In Search of Lost Time (45 page)

One evening when Swann had agreed to dine with the Verdurins, and had just mentioned during dinner that the next day he was going to attend a banquet for old comrades, Odette had answered him across the table, in front of Forcheville, who was now one of the faithful, in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:

– Yes, I know you have your banquet, so I won't see you till I get home, but don't be too late.

Even though Swann had never become very seriously offended by Odette's friendliness towards one or another of the faithful, he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her confess in front of everyone this way, with such calm lack of modesty, to their regular meetings every night, his privileged position in her house and the preference for him which it implied. Of course Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and the ascendancy he exerted over a creature so inferior to him was not something that ought to appear to him very flattering to see proclaimed to all the ‘faithful', but from the time he had first noticed that many men found Odette an enchanting and desirable woman, the attraction which her body had for them had awoken in him a painful need to master her entirely even in the smallest parts of her heart. And he had begun to set an inestimable price on those times spent in her house at night, when he would sit her on his knees, make her say what she thought of one thing, of another, when he would count up the only goods whose possession he now valued on earth. And so, after this dinner, taking her aside, he did not fail to thank her effusively, endeavouring to teach her according to the degrees of gratitude he displayed to her, the scale of pleasures that she could give him, the highest of which was to guarantee him, during the time that his love should last and make him vulnerable to them, protection from the assaults of jealousy.

When he came away from the banquet the next day, it was pouring with rain, all he had was his victoria; a friend offered to drive him home in his coupé, and because Odette, by the fact that she had asked him to come, had given him the assurance that she was not waiting for anyone else, it was with a tranquil mind and a happy heart that, rather than set off in the rain like this, he would have gone back home to bed. But perhaps, if she saw that he did not seem anxious to spend the last part of every evening without exception in her company, she might neglect to reserve it for him, precisely the one time when he particularly desired it.

He reached her house after eleven o'clock, and, as he was apologizing for not being able to come earlier, she complained that it was
indeed very late, the storm had made her unwell, she had a headache and warned him that she would not keep him more than half an hour, that at midnight she would send him away; and, soon afterwards, she felt tired and wanted to go to sleep.

– So, no cattleyas tonight? he said to her, after I was so hoping for a nice little cattleya.

And, a little sulky and irritable, she answered:

– No, no, darling, no cattleyas tonight, you can see I'm unwell!

– It might have done you good, but I won't insist.

She asked him to turn out the light before he went, he himself closed the curtains of the bed and left. But when he was back at home, the idea came to him abruptly that perhaps Odette had been waiting for someone else that night, had only pretended to be tired and had asked him to turn out the lights only so that he would believe she was going to go to sleep, that as soon as he left, she had turned the lights on again, and let in the man who was going to spend the night with her. He looked at the time. It was about an hour and a half since he had left her, he went back out, took a hackney carriage and stopped it very close to where she lived, in a little street perpendicular to the one on to which the back of her house opened and into which he sometimes went to knock at the window of her bedroom so that she would come and open the door for him; he got out of the carriage, the neighbourhood was dark and deserted, he had only to walk a few steps and he came out almost opposite her house. Amid the blackness of all the windows in the street in which the lights had long since been put out, he saw just one from which there spilled out – between shutters which pressed its mysterious golden pulp – the light which filled the bedroom and which, on so many other evenings, as soon as he saw it when he came into the street, lifted his spirits and announced to him: ‘She's there waiting for you' and which now tortured him by saying: ‘She's there with the man she was waiting for.' He wanted to know who it was; he slipped along the wall as far as the window, but between the oblique slats of the shutters he could see nothing; all he heard in the silence of the night was the murmur of a conversation. Certainly it hurt him to see that light and know that in its golden atmosphere, behind the sash, the unseen and detested pair were moving about, to
hear the murmur revealing the presence of the man who had come after he left, Odette's duplicity, the happiness she was enjoying with him.

And yet he was glad he had come: the torment that had forced him to leave his house had become less acute as it became less vague, now that Odette's other life, of which he had had, back then, a sudden helpless suspicion, was now in his grasp, fully illuminated by the lamp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he could go to surprise it and capture it; or rather he would knock on the shutters as he often did when he came very late; this way at least, Odette would learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and heard the talking, and that, after having just a moment ago pictured her laughing with the other man at his illusions, he would now be the one to see them, confident in their error, actually outwitted by him whom they believed to be so very far away and who, in fact, already knew he was going to knock at the shutters. And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress: it was a pleasure in knowledge. If, ever since he had fallen in love, things had regained for him a little of the delightful interest they had once had for him, but only insofar as they were illuminated by the memory of Odette, now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, a passion for truth, but for a truth that was likewise interposed between him and his mistress, taking its light only from her, a completely individual truth whose sole object, of an infinite value and almost disinterested in its beauty, was Odette's actions, her relationships, her plans, her past. At all other periods of his life, the little everyday words and deeds of a person had always seemed worthless to Swann if someone conveyed them to him as the subject of a bit of gossip, he found such gossip meaningless, and, while he listened to it, only the most vulgar part of his attention was interested; these were the times when he felt himself to be most mediocre. But in this strange phase of love, an individual person assumes something so profound that the curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed
him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

