In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  Except when he asked her for Vinteuil’s little phrase instead of the Valse des Roses, Swann made no effort to induce her to play the things that he himself preferred, or, in literature any more than in music, to correct the manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was not intelligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell her about the great poets, she had imagined that she would immediately get to know whole pages of romantic and heroic verse, in the style of the Vicomte de Borelli, only even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman, if it was a woman who had inspired him, and once Swann had told her that no one knew, she had lost all interest in that painter. She would often say: “Poetry, you know—well, of course, there’d be nothing like it if it was all true, if the poets believed everything they say. But as often as not you’ll find there’s no one so calculating as those fellows. I know something about it: I had a friend, once, who was in love with a poet of sorts. In his verses he never spoke of anything but love and the sky and the stars. Oh! she was properly taken in! He did her out of more than three hundred thousand francs.”

  If, then, Swann tried to show her what artistic beauty consisted in, how one ought to appreciate poetry or painting, after a minute or two she would cease to listen, saying: “Yes … I never thought it would be like that.” And he felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to lie to her, assuring her that what he had said was nothing, that he had only touched the surface, that he had no time to go into it all properly, that there was more in it than that. Then she would interrupt sharply: “More in it? What?… Do tell me!”, but he did not tell her, knowing how feeble it would appear to her, how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching, and fearing lest, disillusioned with art, she might at the same time be disillusioned with love.

  With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed. “You’re always so reserved; I can’t make you out.” She was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact. And indeed it happens, often enough, to greater men than Swann, to a scientist or an artist, when he is not misunderstood by the people among whom he lives, that the feeling on their part which proves that they have been convinced of the superiority of his intellect is not their admiration for his ideas—for these are beyond them—but their respect for his kindness. Swann’s position in society also inspired Odette with respect, but she had no desire that he should attempt to secure invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such attempts would be bound to fail; perhaps she even feared that, merely by speaking of her to his friends, he might provoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind. At all events she had made him promise never to mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into society was, she had told him, a quarrel she had once had with a friend who had avenged herself subsequently by speaking ill of her. “But surely,” Swann objected, “not everyone knew your friend.” “Yes, but don’t you see, it spreads like wildfire; people are so horrid.” Swann found this story frankly incomprehensible; on the other hand, he knew that such generalisations as “People are so horrid,” and “A word of scandal spreads like wildfire,” were generally accepted as true; there must be cases to which they were applicable. Could Odette’s be one of these? He teased himself with the question, though not for long, for he too was subject to that mental torpor that had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced by a difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which so frightened Odette did not, perhaps, inspire her with any great longings, since it was too far removed from the world she knew for her to be able to form any clear conception of it. At the same time, while in certain aspects she had retained a genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether the same as that of society people. For the latter, it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index. Society people know this index by heart; they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they have extracted a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation that Swann, for example, without needing to draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. But Odette was one of those persons (an extremely numerous category, whatever the fashionable world may think, and to be found in every class of society) who do not share these notions, but imagine smartness to be something quite other, which assumes different aspects according to the circle to which they themselves belong, but has the special characteristic—common alike to the fashion of which Odette dreamed and to that before which Mme Cottard bowed—of being directly accessible to all. The other kind, the smartness of society people, is, it must be admitted, accessible also; but there is a time-lag. Odette would say of someone: “He only goes to smart places.”

  And if Swann asked her what she meant by that, she would answer with a touch of contempt: “Smart places! Why, good heavens, just fancy, at your age, having to be told what the smart places are! Well, on Sunday mornings there’s the Avenue de l’Impératrice, and round the lake at five o’clock, and on Thursdays, the Eden Théâtre, and the Races on Fridays; then there are the balls …”

  “What balls?”

  “Why, silly, the balls people give in Paris; the smart ones, I mean. For instance, Herbinger, you know who I mean, the fellow who’s in one of the jobbers’ offices. Yes, of course you must know him, he’s one of the best-known men in Paris, that great big fair-haired boy who’s such a toff—always has a flower in his buttonhole, a parting at the back, light-coloured overcoats. He goes about with that old frump, takes her to all the first-nights. Well, he gave a ball the other night, and all the smart people in Paris were there. I should have loved to go! But you had to show your invitation at the door, and I couldn’t get one anywhere. Still, I’m just as glad, now, that I didn’t go; I should have been killed in the crush, and seen nothing. It’s really just to be able to say you’ve been to Herbinger’s ball. You know what a braggart I am! However, you may be quite certain that half the people who tell you they were there are lying … But I’m surprised you weren’t there, a regular ‘swell’ like you.”

