In Search of Lost Time (38 page)

A second visit he made to her was perhaps more important. Going to her house that day, as always when he was to see her, he pictured her to himself beforehand; and his need, if he was to find her face pretty, to limit what he imagined of her cheeks only to her fresh, pink cheekbones since the rest was so often yellow, languid, sometimes marked with little red specks, distressed him as proving that the ideal is inaccessible and happiness mediocre. He had brought her an engraving that she wanted to see. She was a little unwell; she received him in a mauve crêpe de Chine dressing-gown, pulling the richly embroidered material over her chest like a cloak. Standing next to him, allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks, bending one leg somewhat in the position of a dancer so that without getting tired she could lean over the engraving, which she looked at, inclining her head, with those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
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Swann had always had this peculiar penchant for liking to rediscover in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization, the individual features of the faces we know: for instance, in the material of a bust of the Doge Loredano by Antonio Rizzo,
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the jut of the
cheekbones, the slant of the eyebrows, altogether the very evident resemblance to his coachman Rémi; under the colours of a Ghirlandaio,
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M. de Palancy's nose; in a portrait by Tintoretto,
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the invasion of the cheek's fat by the implantation of the first hairs of the side-whiskers, the break in the nose, the penetration of the gaze, the congestion of the eyelids of Doctor du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always continued to feel a touch of remorse that he had limited his life to worldly relationships, to conversation, he believed he could find a sort of indulgent pardon granted him by the great artists, in the fact that they too had contemplated with pleasure, introduced into their work, faces like these, which give it a singular certificate of reality and of truth to life, a modern flavour; perhaps, also, he had allowed himself to be so caught up in the frivolity of the society people that he felt the need to look into an old work of art for these anticipated and rejuvenating allusions to current proper names. Perhaps, on the other hand, he still had enough of an artist's nature so that these individual characteristics gave him pleasure by assuming a more general meaning as soon as he saw them extirpated, emancipated, in the resemblance between an older portrait and an original which it did not represent. Whatever the case, and perhaps because the abundance of impressions that he had been receiving for some time, and even though this abundance had come to him more with his love of music, had enriched even his delight in painting, he now found a deeper pleasure – and this was to exert a permanent influence on Swann – in Odette's resemblance to Zipporah as painted by Sandro di Mariano, whom people call more often by his popular nickname of Botticelli, since that name evokes, not the painter's true work, but the vulgarized idea of it, banal and false. He no longer appraised Odette's face according to the finer or poorer quality of her cheeks and the purely flesh-coloured softness he supposed he must find when he touched them with his lips if he ever dared to kiss her, but as a skein of subtle and beautiful lines that his eyes reeled off, following the curve of their winding, joining the cadence of her nape to the effusion of her hair and the flexion of her eyelids, as in a portrait of her in which her type became intelligible and clear.

He looked at her; a fragment of the fresco appeared in her face and
in her body and from then on he would always try to find it in her again, whether he was with Odette, or was only thinking of her, and even though he probably valued the Florentine masterpiece only because he found it again in her, nevertheless that resemblance conferred a certain beauty on her too, made her more precious. Swann reproached himself for having misunderstood the value of a creature who would have appeared captivating to the great Sandro, and he felt happy that his pleasure in seeing Odette could be justified by his own aesthetic culture. He told himself that, in associating the thought of Odette with his dreams of happiness, he had not been resigning himself to a second-best as imperfect as he had believed until now, since she satisfied his most refined artistic tastes. He forgot that this did not make Odette any more the sort of woman he desired, since in fact his desire had always been oriented in a direction opposite to his aesthetic tastes. The words ‘Florentine work of art' did Swann a great service. They allowed him, like a title, to bring Odette's image into a world of dreams to which she had not had access until then and where she was steeped in nobility. And, while the purely fleshly view he had had of this woman, by perpetually renewing his doubts about the quality of her face, her body, her whole beauty, had weakened his love, these doubts were vanquished, that love confirmed when he had instead, for a foundation, the principles of an unquestionable aesthetic; while the kiss and the possession that would seem natural and ordinary if they had been granted him by damaged flesh, if they came to crown the adoration of a museum piece, appeared to him necessarily supernatural and delicious.

