In Search of Lost Time (39 page)

She was not at Prévost's; he wanted to look in every restaurant along the boulevards. In order to gain time, while he visited some he sent into the others his coachman Rémi (the Doge Loredano by Rizzo), for whom he then waited – having found nothing himself – at a place he had specified to him. The carriage did not return and Swann pictured to himself the approaching moment, as both the moment in which Rémi would say to him: ‘The lady is here,' and the moment in which Rémi would say to him: ‘The lady was not in any of the cafés.' And so he saw the end of the evening before him, single and yet alternative, preceded either by a meeting with Odette which would put an end to his agony, or by a forced renunciation of finding her this evening, by an acceptance of returning home without having seen her.

The coachman came back, but at the moment he stopped in front of Swann, Swann did not say to him: ‘Did you find the lady?' but: ‘Now remind me, tomorrow, to order more wood; I think our supply must be starting to run out.' Perhaps he had told himself that if Rémi had found Odette in some café where she was waiting for him, the end of the ill-fated evening would already be cancelled out by the realization, which was just beginning, of the blissful end of the evening and that he did not need to rush to seize a happiness that was already captured and held in a safe place, that would not be able to break free.
But it was also from the force of inertia; there was in his disposition that lack of suppleness which certain people have in their bodies, those who at the moment when they need to avoid a collision, snatch a flame away from their clothing, perform any other urgent motion, take their time, begin by remaining for a second in the position in which they were before, as though to find in it their springboard, their source of momentum. And no doubt, if the coachman had interrupted him by saying: ‘The lady is there,' he would have answered: ‘Oh yes, of course, the errand I sent you on! Well, well! Is that so?' and would have gone on talking to him about supplies of wood in order to hide the emotion he felt and allow himself time to separate from his uneasiness and give himself up to his happiness.

But the coachman came back to tell him he had not found her anywhere, and added his opinion, old servant that he was:

– I think that all Monsieur can do now is go home.

But the indifference that Swann had no trouble feigning as long as Rémi could do nothing further to change the answer he had brought back fell from him, when he saw Rémi attempt to make him give up hope and abandon his search:

– No, not at all, he cried, we must find the lady; it's terribly important. She would be extremely annoyed – it's a business matter – she would be extremely offended, if she didn't see me.

– I don't see how the lady could be offended, answered Rémi, since she's the one who left without waiting for Monsieur, and since she said she would go to Prévost's and then she wasn't there.

Lights were beginning to go out all around him. Under the trees on the boulevards, in a mysterious darkness, fewer people wandered past, barely recognizable. Now and then the shadow of a woman coming up to him, murmuring a word in his ear, asking him to take her home, would make Swann start. He brushed anxiously against all those dim bodies as if, among the phantoms of the dead, in the kingdom of darkness, he were searching for Eurydice.

Of all love's modes of production, of all the disseminating agents of the holy evil, surely one of the most efficacious is this great breath of agitation which sometimes blows down on us. Then the die is cast, and the person whose company we enjoy at the time is the one we will
love. It is not even necessary for us to have liked him better than anyone else up to then, or even as much. What is necessary is that our predilection for him should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – at a moment like this, when we do not have him with us – the quest for the pleasures that his charm gave us is suddenly replaced in us by an anxious need whose object is this person himself, an absurd need which the laws of this world make impossible to satisfy and difficult to cure – the senseless and painful need to possess him.

Swann asked to be driven to the last remaining restaurants; it was only the hypothesis of happiness he had been able to envisage calmly; now he no longer hid his agitation, the value he placed on this meeting, and he promised a reward to his coachman if they were successful, as though, by inspiring him with a desire to succeed that would be added to his own, he could make Odette appear, even if she had already gone home to bed, in a restaurant on the boulevard. He pushed on as far as La Maison Dorée, went into Tortoni's
³¹
twice, and, still without having seen her had just come out of the Café Anglais
³²
again, walking fast with a wild look on his face, back to the carriage which was waiting for him at the corner of the boulevard des Italiens, when he bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction: it was Odette; later, she explained that she had not found a seat at Prévost's and so had gone to have supper at La Maison Dorée in an alcove where he had not noticed her, and she was on her way back to her carriage.

