But she saw that his eyes remained fixed upon the things that he did not know, and on that past era of their love, monotonous and soothing in his memory because it was vague, and now rent, as with a gaping wound, by that moment on the Island in the Bois, by moonlight, after his dinner with the Princesse des Laumes. But he was so imbued with the habit of finding life interesting—of marvelling at the strange discoveries that there are to be made in it—that even while he was suffering so acutely that he did not believe he could bear such agony much longer, he was saying to himself: “Life is really astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe. Here is a woman I trusted, who seems so simple, so straightforward, who, in any case, even allowing that her morals are not strict, seemed quite normal and healthy in her tastes and inclinations. On the basis of a most improbable accusation, I question her, and the little that she admits reveals far more than I could ever have suspected.” But he could not confine himself to these detached observations. He sought to form an exact estimate of the significance of what she had just told him, in order to decide whether she had done these things often and was likely to do them again. He repeated her words to himself: “I knew quite well what she was after.” “Two or three times.” “I’ve heard that tale before.” But they did not reappear in his memory unarmed; each of them still held its knife, with which it stabbed him anew. For a long time, like a sick man who cannot restrain himself from attempting every minute to make the movement that he knows will hurt him, he kept on murmuring to himself: “I’m quite happy where I am,” “I’ve heard that tale before,” but the pain was so intense that he was obliged to stop. He was amazed to find that acts which he had always hitherto judged so lightly, had dismissed, indeed, with a laugh, should have become as serious to him as a disease which may prove fatal. He knew any number of women whom he could ask to keep an eye on Odette, but how was he to expect them to adjust themselves to his new point of view, and not to look at the matter from the one which for so long had been his own, which had always guided him in sexual matters; not to say to him with a laugh: “You jealous monster, wanting to rob other people of their pleasure!” By what trap-door suddenly lowered had he (who had never had hitherto from his love for Odette any but the most refined pleasures) been precipitated into this new circle of hell from which he could not see how he was ever to escape. Poor Odette! He did not hold it against her. She was only half to blame. Had he not been told that it was her own mother who had sold her, when she was still hardly more than a child, at Nice, to a wealthy Englishman? But what an agonising truth was now contained for him in those lines of Alfred de Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète which he had previously read without emotion: “When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one should say to oneself, ‘Who are the people around her? What kind of life has she led?’ All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.” Swann was astonished that such simple sentences, spelt over in his mind, as “I’ve heard that tale before” or “I knew quite well what she was after,” could cause him so much pain. But he realised that what he thought of as simple sentences were in fact the components of the framework which still enclosed, and could inflict on him again, the anguish he had felt while Odette was telling her story. For it was indeed the same anguish that he now was feeling anew. For all that he now knew—for all that, as time went on, he might even have partly forgotten and forgiven—whenever he repeated her words his old anguish refashioned him as he had been before Odette had spoken: ignorant, trustful; his merciless jealousy placed him once again, so that he might be pierced by Odette’s admission, in the position of a man who does not yet know; and after several months this old story would still shatter him like a sudden revelation. He marvelled at the terrible re-creative power of his memory. It was only by the weakening of that generative force, whose fecundity diminishes with age, that he could hope for a relaxation of his torments. But, as soon as the power of any one of Odette’s remarks to make Swann suffer seemed to be nearly exhausted, lo and behold another, one of those to which he had hitherto paid little attention, almost a new observation, came to reinforce the others and to strike at him with undiminished force. The memory of the evening on which he had dined with the Princesse des Laumes was painful to him, but it was no more than the centre, the core of his pain, which radiated vaguely round about it, overflowing into all the preceding and following days. And on whatever point in it his memory sought to linger, it was the whole of that season, during which the Verdurins had so often gone to dine on the Island in the Bois, that racked him. So violently that by slow degrees the curiosity which his jealousy aroused in him was neutralised by his fear of the fresh tortures he would be inflicting upon himself were he to satisfy it. He recognised that the entire period of Odette’s life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form a picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest that past of hers, colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible and monstrous form, an individual and diabolical countenance. And he continued to refrain from seeking to visualise it, no longer from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. He hoped that, some day, he might be able to hear the Island in the Bois or the Princesse des Laumes mentioned without feeling any twinge of the old heartache; and meanwhile he thought it imprudent to provoke Odette into furnishing him with new facts, the names of more places and different circumstances which, when his malady was still scarcely healed, would revive it again in another form.
