In Search of Lost Time (59 page)

But often the things he did not know, that he now was afraid of knowing, were revealed spontaneously by Odette herself, and without her realizing it; in fact the distance that depravity put between Odette's real life and the relatively innocent life which Swann had believed, and quite often still believed, his mistress led, was a distance whose extent Odette did not realize: a depraved person, still affecting the
same virtue in front of the people by whom he does not want his vices to be suspected, has no gauge by which to recognize how far the latter, whose continuous growth is imperceptible to himself, are drawing him little by little away from normal ways of living. As they cohabited, deep in Odette's mind, with the memory of the acts she was hiding from Swann, other actions were gradually coloured by them, infected by them, without her being able to see anything strange about them, without their seeming out of place in the particular surroundings where she kept them inside her; but if she described them to Swann, he was horrified by the revelation of the environment they betrayed. One day he was trying, without hurting Odette, to ask her if she had ever had any dealings with a procuress. Actually he was convinced she had not; reading the anonymous letter had introduced the conjecture into his mind, but in a mechanical way; it had met with no credence there, but had in fact remained there, and Swann, in order to be rid of the purely material but nonetheless awkward presence of the suspicion, wanted Odette to remove it. ‘Oh, no! Not that they don't pester me,' she added, revealing by her smile a self-satisfied vanity which she no longer noticed could not seem legitimate to Swann. ‘There was one here yesterday who stayed more than two hours waiting for me, offered me any amount I liked. It seems some ambassador had said to her: “I'll kill myself if you don't get her for me.” They told her I'd gone out. In the end I went and talked to her myself so she would leave. I wish you could have seen the way I spoke to her; my maid heard me from the next room and told me I was shouting at the top of my voice. I said, “Haven't I told you I don't want to? I don't like the idea of it at all. Really, I should hope I'm still free to do what I want! If I needed the money, I could understand…” The concierge has orders not to let her in again. He'll tell her I'm in the country. Oh, I wish you had been hiding somewhere. I think you would have been pleased, my dear. You see, your little Odette has some good in her, all the same, even though some people find her so hateful.'

What was more her very admissions, when she made them to him, of faults that she supposed he had discovered, rather served Swann as points of departure towards new doubts than put an end to the old. For they were never exactly proportional to the latter. Though Odette
might subtract from her confession all the essential part, there remained in the accessory part something Swann had never imagined, that crushed him with its newness and would enable him to change the terms of the problem of his jealousy. And these admissions he could no longer forget. His soul bore them along, cast them aside, cradled them, like dead bodies. And it was poisoned by them.