She had so little expected to see him that she started back in fear. And he himself had run all over Paris not because he thought it was possible to find her, but because it was too hard for him to give up the search. But the joy which his reason had continued to believe was beyond realization that night only seemed to him all the more real now; for since he had not collaborated with it by foreseeing its probabilities, it remained external to him; he did not need to reach into his mind in order to furnish it with truth, it was from itself that the truth emanated, it itself projected that truth towards him, that truth whose radiance dispelled like a dream the isolation he had so dreaded, that truth on which he now based, on which he now rested, without thinking, his happy reverie. In the same way, a traveller arriving at the Mediterranean shore on a day of fine weather, no longer certain
whether the lands he has just left behind really exist, allows his vision to be dazzled, rather than looking at them himself, by the rays of light emitted in his direction by the luminous, resistant azure of the waters.

He stepped up with her into the carriage that she had waiting there, and told his own to follow.

She was holding a bunch of cattleyas in her hand and Swann saw, under her lace scarf, that she had flowers of the same orchid in her hair, fastened to a plume of swan feathers. She was dressed, under her mantilla, in a flood of black velvet caught up on one side to reveal in a wide triangle the hem of a skirt of white faille and showing a yoke, also of white faille, at the opening of a low-necked bodice tucked with more cattleya flowers. She had barely recovered from the fright Swann had given her when some obstacle made the horse shy. They were roughly jolted, she cried out and began trembling all over, breathless.

– It's all right, he said, don't be afraid.

And he put his arm around her shoulder, supporting her against himself; then he said:

– Now don't talk to me, just answer with a sign so you don't get even more out of breath. It won't bother you, will it, if I straighten the flowers in your bodice? They were knocked out of place when the carriage lurched. I'm afraid you may lose them, I'll push them in a little.

She was not used to seeing a man make such a fuss over her, and said, smiling:

– No, not at all, I don't mind in the least.

But he, intimidated by her answer, and perhaps also so as to appear to have been sincere when he had used that excuse, or even beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed:

– No, no! Don't talk, you'll get out of breath again, you can answer me perfectly well with a gesture, I'll understand. Tell me sincerely, this doesn't bother you? You see, there's a little… I think there's some pollen sprinkled on you; will you let me wipe it off with my hand? I'm not doing it too quickly, I'm not being too rough? Am I tickling you a little, maybe? – I don't want to touch the velvet of your dress, I'm afraid I might crush it. But look, it really was necessary to fasten them, they would have fallen; and this way, by pushing them in
a little myself… Seriously; I'm not annoying you? And what if I just have a little sniff of them to see if they really have no fragrance? I've never smelled them. May I? Tell the truth.

Smiling, she shrugged her shoulders a little, as though to say ‘you're quite mad; you can see very well that I like it.'

He ran his other hand up along Odette's cheek; she gazed at him steadily, with the grave and languid look of the women by the Florentine master whom he had discovered she resembled; protruding to the edges of her lids, her shining eyes, wide and thin, like theirs, seemed about to well out like two tears. She bent her neck as you see them all do, in the pagan scenes as well as in the religious pictures. And in a position that was no doubt habitual for her, which she knew was appropriate to moments like this and which she took care not to forget to adopt, she seemed to require all her strength to hold her face back, as though an invisible force were drawing it towards Swann. And it was Swann who, before she let it fall, as though despite herself, on his lips, held it back for an instant, at a certain distance, between his two hands. He had wanted to give his mind time to catch up, to recognize the dream that it had caressed for so long and to be present at its realization, like a relative summoned to witness the success of a child she has loved very much. Perhaps Swann was also fastening upon this face of an Odette he had not yet possessed, an Odette he had not yet even kissed, this face he was seeing for the last time, the gaze with which, on a day of departure, we hope to carry away with us a landscape we are about to leave for ever.

