In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  If he was obliged to make excuses to his society friends for not visiting them, it was precisely for visiting her that he sought to excuse himself to Odette. Even so, he paid for his visits (asking himself at the end of the month, should he have overtaxed her patience and gone rather often to see her, whether it would be enough if he sent her four thousand francs), and for each one found a pretext, a present that he had to bring her, a piece of information which she required, M. de Charlus whom he had met actually going to her house and who had insisted on Swann’s accompanying him. And, failing an excuse, he would ask M. de Charlus to go round to her house and say to her, as though spontaneously, in the course of conversation, that he had just remembered something he had to say to Swann, and would she please send a message to Swann asking him to come to her then and there; but as a rule Swann waited at home in vain, and M. de Charlus informed him later in the evening that his ruse had not proved successful. With the result that, if she was now frequently away from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her, and she who, when she was in love with him, used to say “I’m always free” and “What do I care what other people think?” now, whenever he wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded some engagement. When he spoke of going to a charity entertainment, or a private view, or a first-night at which she was to be present, she would complain that he wished to advertise their liaison, that he was treating her like a whore. Things came to such a pitch that, in an effort to avoid being debarred from meeting her anywhere, Swann, remembering that she knew and was deeply attached to my great-uncle Adolphe, whose friend he himself had also been, went to see him in his little flat in the Rue de Belle-chasse, to ask him to use his influence with Odette. Since she invariably adopted a poetical tone when she spoke to Swann about my uncle, saying: “Ah, yes, he’s not in the least like you; it’s such an exquisite thing, a great, a beautiful thing, his friendship for me. He’s not the sort of man who would have so little consideration for me as to let himself be seen with me everywhere in public,” this was embarrassing for Swann, who did not know quite to what rhetorical pitch he should screw himself up in speaking of Odette to my uncle. He began by alluding to her a priori excellence, her axiomatic and seraphic super-humanity, the inspiration of her transcendental, inexpressible virtues. “I should like to speak to you about her,” he went on. “You know what an incomparably superior woman, what an adorable creature, what an angel Odette is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris. Not everyone knows Odette in the light in which you and I have been privileged to know her. And so there are people who think I’m behaving rather foolishly; she won’t even allow me to meet her out of doors, at the theatre. Now you, in whom she has such enormous confidence, couldn’t you say a few words for me to her, just to assure her that she exaggerates the harm which my greeting her in public might do her?”

  My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she would love him all the more, and advised Odette to let Swann meet her whenever and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told Swann that she had just had a rude awakening, on discovering that my uncle was the same as other men: he had tried to take her by force. She calmed Swann down when he wanted to rush out to challenge my uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if he had met my uncle Adolphe again a few times and had contrived to talk things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to throw light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had formerly led in Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the winter there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there that he had first known Odette. The few words which someone had let fall in his hearing about a man who, it appeared, had been Odette’s lover, had left Swann dumbfounded. But the very things which, before knowing them, he would have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them, absorbed for ever into the general mass of his gloom; he accepted them, he could no longer have understood their not existing. Only, each one of them added a new and indelible touch to the picture he had formed of his mistress. At one point indeed he was given to understand that this moral laxity of which he would never have suspected Odette was fairly well known, and that at Baden or Nice, when she used to go to spend several months in one or the other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety. He thought of getting in touch with one or two pleasure-seekers and interrogating them; but they were aware that he knew Odette, and besides, he was afraid of putting the thought of her into their heads, of setting them once more upon her track. But he, to whom nothing could have seemed more tedious hitherto than all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, having learned that Odette had perhaps once led a gay life in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a need for money which, thanks to him, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might at any moment revive in her, now leaned in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish over the bottomless abyss in which those early years of MacMahon’s Presidency had been engulfed, years during which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and he would find in them a painful but magnificent profundity, such as a poet might have lent them; indeed he would have devoted to the reconstruction of the petty details of social life on the Côte d’Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something of Odette’s smile and the look in her eyes—candid and simple though they were—as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.