And when he was tempted to regret the fact that for months now he had done nothing but see Odette, he said to himself that it was reasonable to give a good deal of his time to an inestimable masterpiece, cast for once in a different and particularly savoury material, in a most rare exemplar that he contemplated sometimes with the humility, spirituality and disinterestedness of an artist, and sometimes with the pride, egotism and sensuality of a collector.

He placed on his work table, as if it were a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's daughter. He admired the large eyes, the delicate face, which allowed one to imagine the imperfect skin, the
marvellous curls of the hair along the tired cheeks, and adapting what he had found aesthetically beautiful up to then to the idea of a living woman, he translated it into physical attractions which he rejoiced to find united in a creature whom he could possess. The vague feeling of sympathy that draws us towards a masterpiece as we look at it became, now that he knew the fleshly original of Jethro's daughter, a desire that henceforth compensated for the desire that Odette's body had not at first inspired in him. When he had looked at that Botticelli for a long time, he would think of his own Botticelli, whom he found even more beautiful and, bringing Zipporah's photograph close to him, he would believe he was clasping Odette against his heart.

And yet he strained his ingenuity not only to prevent Odette from becoming tired of him, but also, sometimes, to prevent himself from becoming tired of her; feeling that, ever since Odette had had every opportunity for seeing him, she did not seem to have much to say to him, he was afraid that the rather banal, monotonous, and more or less permanently predetermined manner she now had when they were together would end by killing the romantic hope he had that one day she would declare her passion, a hope which alone had made him fall in love and stay in love. And in order to work a little reformation in Odette's too fixed mental attitude, which he was afraid would make him grow tired of her, he would suddenly write her a letter full of feigned disappointment and simulated anger that he would send round to her before dinner. He knew that she would be dismayed, and would answer him, and he hoped that in the contraction of her soul caused by the fear of losing him, words would spring forth that she had never yet said to him; – and in fact it was by doing this that he had obtained the most tender letters she had yet written to him, including one, which she had sent round to him at noon from La Maison Dorée
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(it was the day of the Paris-Murcia fête, held for the flood victims of Murcia),
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that began with these words: ‘My dearest, my hand is trembling so badly I can hardly write,' and that he had kept in the same drawer as the dry chrysanthemum flower. Or, if she had not had time to write to him, when he arrived at the Verdurins' she would come up to him quickly, saying: ‘I have to talk to you,' and he would gaze curiously at what he saw in her face and her words that
she had until then kept hidden from him, of all that was in her heart.

Even as he approached the Verdurins', when he saw the large lamp-lit windows whose shutters were never closed, he was moved as he thought of the charming creature he was going to see in full bloom in their golden light. Now and then the figures of the guests stood out in silhouette, slender and black, screening the lamps, like those little pictures intercalated at intervals around a translucent lampshade whose other panels are plain light. He would try to distinguish Odette's silhouette. Then, as soon as he arrived, without his realizing it, his eyes would shine with such joy that M. Verdurin would say to the painter: ‘I think it's getting warm.' And for Swann, Odette's presence did indeed add something to this house which none of the others in which he was entertained possessed: a sort of sensory apparatus, a nervous system ramifying through all the rooms and causing constant excitations in his heart.

And so the simple functioning of that social organism, the little ‘clan', automatically arranged daily meetings with Odette for Swann and allowed him to feign an indifference to seeing her, or even a desire not to see her, which did not make him run any great risks, since, whatever he wrote to her during the day, he would necessarily see her that evening and take her home.

But once when, having glumly contemplated that inevitable ride home together, he had taken his young working girl all the way to the Bois in order to delay the moment of going to the Verdurins', he arrived at their house so late that Odette, thinking he would not be coming, had already left. When he saw that she was no longer in the drawing-room, Swann felt a pain in his heart; he trembled at being deprived of a pleasure that he was now measuring for the first time, having had until then that certainty of finding it when he wanted it which in the case of all pleasures diminishes for us, or even prevents us from perceiving at all, their greatness.

– Did you notice the look on his face when he saw she wasn't here? said M. Verdurin to his wife, I think one may say he's smitten!

– The look on his face? asked Doctor Cottard violently since, having gone away for a moment to see a patient and returned to pick up his wife, he did not know whom they were talking about.

