In Search of Lost Time (34 page)

But when his mistress of the moment was a woman of rank or at least one whose background was not too humble or her situation too irregular for him to arrange for her to be received in society, then for her he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her. ‘No use depending on Swann for this evening, they would say. Don't you remember it's his American's night at the Opera?' He would see to it that she was invited to the particularly exclusive salons where he was a constant guest, where he had his weekly dinners, his poker; every evening, after a slight crimp was added to the brush-cut of his red hair, tempering with some gentleness the vivacity of his green eyes, he would choose a flower for his buttonhole and go off to join his mistress at dinner at the home of one or another of the women of his circle; and then, thinking of the admiration and affection which the fashionable people for whom he was the be-all and end-all and whom he was going to find there would lavish on him in the presence of the woman he loved, he would find some fresh charm in this worldly life to which he had become indifferent but whose substance, penetrated and warmly coloured by a flame that had been insinuated into it and flickered there, seemed to him precious and beautiful as soon as he had incorporated into it a new love.

But, while each of these love affairs, or each of these flirtations, had been the more or less complete fulfilment of a dream inspired by the sight of a face or of a body that Swann had spontaneously, without making any effort to do so, found charming, on the contrary when he was introduced to Odette de Crécy one day at the theatre by an old
friend of his, who had spoken of her as an entrancing woman with whom he might perhaps have some success, but making her out to be more difficult than she really was in order to appear to have done him a bigger favour by introducing her to him, she had seemed to Swann not without beauty, certainly, but as having a kind of beauty that left him indifferent, that aroused no desire in him, even caused him a sort of physical repulsion, one of those women such as everyone has his own, different for each, who are the opposite of the type our senses crave. Her profile was too pronounced for his taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too pinched. Her eyes were lovely, but so large they bent under their own mass, exhausted the rest of her face and always gave her a look of being in ill-health or ill-humour. Some time after this introduction at the theatre, she had written to ask if she could see his collections, which interested her so, ‘she, an ignoramus with a taste for pretty things,' saying that it seemed to her she would understand him better when she had seen him in ‘his home',
¹⁰
where she imagined him to be ‘so comfortable with his tea and his books', though she had not hidden her surprise that he should live in that part of town, which must be so dreary and ‘which was so un-
smart
for a man who was so very smart himself'. And after he had allowed her to come, as she left she had told him how sorry she was to have spent such a short time in a house that she had been so glad to enter, speaking of him as though he meant something more to her than the other people she knew, and seeming to establish between their two selves a sort of romantic bond that had made him smile. But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's earliest youth, the goal towards which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure,
that the enjoyment of a woman's beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being – love of the most physical kind – without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire. At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it – filled with the admiration that beauty inspires – in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle – where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other – we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.

Odette de Crécy came to see Swann again, then visited him more and more often; and no doubt each visit renewed his disappointment at finding himself once again in the presence of that face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the meantime and which he had not recalled as being either so expressive or, despite her youth, so faded; he felt sorry, as she talked to him, that her considerable beauty was not the sort he would spontaneously have preferred. Odette's face seemed thinner and sharper, in fact, because her forehead and the upper part of her cheeks, those smoother and flatter surfaces, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that time drawn forward in fringes, lifted in ‘switches', spread in stray locks down along the ears; and as for her body, which was admirably formed, it was difficult to discern its continuity (because of the fashions of the period, and even though she was one of the best-dressed women in Paris), because her blouse, jutting out as though over an imaginary paunch and ending abruptly in a point, below which the balloon of the double skirts swelled out, made a woman look as though she were composed of different parts poorly fitted inside one another; because the flounces, the flutes, the vest followed so independently, according to the whimsy of their design or the consistency of their material, the line that led to the knots, the puffs of lace, the perpendicular fringes of jet, or that directed them along the corset, but were in no way
attached to the living person, who, depending on whether the architecture of these frills and furbelows approached too closely or moved too far away from her own, was either encased or lost in them.

But when Odette had left, Swann would smile, thinking of how she told him the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he would recall the worried, shy air with which she had begged him once that it should not be too long, and the expression in her eyes at that moment, fastened on him in anxious entreaty, which made her look so touching under the bouquet of artificial pansies fastened to the front of her round white straw hat with its black velvet ribbons. ‘And you, she had said, wouldn't you come to my house just once for tea?' He had pleaded unfinished work, a study – in reality abandoned years before – of Vermeer of Delft.
¹¹
‘I realize I can't do anything, pitiful little me, compared with all you great scholars, she had answered. I would be like the frog in front of the Areopagus.
¹²
And yet I would so love to educate myself, to be informed, to know things. How amusing it must be to pore over books, to bury your nose in old papers!' she had added with the self-satisfied air of an elegant woman declaring that she is happiest when abandoning herself without fear of getting dirty to some messy job, like doing a little cooking ‘with her own hands in the dough'. ‘You're going to make fun of me, but that painter who keeps you from seeing me (she meant Vermeer) – I've never heard of him; is he still alive? Can I see any of his things in Paris, so that I could imagine what it is that you like, so that I could have some idea what's behind that great forehead that works so hard, inside that mind that I always sense is so busy with its thoughts, so that I could say to myself: there, this is what he's thinking about. What a joy it would be, to share in your work!' He apologized for his fear of new friendships, for what he had called, out of politeness, his fear of being unhappy. ‘You're afraid of affection? How odd; that's all I ever look for, I would give my life to find it,' she had said in a voice so natural, so convinced, that he had been moved. ‘Some woman must have hurt you. And you think all other women are like her. She must not have understood you; you're such an unusual person. That's what I liked about you right away, I really felt you weren't like anyone else. – And you too, he had said to her, I know very well what women are
like, you must be busy with a great many things, you must not have much time. – Me! I never have anything to do! I'm always free, I will always be free for you. At any hour of the day or night that might be convenient for you to see me, send for me and I'll be only too happy to come immediately. Will you do it? Do you know what would be nice – if you could obtain an introduction to Mme Verdurin; I go to her house every evening. Just imagine if we met there and I thought it was partly because of me that you were there!'

