It was not only Odette’s lassitude, however, that he must take pains to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own. Feeling that, since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have very much to say to him, he was afraid lest the manner—at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly unalterable—which she now adopted when they were together should ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, which alone had aroused and sustained his love, that a day might come when she would declare her passion. And so, in an attempt to revitalise Odette’s too fixed and unvarying attitude towards him, of which he was afraid of growing weary, he would write to her, suddenly, a letter full of feigned disappointment and simulated anger, which he sent off so that it should reach her before dinner. He knew that she would be alarmed, and that she would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard her utter; and indeed, it was by this device that he had won from her the most affectionate letters she had so far written him. One of them, which she had sent round to him at midday from the Maison Dorée (it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête given for the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) began: “My dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write,” and had been put in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she had not had time to write to him, when he arrived at the Verdurins’ she would come running up to him with an “I’ve something to say to you!” and he would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.
Even before he reached the Verdurins’ door, when he caught sight of the great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming creature he would see as he entered the room, basking in that golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out in silhouette, slender and black, between lamp and window, like those little pictures which one sees at regular intervals round a translucent lampshade, the other panels of which are simply naked light. He would try to distinguish Odette’s silhouette. And then, when he was once inside, without his being aware of it, his eyes would sparkle suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin said to the painter: “Hm. Seems to be warming up.” And indeed her presence gave the house what none of the other houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort of nervous system, a sensory network which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart.
Thus the simple and regular manifestations of this social organism, the “little clan,” automatically provided Swann with a daily rendezvous with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing which he incurred no very great risk since, even though he had written to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and accompany her home.
But one evening, when, depressed by the thought of that inevitable dark drive together, he had taken his young seamstress all the way to the Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at the Verdurins’, he arrived at the house so late that Odette, supposing that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare of her, Swann felt a sudden stab at the heart; he trembled at the thought of being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he was able for the first time to gauge, having always, hitherto, had that certainty of finding it whenever he wished which (as in the case of all our pleasures) reduced if it did not altogether blind him to its dimensions.
“Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn’t here?” M. Verdurin asked his wife. “I think we may say that he’s hooked.”
“The face he pulled?” exploded Dr Cottard who, having left the house for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and did not know whom they were discussing.
“D’you mean to say you didn’t meet him on the doorstep—the loveliest of Swanns?”
“No. M. Swann has been here?”
“Just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a Swann tremendously agitated. In a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left.”
“You mean to say that she is ‘on a friendly footing’ with him, that she has ‘given the go-ahead’?” inquired the doctor, cautiously trying out the meaning of these phrases.
“Why, of course not, there’s absolutely nothing in it: in fact, between you and me, I think she’s making a great mistake, and behaving like a silly little fool, which is what she is, in fact.”
“Come, come, come!” said M. Verdurin, “How on earth do you know that there’s nothing in it? We haven’t been there to see, have we now?”
“She would have told me,” answered Mme Verdurin with dignity. “I may say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I told her that she ought to sleep with him. She makes out that she can’t, that she did in fact have a crush on him at first, but he’s always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she doesn’t care for him in that way, she says; it’s an ideal love, she’s afraid of rubbing the bloom off—but how should I know? And yet it’s just what she needs.”
“I beg to differ from you,” M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. “I don’t entirely care for the gentleman. I feel he puts on airs.”
Mme Verdurin’s whole body stiffened, and her eyes stared blankly as though she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device which enabled her to appear not to have caught the sound of that unutterable phrase which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to “put on airs” in their house, in other words consider themselves “superior” to them.
“Anyhow, if there’s nothing in it, I don’t suppose it’s because our friend believes she’s virtuous,” M. Verdurin went on sarcastically. “And yet, you never know; he seems to think she’s intelligent. I don’t know whether you heard the way he lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil’s sonata. I’m devoted to Odette, but really—to expound theories of aesthetics to her—the man must be a prize idiot.”
“Look here, I won’t have you saying nasty things about Odette,” broke in Mme Verdurin in her “little girl” manner. “She’s sweet.”
“But that doesn’t prevent her from being sweet. We’re not saying anything nasty about her, only that she isn’t exactly the embodiment of virtue or intellect. After all,” he turned to the painter, “does it matter so very much whether she’s virtuous or not? She might be a great deal less charming if she were.”
On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins’ butler, who had been somewhere else a moment earlier when he arrived, and who had been asked by Odette to tell Swann in case he still turned up (but that was at least an hour ago) that she would probably stop for a cup of chocolate at Prévost’s on her way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost’s, but every few yards his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles that he would gladly have crushed beneath his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure and so, possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his arriving at Prévost’s in time, and of finding her still there. And then, in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the thoughts which had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard at the Verdurins’ that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as though he had just woken up. What! all this agitation simply because he would not see Odette till tomorrow, exactly what he had been hoping, not an hour before, as he drove towards Mme Verdurin’s. He was obliged to acknowledge that now, as he sat in t
hat same carriage and drove to Prévost’s, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even—that a new person was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a person whom he might, perhaps, be unable to shake off, whom he might have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness. And yet, from the moment he had begun to feel that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed somehow more interesting.
He gave scarcely a thought to the likelihood that this possible meeting at Prévost’s (the tension of waiting for which so ravished and stripped bare the intervening moments that he could find nothing, not one idea, not one memory in his mind behind which his troubled spirit might take shelter and repose) would after all, should it take place, be much the same as all their meetings, of no great significance. As on every other evening, once he was in Odette’s company, casting furtive glances at her changeable face and instantly withdrawing his eyes lest she should read in them the first signs of desire and no longer believe in his indifference, he would cease to be able even to think of her, so busy would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately and to ensure, without betraying his concern, that he would find her again next evening at the Verdurins’; pretexts, that is to say, which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more, the disappointment and the torture engendered by the vain presence of this woman whom he pursued yet never dared embrace.