But, often enough, the things that he did know, that he dreaded, now, to learn, were revealed to him by Odette herself, spontaneously and unwittingly; for the gap which her vices made between her actual life and the comparatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and often still believed his mistress to lead, was far wider than she knew. A vicious person, always affecting the same air of virtue before people whom he is anxious to keep from having any suspicion of his vices, has no gauge at hand from which to ascertain how far those vices, whose continuous growth is imperceptible to himself, have gradually segregated him from the normal ways of life. In the course of their cohabitation, in Odette’s mind, side by side with the memory of those of her actions which she concealed from Swann, others were gradually coloured, infected by them, without her being able to detect anything strange in them, without their causing any jarring note in the particular surroundings which they occupied in her inner world; but if she related them to Swann, he was shattered by the revelation of the way of life to which they pointed. One day he was trying—without hurting Odette—to discover from her whether she had ever had any dealings with procuresses. He was, as a matter of fact, convinced that she had not; the anonymous letter had put the idea into his mind, but in a mechanical way; it had met with no credence there, but for all that had remained, and Swann, wishing to be rid of the purely material but none the less burdensome presence of the suspicion, hoped that Odette would now extirpate it for ever.
“Oh, no!… Not that they don’t pester me,” she added with a smile of self-satisfied vanity, quite unaware that it could not appear justifiable to Swann. “There was one of them waited more than two hours for me yesterday—offered me any money I asked. It seems there’s an ambassador who said to her, ‘I’ll kill myself if you don’t bring her to me.’ They told her I’d gone out, but she waited and waited, and in the end I had to go and speak to her myself before she’d go away. I wish you could have seen the way I went for her; my maid could hear me from the next room and told me I was shouting at the top of my voice: ‘But haven’t I told you I don’t want to! It’s just the way I feel. I should hope I’m still free to do as I please! If I needed the money, I could understand …’ The porter has orders not to let her in again; he’s to tell her I’m out of town. Oh, I wish I could have had you hidden somewhere in the room
while I was talking to her. I know you’d have been pleased, my darling. There’s some good in your little Odette, you see, after all, though people do say such dreadful things about her.”
Besides, her very admissions—when she made any—of faults which she supposed him to have discovered, served Swann as a starting-point for new doubts rather than putting an end to the old. For her admissions never exactly coincided with his doubts. In vain might Odette expurgate her confession of all its essentials, there would remain in the accessories something which Swann had never yet imagined, which crushed him anew, and would enable him to alter the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these admissions he could never forget. His soul carried them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.
She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. “What! you knew him as long ago as that? Oh, yes, of course you did,” he corrected himself, so as not to show that he had been ignorant of the fact. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought that, on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, when he had received from her the letter which he had so carefully preserved, she had perhaps been having lunch with Forcheville at the Maison Dorée. She swore that she had not. “Still, the Maison Dorée reminds me of something or other which I knew at the time wasn’t true,” he pursued, hoping to frighten her. “Yes, that I hadn’t been there at all that evening when I told you I had just come from there, and you’d been looking for me at Prévost’s,” she replied (judging by his manner that he knew) with a firmness that was based not so much on cynicism as on timidity, a fear of offending Swann which her own self-respect made her anxious to conceal, and a desire to show him that she could be perfectly frank if she chose. And so she struck with all the precision and force of a headsman wielding his axe, and yet could not be charged with cruelty since she was quite unconscious of hurting him; she even laughed, though perhaps, it is true, chiefly in order not to appear chastened or embarrassed. “It’s quite true, I hadn’t been to the Maison Dorée. I was coming away from Forcheville’s. I really had been to Prévost’s—I didn’t make that up—and he met me there and asked me to come in and look at his prints. But someone else came to see him. I told you I’d come from the Maison Dorée because I was afraid you might be angry with me. It was rather nice of me, really, don’t you see? Even if I did wrong, at least I’m telling you all about it now, aren’t I? What would I have to gain by not telling you that I lunched with him on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête, if it was true? Especially as at the time we didn’t know one another quite so well as we do now, did we, darling?”
