of her proposed journey, which he was merely allowing to start a little sooner than it must. At once he could imagine Odette puzzled, anxious, distressed at having received neither visit nor letter from him, and this picture of her, by calming his jealousy, made it easy for him to break himself of the habit of seeing her. At moments, no doubt, in the furthest recesses of his mind where his determination had thrust it away thanks to the long interval of the three weeks’ separation which he had accepted, it was with pleasure that he considered the idea that he would see Odette again on her return; but it was also with so little impatience that he began to wonder whether he would not readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy an abstinence. It had lasted, so far, but three days, a much shorter time than he had often spent without seeing Odette, and without having, as on this occasion, premeditated it. And yet, suddenly, some minor vexation or physical ailment—by inciting him to regard the present moment as an exceptional one, outside the rules, one in which common wisdom would allow him to take advantage of the soothing effects of a pleasure and, until there was some purpose in a resumption of effort, to give his will a rest—suspended the operation of the latter, which ceased to exert its inhibitive control; or, without that even, the thought of something he had forgotten to ask Odette, such as whether she had decided in what colour she would have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to some investment, whether they were ordinary or preference shares that she wished him to buy (for it was all very well to show her that he could live without seeing her, but if, after that, the carriage had to be painted over again, or if the shares produced no dividend, a lot of good it would have done him)—and suddenly, like a stretched piece of elastic which is let go, or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped open, the idea of seeing her again sprang back from the distant depths in which it lay dormant into the field of the present and of immediate possibilities.

  It sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance, so irresistible, in fact, that Swann had found it far less painful to watch the fortnight he was to spend separated from Odette creeping by day after day than to wait the ten minutes it took his coachman to bring round the carriage which was to take him to her, minutes which he spent in transports of impatience and joy, in which he recaptured a thousand times over, to lavish on it all the wealth of his affection, that idea of meeting her again which, by so abrupt a reversal, at a moment when he supposed it so remote, was once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness. The fact was that his idea no longer found as an obstacle in its course the desire to resist it without furth
er delay, a desire which had ceased to have any place in Swann’s mind since, having proved to himself—or so at least he believed—that he was so easily capable of resisting it, he no longer saw any danger in postponing a plan of separation which he was now certain of being able to put into operation whenever he wished. Furthermore, this idea of seeing her again came back to him adorned with a novelty, a seductiveness, armed with a virulence, which long habit had dulled but which had been retempered during this privation, not of three days but of a fortnight (for a period of abstinence may be calculated, by anticipation, as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it), and had converted what had been until then a pleasure in store which could easily be sacrificed into an unlooked-for happiness which he was powerless to resist. Finally, the idea returned to him embellished by his ignorance of what Odette might have thought, might perhaps have done, on finding that he had given no sign of life, with the result that what he was going now to find was the entrancing revelation of an almost unknown Odette.

  But she, just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was only a sham, saw nothing but a pretext in the questions he was now coming to ask her, about the repainting of her carriage or the purchase of shares. For she could not reconstruct the several phases of these crises through which he was passing, and the notion she had formed of them omitted any attempt to understand their mechanism, but looked only to what she knew beforehand, their necessary, never-failing and always identical termination. An incomplete notion (though possibly all the more profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered himself misunderstood by Odette, just as a drug-addict or a consumptive, each persuaded that he has been held back, one by some outside event at the moment when he was about to shake himself free of his inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the moment when he was about to be finally cured, feels himself to be misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance to these alleged contingencies, mere disguises, according to him, assumed, so as to make themselves felt once more, by the vice of the one and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased to weigh heavily and incurably upon the patients while they were nursing their dreams of reformation or health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann’s love had reached the stage at which the boldest of physicians or (in the case of certain affections) of surgeons ask themselves whether to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still reasonable or indeed possible.