But he was so timid with her that, having ended by possessing her that night, after beginning by arranging her cattleyas, either from dread of offending her, or from fear of appearing in retrospect to have lied, or from a lack of audacity in formulating a greater demand than this one (which he could renew since it had not angered Odette the first time), in the days following he made use of the same pretext. If she had cattleyas tucked in her blouse, he would say: ‘It's a pity, this evening the cattleyas don't need to be straightened, they haven't been jostled the way they were the other evening; it seems to me, though, that this one isn't quite straight. May I see if these have more fragrance than the others?' Or, if she had none: ‘Oh! No cattleyas tonight, no
way for me to indulge in my little rearrangements.' So that, for some time, the order he had followed the first night, when he began by touching Odette's throat with his fingers and lips, was not changed, and his caresses still began this way each time; and much later, when the rearrangement (or the ritual simulacrum of rearrangement) of the cattleyas had long since fallen into disuse, the metaphor ‘make cattleya', having become a simple utterance they used without thinking about it when they wanted to signify the act of physical possession – in which, in fact, one possesses nothing – lived on in their language, commemorating it, after that forgotten custom. And perhaps this individual way of saying ‘make love' did not mean exactly the same thing as its synonyms. Even if one is tired of women, even if one believes that the possession of the most various women is always the same and familiar beforehand, this possession becomes a new pleasure if it involves women difficult enough – or believed to be so by us – so that we have to make it happen as a result of some episode in our relationship with them that is unforeseen, as had been for Swann, the first time, the rearranging of the cattleyas. He tremulously hoped, that night (but Odette, he told himself, if she was fooled by his ruse, would not be able to guess as much), that the possession of this woman was what would emerge from among their broad mauve petals; and the pleasure he felt already and that Odette was perhaps tolerating, he thought, only because she had not recognized it, seemed to him, because of that – as it might seem to the first man who tasted it among the flowers of earthly paradise – a pleasure that had not existed until then, that he was seeking to create, a pleasure – signalled by the special name he gave it – entirely individual and new.