  Often he would sit, without saying a word, gazing at her dreamily, and she would say: “You do look sad!” It was not very long since he had switched from the idea that she was a really good person, comparable to the nicest he had known, to that of her being a kept woman; conversely, it had happened to him since to revert from the Odette de Crécy who was perhaps too well known to the roisterers, the ladies’ men, to this face whose expression was often so gentle and sweet, to this nature so eminently human. He would ask himself: “What does it mean, after all, if everyone at Nice knows who Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when they’re true, are always based upon other people’s ideas”; he would reflect that this legend—even if it was authentic—was something extraneous to Odette, was not an innate, pernicious and ineradicable part of her personality; that the creature who might have been led astray was a woman with frank eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a docile body which he had clasped in his arms and explored with his hands, a woman whom he might one day come to possess absolutely, if he succeeded in making himself indispensable to her.

  She would sit there, often tired, her face momentarily drained of that eager, febrile preoccupation with the unknown things that made Swann suffer; she would push back her hair with both hands, and her forehead, her whole face, would seem to grow larger; then, suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some kindly sentiment such as are to be found in all individuals when, in a moment of rest or reclusion, they are free to express their true selves, would flash from her eyes like a ray of gold. And immediately the whole of her face would light up like a grey landscape swathed in clouds which are suddenly swept aside, leaving it transfigured by the setting sun. The life which occupied Odette at such times, even the future which she seemed to be dreamily contemplating, Swann could have shared with her; no evil disturbance seemed to have left its residue there. Rare though they became, those moments did not occur in vain. By the process of memory, Swann joined the fragments together, abolished the intervals between them, cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette compact of kindness and tranquillity, for whom (as we shall see in the second part of this story) he was later to make sacrifices which the other Odette would never have won from him. But how rare those moments were, and how seld
om he now saw her! Even in the case of their evening meetings, she would never tell him until the last minute whether she would be able to see him, for, counting on his being always free, she wished first to be certain that no one else would propose coming round. She would plead that she was obliged to wait for an answer that was of the very greatest importance to her, and if, even after she had allowed Swann to come, any of her friends asked her, halfway through the evening, to join them at some theatre or at supper afterwards, she would jump for joy and dress with all speed. As her toilet progressed, every movement she made brought Swann nearer to the moment when he would have to part from her, when she would fly off with irresistible zest; and when at length she was ready, and, peering into her mirror for the last time with eyes tense and bright with anxiety to look well, added a touch of lipstick, fixed a stray lock of hair over her brow, and called for her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden tassels, Swann looked so wretched that she would be unable to restrain a gesture of impatience as she flung at him: “So that’s how you thank me for keeping you here till the last minute! And I thought I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall know better another time!” Sometimes, at the risk of annoying her, he made up his mind that he would find out where she had gone, and even dreamed of an alliance with Forcheville, who might perhaps have been able to enlighten him. In any case, when he knew with whom she was spending the evening, he was usually able to discover, among all his innumerable acquaintance, someone who knew—if only indirectly—the man in question, and could easily obtain this or that piece of information about him. And while he was writing to one of his friends, asking him to try to clear up some point or other, he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to vex himself with questions to which there was no answer and transferring to someone else the strain of interrogation. It is true that Swann was no better off for such information as he did receive. To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them. He was quite happy whenever M. de Charlus was with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus and her nothing untoward could ever happen, that when M. de Charlus went out with her, it was out of friendship for him, and that he would make no difficulty about telling him everything she had done. Sometimes she had declared so emphatically to Swann that it was impossible for her to see him on a particular evening, she seemed to be looking forward so keenly to some outing, that Swann felt it really important that M. de Charlus should be free to accompany her. Next day, without daring to put too many questions to M. de Charlus, he would force him, by appearing not quite to understand his first answers, to give him more, after each of which he would feel increasingly relieved, for he very soon learned that Odette had spent her evening in the most innocent of dissipations.

  “But what do you mean, my dear Mémé, I don’t quite understand … You didn’t go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? Surely you went somewhere else first? No? How very funny! You’ve no idea how much you amuse me, my dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the Chat Noir afterwards. It was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours? How strange. But after all, it wasn’t such a bad idea; she must have known dozens of people there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I can just picture you. What a nice fellow you are, my dear Mémé. I’m exceedingly fond of you.”

  Swann was relieved. So often had it happened to him, when chatting with chance acquaintances to whom he was hardly listening, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance, “I saw Mme de Crécy yesterday with a man I didn’t know”), sentences which dropped into his heart and turned at once into a solid state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay there, irremovable, that the words “She didn’t know a soul, she never spoke to a soul” were, by way of contrast, like a soothing balm. How freely they coursed through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to breathe! And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette must find him very dull if those were the pleasures she preferred to his company. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him, pained him as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.

  Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have sufficed him, to alleviate the anguish which he then felt, and against which Odette’s presence, the joy of being with her, was the sole specific (a specific which in the long run served to aggravate the disease, but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it would have sufficed him, if only Odette had allowed it, to remain in her house while she was out, to wait for her there until the hour of her return, into whose stillness and peace would have flowed and dissolved those intervening hours which some sorcery, some evil spell had made him imagine as somehow different from the rest. But she would not; he had to return home; he forced himself, on the way, to form various plans, ceased to think of Odette; he even succeeded, while he undressed, in turning over some quite happy ideas in his mind; and it was with a light heart, buoyed with the anticipation of going to see some favourite work of art the next day, that he got into bed and turned out the light; but no sooner, in preparing himself for sleep, did he relax the self-control of which he was not even conscious so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed him and he began to sob. He did not even wish to know why, but wiped his eyes and said, to himself with a smile: “This is delightful; I’m getting neurotic.” After which he felt a profound lassitude at the thought that, next day, he must begin afresh his attempts to find out what Odette had been doing, must use all his influence to contrive to see her. This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without results, was so cruel a scourge that one day, noticing a swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. And indeed if, at this period, it often happened that, without admitting it to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the acuity of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

  And yet he would have liked to live until the time came when he no longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in bed with Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was in love with someone else would distract his mind from the question of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new developments in a continuous state of ill-health which seem momentarily to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place the same pain, the sensation of which, the day before, he had as it were diluted in the stream of different daytime impressions. But it had not stirred from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had awakened him.

  Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important matters which took up so much of her time every day (although he had lived long enough to know that such matters are never anything else than pleasures), he could not sustain for any length of time the effort of imagining them; his brain would become a void; then he would draw a finger over his tired eyelids as he might have wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There emerged, however, from this terra incognita, certain landmarks which reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which she referred from time to time to “the day when I go
with my friend to the races,” if, having suddenly felt unwell and thought, “Perhaps Odette would be kind enough to come and see me,” he remembered that it was one of those very days, he would say to himself: “Oh, no! There’s no point in asking her to come. I should have thought of it before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the races. We must confine ourselves to what’s possible; no use wasting time proposing things that are ipso facto unacceptable.” And the duty incumbent upon Odette of going to the races, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely ineluctable in itself, but the mark of necessity with which it was stamped seemed to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely connected with it. If, having acknowledged a greeting from a passer-by in the street which had aroused Swann’s jealousy, Odette replied to his questions by associating the stranger with one of the two or three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him—if, for instance, she said: “That’s a gentleman who was in my friend’s box at the races the other day”—this explanation would set Swann’s suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the races, though he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any coherent impression of them. Ah, how he would have loved to know her, the friend who went to the races! If only she would invite him there with Odette. How readily he would have sacrificed all his grand connexions for no matter what person who was in the habit of seeing Odette, even if she were a manicurist or a shop assistant! He would have put himself out for her, taken more trouble than he would have done for a queen. Would they not have supplied him, from their store of knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one effective anodyne for his pain? With what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with one or other of those humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly relations, either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity of nature! How willingly would he have taken up residence for ever in the attic of some sordid but enviable house where Odette went but never took him and where, if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker, whose lover he would readily have pretended to be, he would have been visited by Odette almost daily! In those almost plebeian districts, what a modest existence, abject even, but happy, nourished by tranquillity and peace of mind, he would have consented to lead indefinitely!