  Certainly, of the extent of this love Swann had no direct awareness. When he sought to measure, it, it happened sometimes that he found it diminished, shrunk almost to nothing; for instance, the lack of enthusiasm, amounting almost to distaste, which, in the days before he was in love with Odette, he had felt for her expressive features, her faded complexion, returned on certain days. “Really, I’m making distinct headway,” he would tell himself next day. “Looking at things quite honestly, I can’t say I got much pleasure last night from being in bed with her. It’s an odd thing, but I actually thought her ugly.” And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette’s person, indeed, no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, “It’s she!” as though suddenly we were to be shown in a detached, externalised form one of our own maladies, and we found it bore no resemblance to what we are suffering. “She”—he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it is a point of resemblance between love and death, far more striking than those which are usually pointed out, that they make us probe deeper, in the fear that its reality may elude us, into the mystery of personality. And this malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.

  By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that when by chance he reappeared in society, reminding himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting (although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate of its worth), might restore something of his own prestige in Odette’s eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming to proclaim such things less precious), he would feel there, side by side with his distress at being in places and among people she did not know, the same detached pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the elegance of his wardrobe and of his servants’ liveries, the soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the mechanics of daily life at Versailles, what Mme de Maintenon ate and drank, or the shrewd avarice and great pomp of Lulli. And to the small extent to which this detachment was not absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which Swann was tasting was that he could take refuge for a moment in those few and distant parts of himself which had remained more or less extraneous to his love and to his pain. In this respect the personality which my great-aunt attributed to him as “young Swann,” as distinct from the more individual personality of Charles Swann, was the one in which he was now happiest. Once, wishing to send the Princesse de Parme some fruit for her birthday (and because she could often be of use indirectly to Odette, by letting her have seats for galas and jubilees and the like) and not being quite sure how to order it, he had entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother who, delighted to do an errand for him, had written to him, when sending him the account, to say that she had not ordered all the fruit from the same place, but the grapes from Crapote, whose speciality they were, the strawberries from Jauret, the pears from Chevet, who always had the best, and so on, “every fruit inspected and examined, one by one, by myself.” And in the sequel, by the cordiality with which the Princess thanked him, he had been able to judge of the flavour of the strawberries and of the ripeness of the pears. But, most of all, that “every fruit inspected and examined, one by one, by myself” had brought balm to his sufferings by carrying his mind off to a region which he rarely visited, although it was his by right as the heir to a rich, upper-middle-class family in which had been handed down from generation to generation the knowledge of the “right places” and the art of placing an order.

  Indeed, he had too long forgotten that he was “young Swann” not to feel, when he assumed the role again for a moment, a keener pleasure than those he might have felt at other times but which had palled; and if the friendliness of the bourgeoisie, for whom he had never been anything else than “young Swann,” was less animated than that of the aristocracy (though more flattering, for all that, since with them it is always inseparable from respect), no letter from a royal personage, whatever princely entertainment it offered, could ever be so agreeable to Swann as a letter inviting him to be a witness, or merely to be present, at a wedding in the family of some old friends of his parents, some of whom had kept up with him—like my grandfather, who, the year before these events, had invited him to my mother’s wedding—while others barely knew him by sight, but considered themselves in duty bound to show civility to the son, to the worthy successor, of the late M. Swann.

  But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of its members, the nobility was in a certain sense also a part of his house, his domestic establishment, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon his brilliant connexi
ons, the same external support, the same solid comfort as when he looked at the fine estates, the fine silver, the fine table-linen which had come to him from his own family. And the thought that, if he were struck down by a sudden illness and confined to the house, the people whom his valet would instinctively run to fetch would be the Duc de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg and the Baron de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old Françoise derived from the knowledge that she would one day be buried in her own fine sheets, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so exquisitely darned that it merely enhanced one’s idea of the skill and patience of the seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which in her mind’s eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually of wealth and prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of all—since in every one of his actions and thoughts which had reference to Odette, Swann was constantly obsessed and influenced by the unavowed feeling that he was, perhaps not less dear, but less welcome to her than anyone, even the most tedious of the Verdurin “faithful”—when he betook himself to a world in which he was the paragon of taste, a man whom no pains were spared to attract, whom people were genuinely sorry not to see, he began once again to believe in the existence of a happier life, almost to feel an appetite for it, as an invalid may feel who has been bedridden for months, on a strict diet, when he picks up a newspaper and reads the account of an official banquet or an advertisement for a cruise round Sicily.