One time she told him about a visit Forcheville had paid her on the day of the Paris-Murcia fête. ‘What? you already knew him back then? Yes, of course, that's right,' he said, catching himself so as not to show that he had not known. And suddenly he began to tremble at the thought that on the day of the Paris-Murcia fête, on which he had received from her the letter he had kept so carefully, she had perhaps been having lunch with Forcheville at the Maison d'Or. She swore she had not. ‘Yet the Maison d'Or does remind me of something or other that I knew at the time wasn't true,' he said in order to frighten her. ‘Yes, that I hadn't actually been there at all that evening when I told you I had just come from there and you had been looking for me at Prévost's,' she answered (thinking from his expression that he knew this), with a decisiveness in which there was, not cynicism, but rather timidity, a fear of vexing Swann, which out of self-respect she wanted to hide, and also a desire to show him that she could be frank. Thus she struck with an executioner's neatness and vigour though quite without cruelty, for Odette was not conscious of the harm she was doing Swann; and she even began to laugh, perhaps, it is true, chiefly so as not to seem humiliated, embarrassed. ‘It's quite true that I hadn't been to the Maison Dorée; I was coming away from Forcheville's house. I actually had been to Prévost's, I didn't make that up, and he met me there and asked me to come in and look at his engravings. But someone else came to see him. I told you I was coming from the Maison d'Or because I was afraid you would be annoyed. See? That was rather kind of me, wasn't it? Even if I was wrong, at least I'm telling you all about it now quite frankly. What would I gain by not telling you I had lunch with him the day of the Paris-Murcia fête, if it was true? Especially since at the time we didn't know each other very well yet, you and I, dear.' He smiled at her with sudden cowardice, changed by these crushing words into a creature without strength. So,
even during the months which he had never dared to think about again because they had been too happy, during those months when she had loved him, she was already lying to him! Besides that time (the first evening they had ‘made cattleya') when she had told him she was coming from the Maison Dorée, how many others there must have been, each of them also harbouring a lie which Swann had not suspected. He remembered that one day she had said to him: ‘I would simply tell Mme Verdurin my dress wasn't ready, or my cab came late. There's always a way to manage it.' From him too, probably, many times when she had murmured the sorts of words which explain a delay, justify a change in the hour of a meeting, they must have concealed, without his suspecting it then, something she was going to do with some other man, with some other man to whom she had said: ‘I'll simply tell Swann my dress wasn't ready, or my cab came late. There's always a way to manage it.' And under all Swann's sweetest memories, under the simplest words Odette had said to him in the old days, which he had believed like the words of the gospel, under the daily actions she had recounted to him, under the most ordinary places, her dressmaker's house, the avenue du Bois, the Hippodrome, he sensed, concealed within the surplus time which even in the most thoroughly itemized days still leaves some play, some room, and can serve as hiding places for certain actions, he sensed insinuating itself the possible subterranean presence of lies which made something ignoble out of all that had remained most dear to him (his best evenings, the rue La Pérouse itself, which Odette must always have left at other hours than those she had reported to him), propagating everywhere a little of the dark horror he had felt when he heard her admission about the Maison Dorée, and, like the loathsome beasts in the Desolation of Nineveh,
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toppling stone by stone his entire past. If he now turned away each time his memory spoke the bitter name of the Maison Dorée, it was because what it recalled to him now was no longer, as still quite recently at Mme de Saint-Euverte's party, a happiness he had long since lost, but an unhappiness he had only just discovered. Then the same thing happened with the name of the Maison Dorée as with that of the island in the Bois, it gradually ceased to hurt Swann. For what we believe to be our love, or our jealousy, is
not one identical and continuous passion, indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity. The life of Swann's love, the faithfulness of his jealousy, were formed of the death, the faithlessness, of numberless desires, numberless doubts, all of which had Odette as their object. If he had remained for a long time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow Swann's heart with affection and suspicion by turns.

On certain evenings she would suddenly be full of kindness towards him again, and she would warn him severely that he ought to take advantage of it right away, under penalty of not seeing it repeated for years to come; they had to go back to her house immediately to ‘make cattleya', and this desire which she claimed to feel for him was so sudden, so inexplicable, so imperious, the caresses she lavished on him at these times so demonstrative and so unusual that this brutal and improbable fondness made Swann as unhappy as a lie or an unkindness. One evening when he had once again gone home with her in obedience to her command, and she was kissing him and murmuring to him with a passion quite unlike her usual coldness, he suddenly thought he heard a noise; he stood up, looked everywhere, found no one, but did not have the courage to go back to his place next to her, whereupon she, in a paroxysm of rage, broke a vase and said to Swann: ‘One can never do anything right with you!' And he remained uncertain whether she had not hidden someone there with the desire of provoking the man's jealousy or inflaming his senses.

Sometimes he visited brothels hoping to learn something about her, though without daring to say her name. ‘I have a nice little one I know you'll like,' the madam would say. And he would stay there for an hour chatting gloomily to some poor girl who was astonished that he did nothing more. One who was very young and beautiful said to him one day: ‘What I'd like would be to find a man who would be a real friend to me; then he could be quite certain I'd never go with another man again. – Really, do you believe it's possible for a woman to be touched that a man loves her, and never be unfaithful to him? Swann
asked her anxiously. – Well, of course! But it would depend on her character, wouldn't it now?' Swann could not help saying to these girls the same sorts of things that would have pleased the Princesse des Laumes. To the one who was looking for a friend, he said, smiling: ‘How nice – you've put on blue eyes to match the colour of your belt. – And you too; you've got blue cuffs on. – What a lovely conversation we're having, for this sort of a place! I'm not boring you, am I? Perhaps you've got something else you have to do? – No, I have plenty of time. If you were boring me, I would have told you. Actually, I like listening to you talk. – I'm very flattered. Aren't we having a nice chat? he said to the madam, who had just come in. – Why yes, that's just what I was saying to myself. How well they're behaving! There! Now they come to my house to talk. The Prince said it himself, the other day, it's much nicer here than at his wife's house. It seems that in high society these days all the women put on such airs, it's a real scandal! But I'll leave you alone, I know when to be discreet.' And she left Swann with the girl who had blue eyes. But soon he stood up and said good-bye, she did not matter to him, she did not know Odette.