Now, every evening, when he took her home, he had to go in, and often she came back out in a dressing-gown and led him to his carriage, kissed him within view of the coachman, saying: ‘What difference does it make to me, what other people think of me?' On evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins' (which happened sometimes now that he had another way of seeing her), on the increasingly rare evenings when he went into society, she would ask him to come to see her on his way home, whatever the hour. It was spring, a clear and icy spring. Coming out of a party, he would get into his victoria,
spread a rug over his legs, tell the friends who were going off at the same time and who had asked him to join them, that he could not, that he was not going in the same direction, and the coachman would leave at a fast trot knowing where to go. They would be amazed, and, in fact, Swann was not the same. No one ever received a letter from him now asking for an introduction to some woman. He no longer paid any attention to women, avoided going to places where one might meet them. In a restaurant, in the country, his attitude was the opposite of the one by which, just recently, he could be recognized and which had seemed to have been his always. To such an extent does a passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character that replaces our other character and eliminates the signs, invariable until then, by which it was expressed! Now, however, what was invariable was that, wherever Swann might be, he did not fail to go to meet Odette. The path that separated him from her was the one he inevitably travelled as though it were the slope itself, rapid and irresistible, of his life. In truth, when he had stayed out late, he would often have preferred to go directly home without making that long trip, and not see her until the next day; but the very fact of taking the trouble to go to her house at an unusual hour, of guessing that the friends who were leaving him were saying to themselves: ‘He is tied hand and foot, some woman must be insisting that he go to her whatever the hour,' made him feel he was leading the life of men known to be having a love affair and in whom the fact that they are sacrificing their sleep and their other interests to a dream of sensuous pleasure produces an inner charm. Then again, without his realizing it, the certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not somewhere else with other people, that he would not return without seeing her, neutralized the anguish, forgotten but always ready to be reawakened, that he had felt the night when Odette was not at the Verdurins', and of which the present assuagement was so sweet that it could be named happiness. Perhaps it was to this anguish that he owed the fact that Odette had assumed such importance for him. Other people usually leave us so indifferent that when we have invested in one person such possibilities of causing us pain and joy, she seems to belong to another universe, she is surrounded with poetry, she makes our life into a sort of expanse of emotion in which
she will be closer to us or less close. Swann could not ask himself without anxiety what Odette would mean to him in the years to come. Now and then, as he saw, from his victoria, on those lovely cold nights, the shining moon spreading its brightness between his eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other face, bright and tinged with pink like the moon's, which, one day, had appeared in the forefront of his mind and, since then, had cast on the world the mysterious light in which he saw it. If he arrived after the hour when Odette sent her servants to bed, before ringing at the gate of the little garden he would first go into the street on to which looked out, on the ground floor, between the windows, all alike but dark, of the contiguous houses, the only lit one, the window of her bedroom. He would rap at the pane, and she, alerted, would answer and go and wait for him on the other side, at the front door. He would find several of her favourite pieces open on the piano: the
Valse des Roses
or
Pauvre Fou
by Tagliafico
³³
(which should, according to her wishes which she had put into writing, be performed at her funeral), he would ask her to play instead the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata, even though Odette played very badly, but the loveliest vision of a work of art that stays with us is often the one that transcended the wrong notes coaxed by unskilful fingers from an out-of-tune piano. For Swann the little phrase continued to be associated with the love he felt for Odette. He was aware that this love was something that did not correspond to anything external, anything verifiable by others besides him; he realized that Odette's qualities did not justify his attaching so much value to the time he spent with her. And often, when his positive intelligence alone prevailed in Swann, he wanted to stop sacrificing so many intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But as soon as he heard it, the little phrase had the power to open up within him the space it needed, the proportions of Swann's soul were changed by it; a margin was reserved in him for a bliss that also did not correspond to any external object, and yet, instead of being purely individual, like the enjoyment of that love, assumed for Swann a reality superior to that of concrete things. The little phrase incited in him this thirst for an unfamiliar delight, but it did not give him anything precise to assuage it. So that those parts of Swann's soul from which the little phrase had
erased any concern for material interests, any considerations that were human and valid for all people, it had left vacant and blank, and in them he was free to write Odette's name. Also, to what Odette's affection might have about it that was somewhat limited and disappointing, the little phrase came along to add, to amalgamate its mysterious essence. From the sight of Swann's face as he listened to the phrase, one would have said he was absorbing an anaesthetic that allowed him to breathe more deeply. And the pleasure which the music gave him, and which was soon to create in him a true need, did indeed resemble, at those moments, the pleasure he would have found in testing fragrances, in entering into contact with a world for which we are not made, which seems formless to us because our eyes do not perceive it, meaningless because it evades our understanding, which we can attain only through a single sense. What great repose, what mysterious renewal for Swann – for him whose eyes, though refined lovers of painting, whose mind, though a shrewd observer of manners, bore forever the indelible trace of the dryness of his life – to feel himself transformed into a creature strange to humanity, blind, without logical faculties, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimerical creature perceiving the world only through his hearing. And since he still searched the little phrase for a meaning to which his understanding could not descend, what strange drunkenness he felt, as he divested his innermost soul of all the help of reason and forced it to pass alone through the sieve, through the dark filter of sound! He began to become aware of all that was painful, perhaps even secretly unappeased in the depths of the sweetness of that phrase, but it could not hurt him. What did it matter if it told him love was fragile, his own love was so strong! He toyed with the sadness it diffused, he felt it pass over him, but in a caress that only deepened and sweetened his sense of his own happiness. He made Odette play it ten times, twenty times, demanding that while she did so she should not stop kissing him. Each kiss summons another kiss. Ah, in those first days of love, kisses come so naturally! So closely, in their profusion, do they crowd together; and it would be as hard for you to count the kisses you give each other in an hour as the flowers of a field in the month of May. Then she would make as if to stop, saying: ‘How can you expect me to play like
that if you hold on to me? I can't do everything at once. Now decide what you want – should I play the piano or play with you?', he would become annoyed, she would burst out laughing, and her laughter would change and descend on him in a rain of kisses. Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of appearing in Botticelli's
Life of Moses
, he would place her in it, he would give Odette's neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by the piano, in the present moment, ready to be kissed and possessed, the idea of her materiality and her life would intoxicate him with such force that, his eye distracted, his jaw tensed as though to devour her, he would swoop down upon that Botticelli virgin and begin pinching her cheeks. Then, once he had left her, not without going back in to kiss her again because he had forgotten to carry away in his memory some detail of her smell or her features, while he was returning home in his victoria, he would bless Odette for allowing him these daily visits, which he felt could not give her very great joy, but which, by saving him from becoming jealous – by relieving him of the occasion for suffering again from the disease that had broken out in him on the evening when he had not found her at the Verdurins' – would help him to arrive, without having any more of those crises of which the first had been so painful and would remain the only one, at the end of this singular period of his life, these hours that were almost enchanted, like those in which he crossed Paris in the light of the moon. And, noticing, during his return, that the star had now moved in relation to him and was almost at the edge of the horizon, feeling that his love, too, was obeying immutable and natural laws, he asked himself whether this period he had entered would last much longer, whether, soon, his thoughts would no longer see the dear face except as occupying a distant and diminished place, and nearly ceasing to radiate any charm. For Swann did find charm in things, now that he was in love, just as in the time when, as an adolescent, he had thought he was an artist; but this was no longer the same charm; Odette alone conferred it on them. He felt the inspirations of his youth, which had been dissipated by a frivolous life, reawakening
in him, but they all bore the reflection, the mark of a particular being; and, in the long hours which he now found a delicate pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescing soul, little by little he became himself again, but for another.