– What, you didn't meet the most handsome of all Swanns at the front door…

– No. M. Swann came?

– Oh, just for a moment. We had a very agitated, a very nervous Swann. You see, Odette had already left.

– You mean she's on a most intimate footing with him, she has given him the key to her city? asked the doctor, cautiously testing the meaning of the expressions.

– No, no, there's absolutely nothing going on, and just between us, I think she's making a great mistake and behaving like a real idiot, which she is, in fact.

– Tut, tut, tut, said M. Verdurin. What do you know about it, how do you know there's nothing going on? We haven't gone there to see for ourselves, have we?

– She would have told me, retorted Mme Verdurin proudly. I tell you she lets me know about all her little affairs! As she hasn't anyone just now, I told her she ought to sleep with him. She claims she can't, she says she was certainly rather infatuated with him at first, but that he's shy with her, which makes her shy with him, and then anyway she doesn't love him that way, he's some sort of ideal for her, she's afraid of taking the bloom off the feeling she has for him, what do I know? Yet it would be just what she needs.

– Allow me to disagree with you, said M. Verdurin. I'm not overly fond of the gentleman's looks; I think he's affected.

Mme Verdurin froze, assumed an inert expression as if she had turned into a statue, a fiction that allowed it to be assumed that she had not heard that intolerable word ‘affected', which seemed to imply that one could ‘be affected' with them, therefore that one was ‘better than them'.

– Anyway, if there's nothing going on, I don't think it's because the gentleman thinks she's
virtuous
, M. Verdurin said ironically. And after all, one can't say anything, since he seems to think she's intelligent. I don't know if you heard what he was declaiming to her the other evening about Vinteuil's sonata; I love Odette with all my heart, but to construct aesthetic theories for her benefit, you'd really have to be quite an imbecile!

– Now, don't say bad things about Odette, said Mme Verdurin, playing the child. She's so charming.

– But she can still be charming. We aren't saying bad things about her, we're saying she's not a saint, she's not a genius. In fact, he said to the painter, are you really so anxious for her to be virtuous? Who knows – perhaps she would be far less charming.

On the landing, Swann had been approached by the butler, who had not been there when he arrived and had been instructed by Odette – but this was already an hour before – to tell him, in case he should still come, that she would probably go and have some chocolate at Prévost's
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before returning home. Swann left for Prévost's, but at every step of the way his carriage was stopped by other carriages or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles that he would gladly have knocked down if the policeman's report would not have delayed him even more than the passing of a pedestrian. He counted the time he was taking, and added a few seconds to all the minutes to be sure of not having made them too short, which would have allowed him to think the chance was greater than it really was that he would arrive early enough and still find Odette. And at one point, like a man in a fever who has just been sleeping and who becomes aware of the absurdity of the dreams he had been contemplating without clearly distinguishing himself from them, Swann suddenly perceived how alien to himself were the thoughts he had been revolving since the moment when he had been told at the Verdurins' that Odette had already left, the new pain he was suffering in his heart, but noted it only as though he had just woken up. What? All this agitation because he would not see Odette till tomorrow, exactly what he had wanted, an hour ago, when he arrived at Mme Verdurin's! He was obliged to acknowledge that in this same carriage which was taking him to Prévost's he was no longer the same, and that he was no longer alone, that a new person was there with him, attached to him, amalgamated to him, one from whom he might not be able to free himself, whom he was going to have to treat with circumspection, like a master or an illness. And yet for a moment now, since he had felt a new person had been added to him in this way, his life had seemed to him more interesting. He hardly said to himself that this possible meeting at
Prévost's, however (the expectation of which so disordered, so denuded the moments preceding it that he could no longer find a single idea, a single memory within which he could rest his mind), would probably, if it took place, be like the others, not much of anything. As on every other evening, once he was with Odette, casting on her changing face a furtive glance which he would immediately turn away for fear that she would see in it his mounting desire and no longer believe in his disinterest, he would cease to be able to think about her, too occupied with finding pretexts that would permit him not to leave her right away and to make certain, without seeming to care about it, that he would see her again the next day at the Verdurins': that is, to prolong for the moment and to renew yet one more day the disappointment and torment that came to him from the pointless presence of this woman whom he saw so regularly without daring to take her in his arms.