Because the painter had been ill, Doctor Cottard had advised him to go to sea for a while; several of the regulars talked about going along with him; the Verdurins could not reconcile themselves to being left alone, rented a yacht, then became the purchasers of it and so Odette went on frequent cruises. Each time she had been gone for a little while, Swann felt he was beginning to separate from her, but as if this mental distance were proportional to the physical distance, as soon as he knew Odette was back, he could not rest without seeing her. Once, having gone off for only a month, as they thought, either because they were tempted along the way, or because M. Verdurin had cunningly arranged things beforehand to please his wife and had informed the regulars only as they proceeded, from Algiers they went to Tunis, then to Italy, then to Greece, to Constantinople, to Asia Minor. The voyage had lasted close to a year. Swann felt absolutely calm, almost happy. Even though Mme Verdurin had tried to persuade the pianist and Doctor Cottard that the aunt of the one and the patients of the other did not need them at all and that in any case it was
imprudent to let Mme Cottard return to Paris, which M. Verdurin assured them was in the midst of a revolution, she was obliged to give them back their freedom at Constantinople. And the painter left with them. One day, shortly after the three travellers
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returned, Swann, seeing an omnibus go by heading for the Luxembourg, where he had business, had jumped inside and found himself sitting across from Mme Cottard, who was making the rounds of the people whose ‘day' it was in full dress uniform, ostrich feather in hat, silk dress, muff, combination umbrella-sunshade, calling-card case and freshly cleaned white gloves. Clothed in these insignia, when it was dry out she would go on foot from one house to the next in the same neighbourhood, but for proceeding into a different neighbourhood would use the omnibus with connection service. During the first few minutes, before the woman's native kindness perforated the starch of the petty bourgeoise, and also not very sure if she ought to talk about the Verdurins to Swann, she produced quite naturally, in her awkward, slow, soft voice which at times the omnibus drowned out completely with its rattling, remarks chosen from among those she heard and repeated in the twenty-five houses whose storeys she climbed during one day:

– I don't need to ask you, Monsieur, if a man in-the-swim such as yourself has gone to the Mirlitons,
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to see the portrait by Machard
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which the whole of Paris is rushing to see? Well, and what do you think of it? Whose camp are you in, those who approve or those who don't? It's the same in every house now, all they talk about is the portrait by Machard; you aren't fashionable, you aren't really cultured, you aren't up-to-date, unless you can give your opinion of Machard's portrait.

Swann answered that he had not see the portrait, and Mme Cottard was afraid she had offended him by obliging him to confess it.

– Well, good, at least you admit it frankly, you don't think you're disgraced because you haven't seen Machard's portrait. I think that's admirable. Well now, I have seen it. Opinion is divided, you know, some people think there's too much polish in it, too much whipped cream, but I think it's just right. Of course she's not like the blue-andyellow women by our friend Biche. But I must confess to you frankly, though you will not find me very
fin-de-siècle
, but I do say what I
think – I don't understand his work. Good Lord, I can see the good points in his portrait of my husband, it's not as strange as what he usually does, but even so he had to go and put a blue moustache on him. Whereas Machard! Imagine, the husband of the friend I'm on my way to see at this moment (giving me the great pleasure of riding with you) has promised her that, if he's elected to the Academy (he's one of the doctor's colleagues) he'll have her portrait done by Machard. Obviously they're dreaming! I have another friend who claims she likes Leloir
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better. I'm just a poor layman and perhaps Leloir is even superior technically. But I think the most important quality in a portrait, especially when it's going to cost 10,000 francs, is that it should be a good likeness, and pleasant to look at.