  Swann made no attempt, however, to modify this conception of fashionable life; feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth, was just as fatuous and trivial, he saw no point in imparting it to his mistress, with the result that, after a few months, she ceased to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went, except as a means of obtaining tickets for the paddock at race-meetings or first-nights at the theatre. She hoped that he would continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances, but in other respects she was inclined to regard them as anything but smart, ever since she had passed the Marquise de Villeparisis in the street, wearing a black woollen dress and a bonnet with strings.

  “But she looks like an usherette, like an old concierge, darling! A marquise, her! Goodness knows I’m not a marquise, but you’d have to pay me a lot of money before you’d get me to go round Paris rigged out like that!”

  Nor could she understand Swann’s continuing to live in his house on the Quai d’Orleans, which, though she dared not tell him so, she considered unworthy of him.

  It was true that she claimed to be fond of “antiques,” and used to assume a rapturous and knowing air when she confessed how she loved to spend the whole day “rummaging” in curio shops, hunting for “bric-à-brac” and “period” things. Although it was a point of honour to wh
ich she obstinately clung, as though obeying some old family precept, that she should never answer questions or “account for” how she spent her days, she spoke to Swann once about a friend to whose house she had been invited, and had found that everything in it was “of the period.” Swann could not get her to tell him what the period was. But after thinking the matter over she replied that it was “mediaeval”; by which she meant that the walls were panelled. Some time later she spoke to him again of her friend, and added, in the hesitant tone and with the knowing air one adopts in referring to a person one has met at dinner the night before and of whom one had never heard until then, but whom one’s hosts seemed to regard as someone so celebrated and important that one hopes that one’s listener will know who is meant and be duly impressed: “Her dining-room … is … eighteenth century!” She herself had thought it hideous, all bare, as though the house were still unfinished; women looked frightful in it, and it would never become the fashion. She mentioned it again, a third time, when she showed Swann a card with the name and address of the man who had designed the dining-room, and whom she wanted to send for when she had enough money, to see whether he couldn’t do one for her too; not one like that, of course, but one of the sort she used to dream of and which unfortunately her little house wasn’t large enough to contain, with tall sideboards, Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the château at Blois. It was on this occasion that she blurted out to Swann what she really thought of his abode on the Quai d’Orléans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming, but in the “sham-antique.”

  “You wouldn’t have her live like you among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!” she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the bourgeois housewife getting the better of the acquired dilettantism of the cocotte.

  People who enjoyed picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them; when a man had told her at dinner that he loved to wander about and get his hands covered with dust in old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in this commercial age since he was not interested in its concerns, and that he belonged to another generation altogether, she would come home saying: “Why, he’s an adorable creature, so sensitive, I had no idea,” and she would conceive for him an immediate bond of friendship. But on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had these tastes but did not speak of them, left her cold. She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: “It’s not the same thing, you see, with him,” and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

  Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to counteract those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, and which in fact he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which enchanted him even, for were they not so many characteristic features by virtue of which the essence of this woman revealed itself to him? And so, when she was in a happy mood because she was going to see the Reine Topaze,10 or when her expression grew serious, worried, petulant because she was afraid of missing the flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable in order to set the seal upon a woman’s certificate of elegance, Swann, enraptured as we all are at times by the naturalness of a child or the verisimilitude of a portrait which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to the surface of her face that he could not refrain from touching it with his lips. “Ah, so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower-show, does she? She wants to be admired, does she? Very well, we’ll take her there, we can but obey.” As Swann was a little short-sighted, he had to resign himself to wearing spectacles at home when working, while to face the world he adopted a monocle as being less disfiguring. The first time that she saw it in his eye, she could not contain her joy: “I really do think—for a man, that is to say—it’s tremendously smart! How nice you look with it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!” she concluded with a tinge of regret. He liked Odette to say these things, just as if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops independently of their sensuality, a weird disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to both simultaneously; yielding to the seductions of more and more rarefied works of art in the company of more and more vulgar women, taking a little servant-girl to a screened box at the theatre for the performance of a decadent piece he particularly wanted to see, or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, convinced, moreover, that a cultivated society woman would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to remain so prettily silent. But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love, for the sake of which he had preferred them to his own. If he went again to Serge Panine, if he looked out for opportunities of going to see Olivier Métra conduct,11 it was for the pleasure of being initiated into every one of Odette’s ideas and fancies, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes. This charm, which her favourite plays and pictures and places possessed, of drawing him closer to her, struck him as being more mysterious than the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places with which she had no connection. Besides, having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to languish, and his man-of-the-world scepticism having permeated them without his being aware of it, he felt (or at least he had felt for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined. And as he considered that the importance Odette attached to receiving an invitation to a private view was not in itself any more ridiculous than the pleasure he himself had at one time felt in lunching with the Prince of Wales, so he did not think that the admiration she professed for Monte-Carlo or for the Righi was any more unreasonable than his own liking for Holland (which she imagined to be ugly) and for Versailles (which bored her to tears). And so he denied himself the pleasure of visiting those places, delighted to tell himself that it was for her sake, that he wished only to feel, to enjoy things with her.

  Like everything else that formed part of Odette’s environment, and was no more, in a sense, than the means whereby he might see and talk to her more often, he enjoyed the society of the Verdurins. There, since at the heart of all their entertainments, dinners, musical evenings, games, suppers in fancy dress, excursions to the country, theatre outings, even the infrequent “gala evenings” when they entertained the “bores,” there was the presence of Odette, the sight of Odette, conversation with Odette, an inestimable boon which the Verdurins bestowed on Swann by inviting him to their house, he was happier in the little “nucleus” than anywhere else, and tried to find some genuine merit in each of its members, imagining that this would lead him to frequent their society from choice for the rest of his life. Not daring to tell himself, lest he should doubt the truth of the suggestion, tha
t he would always love Odette, at least in supposing that he would go on visiting the Verdurins (a proposition which, a priori, raised fewer fundamental objections on the part of his intelligence) he saw himself in the future continuing to meet Odette every evening; that did not, perhaps, come quite to the same thing as loving her for ever, but for the moment, while he loved her, to feel that he would not eventually cease to see her was all that he asked. “What a charming atmosphere!” he said to himself. “How entirely genuine is the life these people lead! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are than the people one knows! And Mme Verdurin, in spite of a few trifling exaggerations which are rather absurd, what a sincere love of painting and music she has, what a passion for works of art, what anxiety to give pleasure to artists! Her ideas about some of the people one knows are not quite right, but then their ideas about artistic circles are still more wrong! Possibly I make no great intellectual demands in conversation, but I’m perfectly happy talking to Cottard, although he does trot out those idiotic puns. And as for the painter, if he is rather disagreeably pretentious when he tries to shock, still he has one of the finest brains that I’ve ever come across. Besides, what is most important, one feels quite free there, one does what one likes without constraint or fuss. What a flow of good humour there is every day in that drawing-room! No question about it, with a few rare exceptions I never want to go anywhere else again. It will become more and more of a habit, and I shall spend the rest of my life there.”

  And as the qualities which he supposed to be intrinsic to the Verdurins were no more than the superficial reflection of pleasures which he had enjoyed in their society through his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound, more vital, when those pleasures were too. Since Mme Verdurin often gave Swann what alone could constitute his happiness—since, on an evening when he felt anxious because Odette had talked rather more to one of the party than to another, and, irritated by this, would not take the initiative of asking her whether she was coming home with him, Mme Verdurin brought peace and joy to his troubled spirit by saying spontaneously: “Odette, you’ll see M. Swann home, won’t you?”; and since, when the summer holidays were impending and he had asked himself uneasily whether Odette might not leave Paris without him, whether he would still be able to see her every day, Mme Verdurin had invited them both to spend the summer with her in the country—Swann, unconsciously allowing gratitude and self-interest to infiltrate his intelligence and to influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim that Mme Verdurin was “a great soul.” Should one of his old fellow-students from the École du Louvre speak to him of some delightful or eminent people he had come across, “I’d a hundred times rather have the Verdurins” he would reply. And, with a solemnity of diction that was new in him: “They are magnanimous creatures, and magnanimity is, after all, the one thing that matters, the one thing that gives us distinction here on earth. You see, there are only two classes of people, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives. And so,” he went on, with the slight thrill of emotion which a man feels when, even without being fully aware of it, he says something not because it is true but because he enjoys saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words as though they came from someone else, “the die is now cast. I have elected to love none but magnanimous souls, and to live only in an atmosphere of magnanimity. You ask me whether Mme Verdurin is really intelligent. I can assure you that she has given me proofs of a nobility of heart, of a loftiness of soul, to which no one could possibly attain without a corresponding loftiness of mind. Without question, she has a profound understanding of art. But it is not, perhaps, in that that she is most admirable; every little action, ingeniously, exquisitely kind, which she has performed for my sake, every thoughtful attention, every little gesture, quite domestic and yet quite sublime, reveals a more profound comprehension of existence than all your text-books of philosophy.”