In Search of Lost Time (40 page)

He went to her house only in the evening, and he knew nothing about how she spent her time during the day, any more than about her past, so much so that he lacked even that initial bit of information which, by allowing us to imagine for ourselves what we do not know, makes us want to know it. Thus, he did not ask himself what she might be doing, nor what sort of life she had had. He merely smiled sometimes at the thought that a few years before, when he did not know her, someone had talked to him about a woman who, if he remembered rightly, must certainly have been she, as being a courtesan, a kept woman, one of those women to whom he still attributed, since he had spent very little time in their company, the wilful, fundamentally perverse character with which they were for so long endowed by the imaginations of certain novelists. He would tell himself that often if one simply believes the opposite of the reputation the world has formed one will judge a person accurately, when he contrasted the character of such a woman with that of Odette, good, naïve, enamoured of idealism, so nearly incapable of not telling the truth that, after he begged her one day, so that he could have dinner alone with her, to write to the Verdurins telling them that she was unwell, the next day he had seen her, face to face with Mme Verdurin, who was asking her if she felt better, blush, stammer and reveal on her face despite herself what an affliction, what a torment it was for her to lie, and, while in her answer she multiplied the invented details of her alleged indisposition the day before, appear to be asking forgiveness, by her supplicating looks and her sorrowful voice, for the falseness of her words.

On certain days, however, though they were rare, she came to his home in the afternoon, interrupting his day-dreams or the study of Vermeer he had resumed lately. His servant would come to tell him that Mme de Crécy was in his morning-room. He would go off to find her there, and when he opened the door, as soon as she saw Swann, a smile would come and settle in Odette's rosy face, changing the shape of her mouth, the look in her eyes, the modelling of her cheeks. When
he was alone again, he would see that smile, he would see the one she had given him the day before, another with which she had greeted him on some occasion or other, the one with which she had responded, in the carriage, when he had asked her if it annoyed her that he was straightening her cattleyas; and Odette's life during the rest of the time, since he knew nothing about it, appeared to him, with its neutral and colourless background, similar to those pages of studies by Watteau
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in which one sees, here, there, in every corner, from every angle, drawn in three colours on buff paper, innumerable smiles. But sometimes, in a corner of that life which Swann saw as completely empty, even if his mind told him it was not, because he could not imagine it, some friend, who, suspecting they loved each other, would not have ventured to tell him anything about her except what was insignificant, would describe to him Odette's form, which he had seen, that very morning, going up the rue Abbatucci
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on foot in a ‘visiting cloak' trimmed with skunk, under a ‘Rembrandt-style' hat and with a bouquet of violets at her blouse. This simple sketch was greatly disturbing to Swann because it suddenly made him see that Odette had a life which did not belong entirely to him; he wanted to know whom she had been trying to please with that outfit, which he did not know she possessed; he would promise himself to ask her where she had been going, at that moment, as if in the whole of his mistress's colourless life – almost inexistent, because it was invisible to him – there had been only one thing apart from all those smiles directed at him: her walking under a Rembrandt-style hat, with a bunch of violets in her bodice.

Except when he asked her for the little phrase by Vinteuil instead of
The Waltz of the Roses
, Swann did not try to make her play things he liked or, any more in music than in literature, to correct her bad taste. He fully realized that she was not intelligent. When she told him she would like it so much if he would tell her about the great poets, she had imagined that she would immediately become familiar with heroic and romantic couplets like those by the Vicomte de Borelli,
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but even more moving. As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked if he had ever suffered because of a woman, if it was a woman who had inspired him, and when Swann admitted to her that no one knew anything
about that, she lost interest in the painter. She often said: ‘I do believe, of course, that poetry – well, there would be nothing more beautiful if it was true, if poets really believed everything they said. But quite often, those people are the most calculating of all. I know something about it, because a friend of mine was in love with a poet of sorts. In his poetry all he talked about was love, the sky, the stars. Oh, she was fooled all right! He did her out of more than three hundred thousand francs.' If Swann then tried to teach her what artistic beauty was, how one should admire poetry or painting, after a moment she would stop listening, saying: ‘Yes… I didn't imagine it was like that.' And he would sense that she was feeling such disappointment that he would prefer to lie, telling her that what he had said was nothing, that it was only the least important part, that he did not have the time to go into things more deeply, that there was something else. But she would say to him sharply: ‘Something else? What?… Say it, then,' but he would not say it, knowing how it would seem feeble to her and different from what she was hoping for, less sensational and less touching, and fearing that, disillusioned by art, she would at the same time be disillusioned by love.

