In Search of Lost Time (46 page)

– He need only have been friendly, and he would still be here. A good rebuke does a man no harm at any age.

One day when Swann had gone out in the middle of the afternoon to pay a call, not having found the person he wanted to see, he had the idea of going to Odette's house at an hour when he never went there, but when he knew she was always at home having her nap or writing letters before tea-time, and when he would enjoy seeing her for a little while without bothering her. The concierge told him he thought she was there; he rang, thought he heard a noise, heard footsteps, but no one opened the door. Anxious, irritated, he went into the little street on which the other side of the house looked out, stood in front of the window of Odette's bedroom; the curtains prevented him from seeing anything, he knocked hard on the window-panes, called out; no one opened the window. He saw that some neighbours were watching him. He went away, thinking that after all, perhaps he had been mistaken in believing he heard footsteps; but he remained so preoccupied by it that he could not think about anything else. An hour later, he came back. He found her there; she told him she had been at home earlier when he rang, but was sleeping; the bell had woken her, she had guessed it was Swann, she had run after him, but he had already left. She had certainly heard the sound of knocking at the window-panes. Swann immediately recognized this statement as one of those fragments of true fact which liars, when caught unprepared, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood they are inventing, believing they can accommodate it there and steal away its resemblance to the Truth. Of course when Odette had just done something she did not want to reveal, she would hide it deep inside herself. But as soon as she found herself face to face with the man to whom she wanted to lie, she was overcome with uneasiness, all her ideas collapsed, her faculties of invention and reasoning were paralysed, she found nothing in her head but emptiness, yet it was necessary to say something, and all she would find within reach was the very thing she had wanted to conceal and which, being true,
was all that had remained there. She would detach a little piece from it, unimportant in itself, telling herself that after all this was better since the detail was authentic and did not present the same dangers as a false detail. ‘At least this is true, she would say to herself, so much is gained, anyway. He may make inquiries and he'll see that it's true, so at least it won't be this that gives me away.' She was wrong, it was precisely this that gave her away, she did not realize that the true detail had corners that could fit only into the contiguous details of the true fact from which she had arbitrarily detached it, corners which, whatever might be the invented details among which she placed it, would always reveal, by their excess of material and unfilled empty areas, that it was not from among these that it had come. ‘She admits that she heard me ring, then knock, and that she thought it was me, that she wanted to see me, Swann said to himself. But this does not conform with the fact that no one opened the door.'

But he did not point out this contradiction to her, because he thought that, left to herself, Odette would perhaps produce some lie that would be a faint indication of the truth; she would talk; he would not interrupt her, he would collect with an avid and painful piety the words she said to him, feeling (precisely because she was hiding it behind them as she talked to him) that, like the sacred veil, they retained the vague imprint, sketched the uncertain features, of that reality so infinitely precious and, alas! undiscoverable – what she had been doing that afternoon at three o'clock, when he came – of which he would never possess more than these lies, illegible and divine vestiges, and which now existed only in the memory of this woman, who would conceal it like stolen goods and contemplate it without being able to appreciate it, but would not hand it over to him. Of course, he fully suspected at times that in themselves Odette's daily actions were not passionately interesting, and that the relationships she might have with other men did not exhale naturally, universally and for every intelligent creature a morbid sadness capable of infecting one with a feverish desire to commit suicide. He would then realize that this interest, this sadness existed only in him like a disease, and that, once this disease was cured, Odette's actions, the kisses she might have given would become once again as harmless as those of so many other women. But the fact that
the painful curiosity which Swann brought to them now had its origin only in himself was not enough to make him think it was unreasonable to consider this curiosity important and to use every possible means to satisfy it. For Swann was reaching an age at which one's philosophy – encouraged by the current philosophy of the day, and also by that of the circle in which Swann had spent so much of his life, that of the social set attached to the Princesse des Laumes, where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to scepticism and nothing was real and incontestable except the individual tastes of each person – is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorizing the objects of their aspirations, try to derive from the years that have already elapsed a stable residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and which they will deliberately make it their primary concern that the kind of life they adopt may satisfy. Swann thought it prudent to make allowances in his life for the pain he felt at not knowing what Odette had been doing, just as he made allowances for the fresh outbreak which a damp climate might cause in his eczema; to provide in his budget for a sizeable sum of available funds for obtaining information about how Odette spent her days, without which he would feel unhappy, just as he reserved the same for other partialities from which he knew he could expect to derive pleasure, at least before he had fallen in love, like his partiality for collections and for good food.

When he wanted to say good-bye to Odette in order to leave for home, she asked him to stay longer and even held him back suddenly, by taking his arm, when he was about to open the door to go out. But he took no notice of this, because among the multitude of gestures, remarks, minor incidents that fill a conversation, it is inevitable that we should come close, without detecting anything in them to attract our attention, to those that hide a truth our suspicions are blindly seeking, and that we should stop, on the other hand, at those behind which there is nothing. She kept saying to him: ‘How unfortunate – you never come in the afternoon, and the one time you do come, I don't see you.' He knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed at having missed his visit, but,
because she was good, desirous of pleasing him and often sad when she had vexed him, he found it quite natural that she should be sad this time at having deprived him of the pleasure of spending an hour together, a very great pleasure, not for her, but for him. Yet it was a thing unimportant enough so that the pained air she continued to have ended by surprising him. She reminded him even more than usual, when she looked this way, of the faces of the women portrayed by the painter of the Primavera.
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She had, at these times, their sort of dejected and woebegone expression which seems about to succumb beneath the weight of a grief too heavy for them, when they are merely letting the child Jesus play with a pomegranate or watching Moses pour water into a trough.
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He had once before seen such a sadness in her, but he no longer knew when. And suddenly he remembered: it was when Odette had lied in talking to Mme Verdurin the day after that dinner to which she had not come on the pretext that she was ill and in reality in order to stay with Swann. Of course, even if she had been the most scrupulous of women, she might not have felt remorse over a lie as innocent. But the lies Odette generally told were less innocent and served to prevent discoveries that might have created for her, with one person or another, terrible difficulties. And so when she lied, overcome by fear, aware that she was not very well armed to defend herself, uncertain of success, she wanted to cry, from exhaustion, like certain children who have not slept. And she also knew that her lie was usually doing serious harm to the man to whom she was telling it, and into whose power she was perhaps going to fall if she lied badly. And so she felt at once humble and guilty in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant social lie, the association of sensations and memories would leave her with the faintness that follows overexertion and the regret that follows an act of malevolence.

