“I needn’t ask you, M. Swann, whether a man so much in the swim as yourself has been to the Mirlitons to see the portrait by Machard which the whole of Paris is rushing to see. Well and what do you think of it? Whose camp are you in, those who approve or those who don’t? It’s the same in every house in Paris now, no one talks about anything else but Machard’s portrait. You aren’t smart, you aren’t really cultured, you aren’t up-to-date unless you give an opinion on Machard’s portrait.”
Swann having replied that he had not seen this portrait, Mme Cottard was afraid that she might have hurt his feelings by obliging him to confess the omission.
“Oh, that’s quite all right! At least you admit it frankly. You don’t consider yourself disgraced because you haven’t seen Machard’s portrait. I find that most commendable. Well now, I have seen it. Opinion is divided, you know, there are some people who find it a bit over-finical, like whipped cream, they say; but I think it’s just ideal. Of course, she’s not a bit like the blue and yellow ladies of our friend Biche. But I must tell you quite frankly (you’ll think me dreadfully old-fashioned, but I always say just what I think), that I don’t understand his work. I can quite see the good points in his portrait of my husband, oh, dear me, yes, and it’s certainly less odd than most of what he does, but even then he had to give the poor man a blue moustache! But Machard! Just listen to this now, the husband of the friend I’m on my way to see at this very moment (which has given me the very great pleasure of your company), has promised her that if he is elected to the Academy (he’s one of the Doctor’s colleagues) he’ll get Machard to paint her portrait. There’s something to look forward to! I have another friend who insists that she’d rather have Leloir. I’m only a wretched Philistine, and for all I know Leloir may be technically superior to Machard. But I do think that the most important thing about a portrait, especially when it’s going to cost ten thousand francs, is that it should be like, and an agreeable likeness.”
Having delivered these words, to which she had been inspired by the loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card-case, the little number inked inside each of her gloves by the cleaner, and the embarrassment of speaking to Swann about the Verdurins, Mme Cottard, seeing that they had still a long way to go before they would reach the corner of the Rue Bonaparte where the conductor was to set her down, listened to the promptings of her heart, which counselled other words than these.
“Your ears must have been burning,” she ventured, “while we were on the yacht with Mme Verdurin. We talked about you all the time.”
Swann was genuinely astonished, for he supposed that his name was never uttered in the Verdurins’ presence.
“You see,” Mme Cottard went on, “Mme de Crécy was there; need I say more? Wherever Odette is, it’s never long before she begins talking about you. And you can imagine that it’s never unfavourably. What, you don’t believe me!” she went on, noticing that Swann looked sceptical.
And, carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, without putting any sly meaning into the word, which she used purely in the sense in which one employs it to speak of the affection that unites a pair of friends: “Why, she adores you! No, indeed, I’m sure it would never do to say anything against you when she was about; one would soon be put in one’s place! Whatever we might be doing, if we were looking at a picture, for instance, she would say, ‘If only we had him here, he’s the man who could tell us whether it’s genuine or not. There’s no one like him for that.’ And all day long she would be saying, ‘What can he be doing just now? I do hope he’s doing a little work! It’s too dreadful that a fellow with such gifts as he has should be so lazy.’ (Forgive me, won’t you.) ‘I can see him this very moment; he’s thinking of us, he’s wondering where we are.’ Indeed, she made a remark which I found absolutely charming. M. Verdurin asked her, ‘How in the world can you see what he’s doing, when he’s a thousand miles away?’ And Odette answered, ‘Nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend.’ No, I assure you, I’m not saying it just to flatter you; you have a true friend in her, such as one doesn’t often find. I can tell you, besides, that if you don’t know it you’re the only one who doesn’t. Mme Verdurin told me as much herself on our last day with them (one talks freely, don’t you know, before a parting), ‘I don’t say that Odette isn’t fond of us, but anything that we may say to her counts for very little beside what Swann might say.’ Oh, mercy, there’s the conductor stopping for me. Here I’ve been chatting away to you, and would have gone right past the Rue Bonaparte and never noticed … Will you be so very kind as to tell me if my plume is straight?”
And Mme Cottard withdrew from her muff, to offer it to Swann, a white-gloved hand from which there floated, together with a transfer-ticket, a vision of high life that pervaded the omnibus, blended with the fragrance of newly cleaned kid. And Swann felt himself overflowing with affection towards her, as well as towards Mme Verdurin (and almost towards Odette, for the feeling that he now entertained for her, being no longer tinged with pain, could scarcely be described, now, as love) as from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with fond eyes as she gallantly threaded her way along the Rue Bonaparte, her plume erect, her skirt held up in one hand, while in the other she clasped her umbrella and her card-case with its monogram exposed to view, her muff dancing up and down in front of her as she went.
To counterbalance the morbid feelings that Swann cherished for Odette, Mme Cottard, a wiser physician, in this case, than ever her husband would have been, had grafted on to them others more normal, feelings of gratitude, of friendship, which in Swann’s mind would make Odette seem more human (more like other women, since other women could inspire the same feelings in him), would hasten her final transformation back into the Odette, loved with an undisturbed affection, who had taken him home one evening after a revel at the painter’s to drink a glass of orangeade with Forcheville, the Odette with whom Swann had glimpsed the possibility of living in happiness.
In the past, having often thought with terror that a day must come when he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and as soon as he felt that love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it and hold it back. But now, to the diminution of his love there corresponded a simultaneous diminution in his desire to remain in love. For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. Occasionally the name glimpsed in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been Odette’s lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very mild, and, inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely emerged from that period in which he had so greatly suffered—but in which he had also known so voluptuous a way of feeling—and that the hazards of the road ahead might still enable him to catch an occasional furtive, distant glimpse of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if anything, an agreeable thrill, as, to the sad Parisian who is leaving Venice behind him to return to France, a last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain a clear view of it while he still could, he discovered that already it was too late; he would have liked to glimpse, as though it were a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had departed; but it is so difficult to enter into a state of duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could see nothing at all, abandoned the attempt, took the glasses from his nose and wiped them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy traveller who pulls his hat down over his eyes to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster out of the country in which he has lived for so long and which he had vowed not to allow to sl
ip away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed, like the same traveller if he does not awake until he has crossed the frontier and is back in France, when Swann chanced to alight, close at hand, on proof that Forcheville had been Odette’s lover, he realised that it caused him no pain, that love was now far behind, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the moment when he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been familiar before it was altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have wished—in thought at least—to have been able to bid farewell, while she still existed, to the Odette who had aroused his love and jealousy, to the Odette who had caused him to suffer, and whom now he would never see again.
He was mistaken. He was destined to see her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme Verdurin, Dr Cottard, a young man in a fez whom he failed to identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path which followed the line of the coast, and overhung the sea, now at a great height, now by a few feet only, so that they were continually going up and down. Those of the party who had reached the downward slope were no longer visible to those who were still climbing; what little daylight yet remained was failing, and it seemed as though they were about to be shrouded in darkness. From time to time the waves dashed against the edge, and Swann could feel on his cheek a shower of freezing spray. Odette told him to wipe it off, but he could not, and felt confused and helpless in her company, as well as because he was in his nightshirt. He hoped that, in the darkness, this might pass unnoticed; Mme Verdurin, however, fixed her astonished gaze upon him for an endless moment, during which he saw her face change shape, her nose grow longer, while beneath it there sprouted a heavy moustache. He turned round to look at Odette; her cheeks were pale, with little red spots, her features drawn and ringed with shadows; but she looked back at him with eyes welling with affection, ready to detach themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt that he loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist, glanced at a tiny watch, and said: “I must go.” She took leave of everyone in the same formal manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling him where they were to meet that evening, or next day. He dared not ask; he would have liked to follow her, but he was obliged, without turning back in her direction, to answer with a smile some question from Mme Verdurin; but his heart was frantically beating, he felt that he now hated Odette, he would gladly have gouged out those eyes which a moment ago he had loved so much, have crushed those flaccid cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme Verdurin, that is to say to draw further away with each step from Odette, who was going downhill in the other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left them. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had slipped away immediately after Odette. “They had obviously arranged it between them,” he added. “They must have met at the foot of the cliff, but they didn’t want to say good-bye together because of appearances. She is his mistress.” The strange young man burst into tears. Swann tried to console him. “After all, she’s quite right,” he said to the young man, drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more at ease. “I’ve advised her to do it dozens of times. Why be so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her.” So Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed at first to identify was himself too; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, the one who was dreaming the dream, and another whom he saw in front of him sporting a fez.
As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association of ideas, then a certain modification of the baron’s usual physiognomy, and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast, had made Swann give that name; in reality, and in everything that the person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images, Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying at the same time, momentarily, such a creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he thought he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of which he was not yet conscious he brought about sudden vicissitudes which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at specific points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; a tocsin sounded, people ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses; he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own heart, which with equal violence was anxiously beating in his breast. Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt an inexplicable pain and nausea. A peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at him as he passed: “Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night with her friend. He used to go about with her in the past, and she tells him everything. It was they who started the fire.” It was his valet, come to awaken him, and saying:
“Sir, it’s eight o’clock, and the barber is here. I’ve told him to call again in an hour.”
But these words, as they plunged through the waves of sleep in which Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing that refraction which turns a ray of light in the depths of water into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the clangour of a tocsin, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile, the scenery of his dream-stage scattered into dust, he opened his eyes, and heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, now distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he remembered the sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had written the day before to my grandfather to say that he was going to Combray that afternoon, having learned that Mme de Cambremer—Mlle Legrandin that had been—was spending a few days there. The association in his memory of her young and charming face with a countryside he had not visited for so long offered him a combined attraction which had made him decide at last to leave Paris for a while. As the different circumstances that bring us into contact with certain people do not coincide with the period in which we are in love with them, but, overlapping it, may occur before love has begun, and may be repeated after it has ended, the earliest appearances in our lives of a person who is destined to take our fancy later on assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as an indication, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann had often reverted in his mind to the image of Odette encountered in the theatre on that first evening when he had no thought of ever seeing her again—and that he now recalled the party at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s at which he had introduced General de Froberville to Mme de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon, on the self-same occasion, for the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist to be laid down simultaneously with the aggravation of a grief from which we are still suffering. And doubtless this could have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s. Who indeed can say whether, in the event of his having gone elsewhere that evening, other happinesses, other griefs might not have come to him, which later would have appeared to him to have been inevitable? But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had indeed taken place, and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact that he had decided to go to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s that evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shows, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any length of time, such as deciding what was most to be wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures, as yet unsuspected, which were already germinating there—the exact bal
ance between which was too difficult to establish—were linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity.
But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions to the barber to see that his stiffly brushed hair should not become disarranged on the journey, he thought of his dream again, and saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which—in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression that he had formed of her—he had ceased to notice since the early days of their intimacy, days to which doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek their exact sensation. And with the old, intermittent caddishness which reappeared in him when he was no longer unhappy and his moral standards dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Page 50