On the point of knocking on the shutters, he felt a pang of shame thinking that Odette was going to know he had been suspicious, that he had come back, that he had posted himself in the street. She had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who spied. What he was about to do was very uncouth, and from now on she would detest him, whereas now, for the moment, so long as he had not knocked, perhaps, even while deceiving him, she loved him. How often we sacrifice the fulfilment of a possible happiness to our impatience for an immediate pleasure! But the desire to know the truth was stronger and seemed to him nobler. He knew that the reality of certain circumstances which he would have given his life to reconstruct accurately could be read behind that window striated with light, as under the gold-illuminated cover of one of those precious manuscripts to whose artistic richness itself the scholar who consults them cannot remain indifferent. He felt a sensuous pleasure in finding out the truth that so impassioned him from this unique, ephemeral and precious copy of a translucid substance so warm and so beautiful. Then, too, the advantage he felt he had – that he so needed to feel he had – over them, was perhaps less in knowing than in being able to show them he knew. He raised himself on his tiptoes. He knocked. They had not heard, he knocked again more loudly, the conversation stopped. A man's voice which he tried to distinguish from among the voices of those of Odette's friends whom he knew asked:

– Who's there?

He was not sure he recognized it. He knocked again. The window was opened, then the shutters. Now, there was no way to retreat and, since she was going to know everything, so as not to seem too wretched, too jealous and curious, he merely called out, carelessly and gaily:

– Please don't disturb yourself, I was just passing by, I saw the light was on, I wanted to know if you were feeling better.

He looked. Before him, two old gentlemen were standing at the window, one holding a lamp, and then he saw the bedroom, a bedroom unknown to him. Because he was in the habit, when he came to Odette's house very late, of recognizing her window by the fact that it was the only one lit among windows that were all alike, he had made a mistake and knocked at the window after hers, which belonged to the adjoining house. He went away apologizing and returned home, happy that the satisfaction of his curiosity had left their love intact and that after having simulated a sort of indifference towards Odette for so long, he had not given her, by his jealousy, that proof of loving her too much, which, between two lovers, exempts, for ever after, from loving enough, the one who receives it. He did not talk to her about this misadventure, he himself did not think about it further. But now and then his thoughts as they moved about would come upon the memory of it which they had not noticed, bump up against it, drive it farther in, and Swann would feel a sudden, deep pain. As if it were a physical pain, Swann's mind could not lessen it; but at least with physical pain, because it is independent of thought, thought can dwell on it, note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased. But with this pain the mind, merely by recalling it, recreated it. To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from it. And when, chatting with friends, he forgot his hurt, all of a sudden a word someone said to him would make him change expression, like a wounded man whom some clumsy person has just carelessly touched on his sore arm or leg. When he left Odette, he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled her smiles, derisive when speaking of this or that other person, and affectionate towards him, the heaviness of her head which she had shifted from its axis to incline it, let it fall, almost despite herself, on his lips, as she had done the first time in the carriage, the languishing looks she had cast at him while she was in his arms, as with a shiver she pulled her inclined head in against her shoulder.

But instantly his jealousy, as if it were the shadow of his love, would furnish itself with a duplicate of the new smile she had given him that very evening – and which, inverse now, mocked Swann and was filled
with love for another man – with that inclination of her head but reversed towards other lips, with all the marks of affection, now given to another man, that she had given him. And all the sensuous memories he carried away from her house were like so many sketches, ‘plans' like those a decorator submits to you, that allowed Swann to form an idea of the ardent or swooning attitudes she might adopt with other men. So that he came to regret every pleasure he enjoyed with her, every invented caress whose sweetness he had been so imprudent as to point out to her, every grace he discovered in her, for he knew that a moment later, they would supply new instruments for torturing him.

This torture became still crueller when Swann remembered a brief expression he had surprised, a few days before, and for the first time, in Odette's eyes. It was after dinner, at the Verdurins'. Either because Forcheville, feeling that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favour in their house, wanted to use him as a whipping-boy and shine in front of them at his expense, or because he had been irritated by a clumsy remark which Saniette had just made to him and which, in fact, had gone unnoticed by those present, who were not aware of the unpleasant allusion it might contain, quite against the wishes of the one who had uttered it without any malice, or finally because for some time now he had been looking for an opportunity to induce them to banish from the house someone who was too well acquainted with him and whom he knew to be so refined that he felt embarrassed at certain moments simply by his presence, Forcheville answered this clumsy remark of Saniette's with such coarseness, hurling insults at him, and emboldened, as he shouted, by Saniette's pain, his dismay, his entreaties, that the wretched man, after asking Mme Verdurin if he ought to stay, and receiving no answer, had left the house stammering, tears in his eyes. Odette had watched this scene impassively, but when the door closed on Saniette, lowering as it were by several notches her face's habitual expression, so as to be able to find herself, in her baseness, on an equal footing with Forcheville, she had made her eyes glitter with a sly smile of congratulations for the audacity he had shown, of mockery for the man who had been its victim; she had cast him a glance of complicity in evil which was so clearly intended to say: ‘That finished him off, or I'm very much mistaken. Did you see how pathetic he looked? He
was actually crying,' that Forcheville, when his eyes met that glance, suddenly sobering from the anger or simulation of anger which still warmed him, smiled and answered: