In Search of Lost Time (60 page)

Having made these remarks, which were inspired by the loftiness of her plume, the monogram on her card case, the little number inked inside her gloves by the dry cleaner and the difficulty of talking to Swann about the Verdurins, Mme Cottard, seeing that they were still far away from the corner of the rue Bonaparte where the driver was to let her off, listened to her heart, which counselled other words.

– Your ears must have been burning, Monsieur, she said, during the voyage we made with Mme Verdurin. We talked of nothing else but you.

Swann was very surprised, he assumed his name was never mentioned in the presence of the Verdurins.

– Anyway, added Mme Cottard, Mme de Crécy was there, and that says it all. Wherever Odette is, she can never go for very long without mentioning you. And as you may expect she does not speak ill of you. What! You doubt it? she said, seeing Swann make a gesture of scepticism.

And carried away by the sincerity of her conviction, and imputing no unfavourable meaning to the word, which she used only in the sense in which one employs it to speak of the affection between friends:

– Why, she adores you! Oh, I'm sure one couldn't say anything against you in front of her! One would be in a fine fix! Apropos of anything at all, if we saw a painting, for instance, she would say: ‘Now, if he were here, he'd be able to tell us whether it was genuine or not. There's nobody like him for that.' And she was constantly asking:
‘What can he be doing right now? If only he would do a little work! It's dreadful that a fellow with such gifts should be so lazy.' (You'll forgive me, won't you?) ‘I can see him right now, he's thinking about us, he's wondering where we are.' She even made a remark that I found quite charming: M. Verdurin said to her: ‘How in the world can you see what he's doing right now, since you're eight hundred leagues away?' And Odette answered: ‘Nothing is impossible for the eye of a friend.' No I swear, I'm not saying it just to flatter you, you have a true friend in her such as you don't often find. I can tell you besides, that if you don't know it, you're the only one who doesn't. Mme Verdurin told me as much herself on our very last day (you know, when you're about to leave you always have the best talks): ‘I'm not saying Odette doesn't care a great deal for us, but whatever we might say to her wouldn't have much weight compared to what M. Swann might say.' Oh, my Lord! The driver's stopping for me – here I've been chatting away with you and I nearly went right past the rue Bonaparte… Would you be so kind as to tell me if my plume is straight?

And Mme Cottard withdrew from her muff and held out to Swann a hand gloved in white from which escaped, along with a transfer ticket, a vision of upper-class life that filled the omnibus, mingling with the smell of the dry cleaner. And Swann felt himself overflowing with affection for her, as much as for Mme Verdurin (and almost as much as for Odette, since the feeling he now had for the latter, being no longer mingled with pain, was hardly love any more), while from the platform of the omnibus he followed her with his newly affectionate eyes as she courageously made her way up the rue Bonaparte, her plume high, her skirt lifted in one hand, holding in the other her sunshade and her card case with its monogram displayed, while her muff danced in front of her.

To compete with the morbid feelings that Swann had for Odette, Mme Cottard, a better healer than her husband would have been, had grafted alongside them other feelings, normal ones, of gratitude, friendship, feelings which in Swann's mind would make Odette more human (more like other women, because other women too could inspire these feelings in him), would hasten her final transformation
into the Odette who was loved with a peaceful affection, who had brought him back one evening after a party at the painter's home to drink a glass of orangeade with Forcheville and with whom Swann had glimpsed the possibility of living in happiness.