What depressing lie was she telling Swann that gave her this pained look, this plaintive voice which seemed to falter under the effort she demanded of herself and ask for forgiveness? He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about the incident in the afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, that had perhaps not yet transpired and was quite imminent, something that might enlighten him about this truth. At that moment, he heard
the bell ring. Odette did not stop talking, but her words were now no more than a long lament: her regret at not having seen Swann in the afternoon, at not having opened the door to him, had turned into true despair.

He could hear the front door closing again and the sound of a carriage, as if someone was going away again – probably the one Swann was not supposed to meet – after being told that Odette was out. Then, when he reflected that merely by coming at an hour when he was not in the habit of coming he had managed to disturb so many arrangements she did not want him to discover, he was overcome with a feeling of discouragement, almost of despondency. But because he loved Odette, because he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts towards her, the pity he might have inspired in himself he felt for her instead, and he murmured: ‘Poor darling!' As he was leaving her, she picked up several letters that she had on her table and asked him if he would put them in the post. He took them away with him and, once he was home, saw that he had kept the letters on him. He returned as far as the post-office, drew them from his pocket and before tossing them into the box looked at the addresses. They were all for tradesmen, except one for Forcheville. He held it in his hand. He said to himself: ‘If I saw what was inside it, I would know what she calls him, how she talks to him, if there's anything between them. It may even be that by not looking, I'm behaving with a lack of delicacy towards Odette, because this is the only way to free myself of a suspicion which is perhaps calumnious for her, which is in any case bound to hurt her, and which nothing would be able to destroy, once the letter was gone.'

He returned home after leaving the post-office, but he had kept that last letter with him. He lit a candle and held up close to it the envelope he had not dared to open. At first he could not read anything, but the envelope was thin and, by making it adhere to the stiff card that was enclosed in it, he could read, through its transparency, the last words. It was a very cold, formal ending. If it had not been he looking at a letter addressed to Forcheville, but instead Forcheville reading a letter addressed to Swann, Forcheville would have seen words that were far more affectionate! He took firm hold of the card that danced in the envelope, which was larger than it was, then, sliding it with his thumb,
brought its different lines one after another under the part of the envelope where the paper was not doubled, the only part through which one could read.

Despite this he could not distinguish anything very well. But it did not matter, because he had seen enough to realize that its subject was a minor, unimportant event that had nothing to do with a love affair; it was something relating to an uncle of Odette's. Swann had read clearly at the beginning of the line: ‘I was right', but had not understood what Odette had done that was right, when suddenly, a word he had not at first been able to decipher appeared and illuminated the meaning of the entire sentence: ‘I was right to open the door, it was my uncle.' Open the door! So Forcheville had been there that afternoon when Swann rang the bell, and she had made him leave, which was the source of the noise Swann had heard.

Then he read the whole letter; at the end she apologized for having acted so unceremoniously towards him and said he had forgotten his cigarettes at her house, the same sentence she had written to Swann one of the first times he had come. But in Swann's case she had added: ‘If you had left your heart here, I would not have let you take it away again.' For Forcheville nothing like that: no allusion that might suggest that they were having an affair. And in fact, Forcheville was more deceived in all this than he, since Odette was writing to him to assure him that the visitor had been her uncle. In the end he, Swann, was the one she considered important, the one for whom she had dismissed the other. And yet, if there was nothing between Odette and Forcheville, why had she not opened the door right away, why had she said, ‘I did the right thing to open the door, it was my uncle'? if she was doing nothing wrong at that moment, how would Forcheville even be able to explain to himself the fact that she had not opened the door? Swann remained there, disconsolate, embarrassed and yet happy, with this envelope which Odette had handed over to him quite fearlessly, so absolute was her confidence in his sense of delicacy, but through the transparent glazing of which was revealed to him, with the secret of an incident which he would never have believed it possible to find out, a little of Odette's life, as in a narrow illuminated section cut directly out of the unknown. Then his jealousy rejoiced over it, as if
that jealousy had had an independent, selfish vitality, voracious for anything that would feed it, even at Swann's own expense. Now it had food and Swann was going to be able to begin worrying each day over the visitors Odette might have received at about five o'clock, and begin trying to learn where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann's affection continued to preserve the same character imprinted on it from the very beginning by his ignorance as to how Odette spent her days and by the mental laziness that stopped him from compensating for his ignorance with his imagination. He had not been jealous at first of Odette's whole life, but only of the times when some circumstance, perhaps wrongly interpreted, led him to suppose that Odette might have deceived him. His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another. But Swann was not capable of inventing his sufferings. They were merely the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from outside.