And in fact she found Swann intellectually inferior to what she would have thought. ‘You're always so reserved. I can't make you out.' She would marvel more at his indifference to money, his kindness to everyone, his refinement. And it often happens, in fact, to greater men than Swann, to a scientist or an artist, when he is not misunderstood by those around him, that the feeling on their part which proves that the superiority of his intelligence has compelled their recognition is not their admiration for his ideas, since these are beyond them, but their respect for his goodness. Respect, too, was what was inspired in Odette by Swann's position in society, but she did not want him to try to secure invitations for her. Perhaps she felt that he might not be successful, or was even afraid that merely by talking about her he would prompt revelations that she dreaded. In any case, she had made him promise never to utter her name. The reason she did not want to go into society, she had told him, was a quarrel she had once had with a friend who, to avenge herself, had then said bad things about her. Swann objected: ‘But not everyone knew your friend. – Well, yes, but
these things get around. The world is cruel.' Swann did not understand this story, but on the other hand he knew that such precepts – ‘The world is cruel,' ‘a slanderous remark spreads like a drop of oil' – were generally held to be true; there must be cases to which they applied. Was Odette's one of them? He wondered about this, but not for long, because he too was subject to the mental torpor that had burdened his father, whenever he posed himself a difficult problem. Besides, this world which so frightened Odette did not, perhaps, inspire any great desire in her, because it was too far removed from the one she knew for her to picture it quite clearly to herself. However, while she had remained in certain respects truly simple (for example she had kept as her friend a solitary little seamstress, whose steep, dark and foul-smelling stair she climbed almost every day), she thirsted after fashion, but did not conceive of it in the same way as the fashionable people. For them, fashion is a thing that emanates from a small number of individuals who project it to a considerable distance – more and more faintly the farther one is from the centre of their closest associations – through the circle of their friends or the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of register. Society people hold this register in their memory, they have an erudition about such matters, from which they have derived a sort of taste, a sort of discernment, so that if Swann, for example, read in a newspaper the names of the people who were at a dinner, he could immediately, without having to call upon his knowledge of the world, tell the exact degree of stylishness of that dinner, the way a literary person, simply by reading a sentence, can judge exactly the quality of its author. But Odette was one of those people (extremely numerous, whatever the fashionable people may think, and the like of which exists in every class of society) who do not share these notions, who imagine a stylishness that is quite different, that assumes different guises according to the circle to which they belong, but has the particular characteristic – whether it be the sort of stylishness Odette dreamed of, or the sort Mme Cottard worshipped – of being directly accessible to everyone. The other, the stylishness of the society people, is accessible too, in truth, but only after some lapse of time. Odette would say of someone:

– He only goes to the really smart places.

And if Swann asked her what she meant by that, she would answer him a little scornfully:

– Why, smart places! My goodness! If at your age you need to be taught what the smart places are, I don't know what to tell you. For example, the avenue de l'Impératrice
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on Sunday mornings, the Tour du Lac
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at five o'clock, the é den Théâtre
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on Thursdays, the Hippodrome
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on Friday, the balls…

– Now, what balls?

– Why, the balls people give in Paris, the smart ones, I mean. Well, Herbinger, you know, the one that has a job with a broker? But you must know him, he's one of the most successful men in Paris, that tall blond young man who's such a snob, who always has a flower in his buttonhole, a part at the back, a light-coloured overcoat; he goes about with that old bag he takes out to all the premières. Well, he gave a ball the other night, and the smartest people in Paris were there. How I would have loved to go! But you had to show your invitation card at the door and I couldn't get one. Really, I'm just as glad I didn't go, I would have got killed in the crush, and I wouldn't have seen a thing. It's really just to be able to say you were at Herbinger's. And you know what a braggart I am! Anyway, you can bet that out of a hundred girls who tell you they were there, a good half of them are lying… But actually, you're such a swell, I'm amazed you weren't there.

But Swann in no way tried to make her change this conception of fashionable life; thinking that his own was no more real, was also foolish, unimportant, he saw no point in instructing her about it, so that after some months she had no interest in the people whose homes he went to except as a means of obtaining enclosure passes for horse-races or tickets to premières. She wanted him to cultivate useful relationships of that kind, but in other respects she was persuaded they were not very smart, after she saw the Marquise de Villeparisis go past her in the street wearing a black woollen dress and a bonnet with strings.

– Why, she looks like a working-class woman, darling, like an old concierge! That was a marquise! I'm no marquise, but you'd have to pay me handsomely to make me go about rigged out like that!

She could not understand why Swann lived in the house on the quai d'Orléans which, though she did not dare admit it to him, she found unworthy of him.

Of course she claimed she loved ‘antiques' and assumed a rapturous and discriminating air when she said she adored spending a whole day ‘collecting curios', looking for ‘bric-à-brac', things ‘from the past'. Although it was a sort of point of honour in which she persisted (and in which she seemed to be obeying some family precept) that she should never answer questions or ‘account' for how she spent her days, she talked to Swann once about a friend who had invited her to her house, where everything was ‘period'. But Swann could not manage to make her say what that period was. After some reflection, however, she answered that it was ‘medieval'. By this she meant that there was wood panelling. Some time later, she talked to him about her friend again and added, in the hesitant tone and with the knowing look with which you mention someone you have had dinner with the night before and whose name you never heard before, but whom your hosts seemed to consider someone so celebrated that you hope the person you are talking to will know who you are talking about: ‘Her dining-room… is… eighteenth-century!' She had thought the room was hideous, bare, as if the house were not finished, the women looked hideous in it too and the fashion would never catch on. Finally, she talked about this again a third time and showed Swann the address of the man who had made that dining-room and whom she wanted to send for, when she had the money, to see if he could make one for her, not the same one, of course, but another which she was contemplating and which unfortunately the dimensions of her little house would not allow, one with tall sideboards, Renaissance furniture and fireplaces like the ones in the Château de Blois.
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That day, she let slip in Swann's presence what she thought of his home on the quai d'Orléans; because he had criticized the fact that Odette's friend preferred, not Louis XVI, for, he said, even though that was not done, it could be charming, but the fake antique: ‘You wouldn't want her to live the way you do, with your broken furniture and your threadbare carpets,' she said to him, her bourgeois deference to public opinion prevailing, again, over her cocotte dilettantism.

People who liked collecting curios, who liked poetry, who were contemptuous of crass calculations, and dreamed of honour and love, she saw as an elite superior to the rest of humanity. One did not really have to have these predilections, provided one proclaimed them; of a man who had confessed to her at dinner that he loved to wander about the city, to get his hands dirty in the old shops, that he would never be appreciated by this commercial century, because he did not look after his own interests, and that because of this he belonged to another age, she returned home saying: ‘Why, he's adorable, so sensitive, I never would have guessed!' and she felt a sudden warm friendship for him. But on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had these tastes, but did not talk about them, left her cold. No doubt she had to admit that Swann did not value money, but she would add sulkily: ‘But with him, it's not the same thing'; and in fact, what spoke to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.