And as he recalled their conversations this way, as he thought of her this way when he was alone, he was no doubt merely turning over her image among those of many other women in his romantic day-dreams; but if, due to some circumstance (or even perhaps not due to it, since a circumstance that presents itself at the moment when a state of mind, latent until then, comes out into the open may possibly not have influenced it in any way) the image of Odette de Crécy came to absorb all these day-dreams, if these day-dreams were no longer separable from the memory of her, then the imperfection of her body would no longer have any importance, nor would the fact that it might be, more or less than some other body, to Swann's taste, since, now that it had become the body of the woman he loved, it would be the only one capable of filling him with joy and torment.

As it happened, my grandfather had known – which was more than could be said of any of their current friends – the family of these Verdurins. But he had lost all contact with ‘young Verdurin', as he called him, whom he regarded, somewhat approximately, as having fallen – even while holding on to his many millions – among bohemians and riff-raff. One day, he received a letter from Swann asking him if he could put him in touch with the Verdurins: ‘On guard! On guard!' my grandfather had exclaimed. ‘This doesn't surprise me at all; it's just where Swann was bound to end up. A nice group they are! In the first place, I can't do what he asks, because I don't know the gentleman in question any more. And secondly, there must be a woman in it somewhere, and I never get mixed up in such affairs. Well, well! We shall have a rather amusing time of it if Swann falls in with the young Verdurins.'

And after my grandfather returned a negative answer, it was Odette herself who had taken Swann to the Verdurins'.

The Verdurins had had to dinner, on the day Swann made his first appearance there, Doctor and Mme Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt, and the painter who was in their favour at the time, and these were joined during the evening by several other faithful regulars.

Doctor Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to answer someone, whether the person addressing him wanted to make a joke or was serious. And just in case, he would add to each of his facial expressions the offer of a conditional and tentative smile whose expectant shrewdness would exculpate him from the reproach of naïvety, if the remark that had been made to him was found to have been facetious. But since, so as to respond to the opposite hypothesis, he did not dare allow that smile to declare itself distinctly on his face, one saw an uncertainty perpetually floating upon it in which could be read the question he did not dare ask: ‘Are you saying this in earnest?' He was no more sure how he ought to behave in the street, and even in life generally, than in a drawing-room, and he could be seen greeting passers-by, carriages and any minor event that occurred with the same ironic smile that removed all impropriety from his attitude in advance, since he was proving that if the attitude was not a fashionable one he was well aware of it and that if he had adopted it, it was as a joke.

On all points, however, where a direct question seemed to him permissible, the doctor did not fail to endeavour to reduce the field of his doubts and complete his education.

And so, acting on the advice given him by a foresightful mother when he left her province, he never let pass either an expression or a proper name that was unknown to him, without trying to acquire documentation about it.

In the case of expressions, he was insatiable for enlightenment, because, sometimes assuming they had a more precise meaning than they had, he wanted to know exactly what was meant by those he heard used most often: the bloom of youth, blue blood, a fast life, the hour of reckoning, to be a prince of refinement, to give carte blanche, to be nonplussed, etc., and in which specific cases he in his turn could introduce them into his conversation. If there were none, he would
substitute puns he had learned. As for new names of people mentioned in his presence, he contented himself merely with repeating them in a questioning tone that he thought sufficient to procure him explanations without his appearing to ask for them.

Since he completely lacked the critical faculty which he thought he exercised on everything, that refinement of politeness which consists in declaring to a person to whom you are doing a favour, without however expecting to be believed, that you are in fact indebted to him, was a waste of time with the doctor, who took everything literally. Whatever Mme Verdurin's blindness with respect to him, she had in the end, while continuing to find him very subtle, been annoyed to see that, when she invited him to share a box near the stage for a performance by Sarah Bernhardt, saying to him, to be especially gracious: ‘It was too kind of you to come, Doctor, especially since I'm sure you've already heard Sarah Bernhardt many times, and we may also be too close to the stage,' Doctor Cottard, who had entered the box with a smile that was waiting to become more pronounced or to disappear as soon as some authoritative person informed him as to the quality of the entertainment, answered her: ‘It's true that we're much too close and one begins to tire of Sarah Bernhardt. But you expressed a desire that I should come. And your desire is my command. I am only too happy to do you this small service. Is there anything one would not do in order to please you, you're so good!' And he added: ‘Sarah Bernhardt – she is in fact the Golden Voice, isn't she? And they often write that she sets the stage on fire. That's an odd expression, isn't it?' in hope of commentaries which were not forthcoming.