She was not at Prévost’s; he must search for her, then, in every restaurant along the boulevards. To save time, while he went in one direction, he sent in the other his coachman Rémi (Rizzo’s Doge Loredan) for whom he presently—after a fruitless search—found himself waiting at the spot where the carriage was to meet him. It did not appear, and Swann tantalised himself with alternate pictures of the approaching moment, as one in which Rémi would say to him: “That lady is there,” or as one in which Rémi would say to him: “That lady was not in any of the cafés.” And so he saw the remainder of the evening stretching out in front of him, single and yet alternative, preceded either by the meeting with Odette which would put an end to his agony, or by the abandonment of all hope of finding her that evening, the acceptance of the necessity of returning home without having seen her.
The coachman returned; but, as he drew up opposite him, Swann asked, not “Did you find the lady?” but “Remind me, tomorrow, to order in some more firewood. I’m sure we must be running short.” Perhaps he had persuaded himself that, if Rémi had at last found Odette in some café where she was waiting for him, then the baleful alternative was already obliterated by the realisation, begun already in his mind, of the happy one, and that there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a joy already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again. But it was also from the force of inertia; there was in his soul that want of adaptability that afflicts the bodies of certain people who, when the moment comes to avoid a collision, to snatch their clothes out of reach of a flame, or to perform any other such necessary movement, take their time, begin by remaining for a moment in their original position, as though seeking to find in it a fulcrum, a springboard, a source of momentum. And no doubt, if the coachman had interrupted him with “That lady is there,” he would have answered, “Oh, yes, of course, the errand I sent you on, well, I wouldn’t have thought it,” and would have continued to discuss his supply of firewood, so as to hide from his servant the emotion he had felt, and to give himself time to break away from the thraldom of his anxieties and devote himself to happiness.
The coachman came back, however, with the report that he could not find her anywhere, and added the advice, as an old and privileged servant: “I think, sir, that all we can do now is to go home.”
But the air of indifference which Swann could so lightly assume when Rémi uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a cast-off cloak when he saw Rémi attempt to make him abandon hope and retire from the quest.
“Certainly not!” he exclaimed. “We must find the lady. It’s most important. She would be extremely put out—it’s a business matter—and vexed with me if she didn’t see me.”
“But I don’t see how the lady can be vexed,” answered Rémi, “since it was she who left without waiting for you, sir, and said she was going to Prévost’s, and then wasn’t there.”
Meanwhile the restaurants were closing and their lights began to go out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness. From time to time the shadowy figure of a woman gliding up to Swann, murmuring a few words in his ear, asking him to take her home, would make him start. Anxiously he clutched at all these dim forms, as though, among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.
Among all the modes by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when—in this moment of deprivation—the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult; to assuage—the insensate, agonising need to possess exclusively.
Swann made Rémi drive him to such restaurants as were still open; it was only the hypothesis of a happy outcome that he had envisaged with calm; now he no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon their meeting, and promised in case of success to reward his coachman, as though, by inspiring in him a will to succeed which would reinforce his own, he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette—assuming that she had long since gone home to bed—might yet be found seated in some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the search as far as the Maison Dorée, burst twice into Tortoni’s and, still without seeing her, had just emerged from the Café Anglais and was striding, wild-eyed, towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens, when he collided with a person coming in the opposite direction: it was Odette. She explained, later, that there had been no room at Prévost’s, that she had gone, instead, to sup at the Maison Dorée, in an alcove where he must have failed to see her, and that she was going back to her carriage.
She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As for him, he had ransacked the streets of Paris not because he supposed it possible that he should find her, but because it was too painful for him to abandon the attempt. But this happiness which his reason had never ceased to regard as unattainable, that evening at least, now seemed doubly real; for, since he himself had contributed nothing to it by anticipating probabilities, it remained external to himself; there was no need for him to think it into existence—it was from itself that there emanated, it was itself that projected towards him, that truth whose radiance dispelled like a bad dream the loneliness he had so dreaded, that truth on which his happy musings now dwelt unthinkingly. So will a traveller, arriving in glorious weather at the Mediterranean shore, no longer certain of the existence of the lands he has left behind, let his eyes be dazzled by the radiance streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure of the sea.
He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept waiting, and ordered his own to follow.
She was holding in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was dressed, beneath her cloak, in a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side to reveal a large triangle of whit
e silk skirt, and with a yoke, also of white silk, in the cleft of the low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward in their seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless.
“It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own. Then he went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word; just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I straighten the flowers on your bodice? The jolt has disarranged them. I’m afraid of their dropping out, so I’d just like to fasten them a little more securely.”
She was not used to being made so much fuss of by men, and she smiled as she answered: “No, not at all; I don’t mind in the least.”
But he, daunted a little by her answer, and also, perhaps, to bear out the pretence that he had been sincere in adopting the stratagem, or even because he was already beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed, “No, no, you mustn’t speak. You’ll get out of breath again. You can easily answer in signs; I shall understand. Really and truly now, you don’t mind my doing this? Look, there’s a little—I think it must be pollen, spilt over your dress. Do you mind if I brush it off with my hand? That’s not too hard? I’m not hurting you, am I? Perhaps I’m tickling you a bit? I don’t want to touch the velvet in case I crease it. But you see, I really had to fasten the flowers; they would have fallen out if I hadn’t. Like that, now; if I just tuck them a little further down … Seriously, I’m not annoying you, am I? And if I just sniff them to see whether they’ve really got no scent? I don’t believe I ever smelt any before. May I? Tell the truth, now.”
Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who should say, “You’re quite mad; you know very well that I like it.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Page 31