He smiled back at her with the sudden, craven weakness of the shattered creature which these crushing words had made of him. So, even in the months of which he had never dared to think again because they had been too happy, in those months when she had loved him, she was already lying to him! Besides that moment (that first evening on which they had “done a cattleya”) when she had told him that she was coming from the Maison Dorée, how many others must there have been, each of them also concealing a falsehood of which Swann had had no suspicion. He recalled how she had said to him once: “I need only tell Mme Verdurin that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There’s always some excuse.” From himself too, probably, many a time when she had glibly uttered such words as explain a delay or justify an alteration of the hour fixed for a meeting, they must have hidden, without his having the least inkling of it at the time, an appointment she had with some other man, some man to whom she had said: “I need only tell Swann that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There’s always some excuse.” And beneath all his most tender memories, beneath the simplest words that Odette had spoken to him in those early days, words which he had believed as though they were gospel, beneath the daily actions which she had recounted to him, beneath the most ordinary places, her dressmaker’s flat, the Avenue du Bois, the race-course, he could feel (dissembled by virtue of that temporal superfluity which, even in days that have been most circumstantially accounted for, still leaves a margin of room that may serve as a hiding place for certain unconfessed actions), he could feel the insinuation of a possible undercurrent of falsehood which rendered ignoble all that had remained most precious to him (his happiest evenings, the Rue La Pérouse itself, which Odette must constantly have been leaving at other hours than those of which she told him) everywhere disseminating something of the shadowy horror that had gripped him when he had heard her admission with regard to the Maison Dorée, and, like the obscene creatures in the “Desolation of Nineveh,” shattering stone by stone the whole edifice of his past … If, now, he turned away whenever his memory repeated the cruel name of the Maison Dorée, it was because that name recalled to him no longer, as, but recently, at Mme de Saint-Euverte’s party, a happiness which he had long since lost, but a misfortune of which he had just become aware. Then it happened with the Maison Dorée as it had happened with the Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him. For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann’s heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
On certain evenings she would suddenly resume towards him an amenity of which she would warn him sternly that he must take immediate advantage, under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come; he must instantly accompany her home, to “do a cattleya,” and the desire which she claimed to have for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so imperious, the caresses which she lavished on him were so demonstrative and so unwonted, that this brutal and improbable fondness made Swann just as unhappy as any lie or unkindness. One evening when he had thus, in obedience to her command, gone home with her, and she was interspersing her kisses with passionate words, in strange contrast to her habitual coldness, he suddenly thought he heard a sound; he rose, searched everywhere and found nobody, but hadn’t the heart to return to his place by her side; whereupon, in the height of fury, she broke a vase and said to him: “One can never do anything right with you!” And he was left uncertain whether she had not actually had some man concealed in the room, whose jealousy she had wished to exacerbate or his senses to inflame.
Sometimes he repaired to brothels in the hope of learning something about Odette, although he dared not mention her name. “I have a little thing you’re sure to like,” the bawd would greet him, and he would stay for an hour or so chatting gloomily to some poor girl who sat there astonished that he went no further. One of them, who was quite young and very pretty, said to him once: “Of course, what I’d like would be to find a real friend—then he might be quite certain I’d never go with any other men again.”
“Really, do you think it possible for a woman to be touched by a man’s loving her, and never to be unfaithful to him?” asked Swann anxiously.
“Why, of course! It all depends on people’s characters!”
Swann could not help saying to these girls the sort of things that would have delighted the Princesse des Laumes. To the one who was in search of a friend he said with a smile: “But how nice, you’ve put on blue eyes to go with your sash.”
“And you too, you’ve got blue cuffs on.”
“What a charming conversation we’re having for a place of this sort! I’m not boring you, am I; or keeping you?”
“No, I’m not in a hurry. If you’d have bored me I’d have said so. But I like hearing you talk.”
“I’m very
flattered … Aren’t we having a nice chat?” he asked the bawd who had just looked in.
“Why, yes, that’s just what I was saying to myself, how good they’re being! But there it is! People come to my house now just to talk. The Prince was telling me only the other day that it’s far nicer here than at home with his wife. It seems that, nowadays, all the society ladies are so flighty; a real scandal, I call it. But I’ll leave you in peace now,” she ended discreetly, and left Swann with the girl who had the blue eyes. But presently he rose and said good-bye to her. She had ceased to interest him. She did not know Odette.
The painter having been ill, Dr Cottard recommended a sea-voyage. Several of the “faithful” spoke of accompanying him. The Verdurins could not face the prospect of being left alone in Paris, so first of all hired and finally purchased a yacht; thus Odette went on frequent cruises. Whenever she had been away for any length of time, Swann would feel that he was beginning to detach himself from her, but as though this moral distance were proportionate to the physical distance between them, whenever he heard that Odette had returned to Paris, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, when they had gone away ostensibly for a month only, either they succumbed to a series of temptations, or else M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged everything beforehand to please his wife, and disclosed his plans to the “faithful” only as time went on; at all events, from Algiers they flitted to Tunis; then to Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor. They had been absent for nearly a year, and Swann felt perfectly at ease and almost happy. Although Mme Verdurin had endeavoured to persuade the pianist and Dr Cottard that their respective aunt and patients had no need of them, and that in any event it was most rash to allow Mme Cottard to return to Paris which, so M. Verdurin affirmed, was in the throes of revolution, she was obliged to grant them their liberty at Constantinople. And the painter came home with them. One day, shortly after the return of these four travellers, Swann, seeing an omnibus for the Luxembourg approaching and having some business there, had jumped on it and found himself sitting opposite Mme Cottard, who was paying a round of visits to people whose “day” it was, in full fig, with a plume in her hat, a silk dress, a muff, an umbrella-sunshade, a card-case, and a pair of white gloves fresh from the cleaners. Clothed in these regalia, she would, in fine weather, go on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the natural amiability of the woman broke through the starched surface of the doctor’s-wife, not being certain, moreover, whether she ought to talk to Swann about the Verdurins, she proceeded to hold forth, in her slow, awkward and soft-spoken voice, which every now and then was completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, on topics selected from those which she had picked up and would repeat in each of the score of houses up the stairs of which she clambered in the course of an afternoon.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume I Page 49