Having in the past often thought with terror that one day he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had promised himself to be vigilant and, as soon as he felt his love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it, to keep hold of it. But now, corresponding to the weakening of his love there was a simultaneous weakening of his desire to remain in love. For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one no longer is. Now and then a name glimpsed in a newspaper, that of one of the men he thought could have been Odette's lovers, restored his jealousy to him. But it was very mild and as it proved to him that he had not yet completely emerged from the time when he had suffered so much – but also when he had experienced such voluptuous sorts of feelings – and that the hazards of the road ahead might still permit him to catch a furtive, distant glimpse of its beauties, this jealousy actually gave him a pleasant thrill just as to the sad Parisian leaving Venice to return to France a last mosquito proves that Italy and the summer are not yet too remote. But most often, when he made the effort, if not to remain in this quite distinctive period of his life from which he was emerging, at least to have a clear view of it while he still could, he would notice that already he no longer could; he would have liked to observe as though it were a landscape about to disappear that love which he had just left behind; but it is so difficult to duplicate oneself and give oneself a truthful display of a feeling one no longer has that soon, darkness gathering in his brain, he could no longer see anything, gave up looking, took off his lorgnon, wiped its lenses; and he said to himself that it would be better to rest a little, that there would still be time later on, and would settle back with the incuriosity, the torpor of the drowsy traveller who pulls his hat down over his eyes in order to sleep in the railway carriage which he feels carrying him faster and faster, away from the country where he has lived for so long and which he had promised himself not to let slip past without giving it a last farewell. Indeed, like the same traveller if he does not
wake until he is back in France, when Swann happened upon proof close at hand that Forcheville had been Odette's lover, he noticed that he felt no pain, that his love was far away by now, and he was sorry not to have been warned of the moment when he was about to leave it behind for ever. And just as before kissing Odette for the first time he had tried to imprint on his memory the face which had been familiar to him for so long and which was about to be transformed by the memory of that kiss, so he would have wanted, in his thoughts at least, to have been able to make his farewells, while she still existed, to the Odette who had inspired him with love, jealousy, to the Odette who had made him suffer and whom he would now never see again. He was mistaken. He did see see her again, one more time, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme Verdurin, Doctor Cottard, a young man in a fez whom he could not identify, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III and my grandfather, along a path that followed the sea and overhung it steeply sometimes very high up, sometimes by a few metres only, so that one climbed and descended again constantly; those who were descending again were already no longer visible to those who were still climbing, what little daylight remained was failing and it seemed as though darkest night was about to descend on them at any moment. Now and again the waves leaped right up to the edge and Swann felt sprays of icy water on his cheek. Odette told him to wipe them off, he could not and was embarrassed by this in front of her, as he was embarrassed to be in his nightshirt. He hoped that in the darkness no one would realize, but Mme Verdurin stared at him with a look of surprise for a long moment during which he saw her face change shape, her nose lengthen, and that she had a large moustache. He turned away to look at Odette, her cheeks were pale, with little red spots, her features drawn, ringed with shadows, but she was looking at him with eyes full of tenderness that were about to separate from her like teardrops and fall on him, and he felt he loved her so much that he wanted to take her away at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist, looked at a little watch and said: ‘I have to go,' she said good-bye to everyone, in the same manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling him where she would see him again that evening or another day. He did not dare
ask her, he would have liked to follow her and was obliged, without turning back towards her, to answer with a smile some question of Mme Verdurin's, but his heart was pounding horribly, he felt he hated Odette, he would have liked to cut out those eyes of hers that he had loved so much just a moment ago, crush those pallid cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme Verdurin, which meant that with each step he moved farther away from Odette, who was descending in the opposite direction. After one second, it was many hours ago that she had left them. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had vanished an instant after she had. ‘They certainly must have arranged it together, he added. They must have met at the bottom of the hill, but they didn't want to say good-bye at the same time for the sake of appearances. She's obviously his mistress.' The unknown young man began to cry. Swann tried to comfort him. ‘Really, she's doing the right thing, he told him, drying his eyes and taking off his fez so that he would be more comfortable. I told her a dozen times she should do it. Why be sad about it? He above all would understand her.' Thus did Swann talk to himself, for the young man he had not been able to identify at first was also himself; like certain novelists, he had divided his personality between two characters, the one having the dream, and another he saw before him wearing a fez.

As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association of ideas, then a certain modification in the Baron's usual physiognomy, lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour on his chest, had induced him to give this name; but in reality, and in everything which the character in the dream represented to him and recalled to him, it was indeed Forcheville. For, from incomplete and changing images the sleeping Swann drew false deductions, having for the moment as well such creative power that he reproduced himself by simple division like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he thought he was clasping, and from feelings and impressions of which he was not yet conscious, devised peripeteias of a sort which, through their logical linking, would produce at just the right moment in Swann's sleep the person required to receive his love or prompt his awakening. In an instant utter darkness descended on him, an alarm
sounded, inhabitants passed by running, escaping from houses in flames; Swann heard the sound of the waves leaping and his heart, with the same violence, pounding with anxiety in his chest. Suddenly the palpitations of his heart redoubled in speed, he felt an inexplicable pain and nausea; a countryman covered with burns flung at him as he passed: ‘Come and ask Charlus where Odette ended up this evening with her friend, he used to go about with her in the old days and she tells him everything. It's them that started the fire.' It was his valet who had come to wake him and who said:

– Monsieur, it's eight o'clock and the hairdresser is here, I've told him to come by again in an hour.

But these words, penetrating the swells of sleep in which Swann was plunged, had reached his consciousness only by suffering that deflection which causes a ray of light in the depths of water to appear to be a sun, just as a moment earlier the sound of the doorbell, assuming in the depths of those abysses the sonority of an alarm, had begotten the episode of the fire. Meanwhile the scene before his eyes turned to dust, he opened his eyes, heard one last time the sound of a wave of the sea as it receded. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he could recall the sensation of the cold water and the taste of the salt. He got up, dressed. He had asked the hairdresser to come early because he had written to my grandfather the night before that he would be going to Combray in the afternoon, having learned that Mme de Cambremer – Mlle Legrandin – was spending a few days there. Associating in his memory the charm of that young face with the charm of a countryside he had not visited in such a long time, he found that together they offered him an attraction that had made him decide to leave Paris for a few days at last. Because the different chance events which bring us into contact with certain people do not coincide with the time during which we are in love with them, but, extending beyond it, may occur before it begins and repeat themselves after it has ended, the earliest appearances in our lives of a person destined later to captivate us assume retrospectively in our eyes the significance of a warning, a presage. This was how Swann had often looked back at the image of Odette when he met her at the theatre, that first evening when he did not dream he would ever see her again – and how he
now recalled the party at Mme de Saint-Euverte's where he had introduced Général de Froberville to Mme de Cambremer. We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering. And undoubtedly this could have happened to Swann elsewhere than at Mme de Saint-Euverte's. Who knows, even, had he found himself elsewhere, that evening, if other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him, which afterwards would have appeared to him to have been inevitable? But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had taken place, and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact that he had decided to go to Mme de Saint-Euverte's party, because his mind, wanting to admire life's richness of invention and incapable of posing itself a difficult question for very long, such as the question of what was most to be wished for, believed that in the sufferings he had experienced that evening and in the pleasures still unsuspected that were already germinating – between which the balance was too difficult to establish – there was a sort of necessary connection.