In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (26 page)

“One simply can’t tear oneself away from this house,” observed Mme Bontemps to Mme Swann, while Mme Cottard, in her astonishment at hearing her own thought put into words, exclaimed: “Why, that’s just what I always say to myself, in my common-sensical little way, in my heart of hearts!” winning the approval of the gentlemen from the Jockey Club, who had been profuse in their salutations, as though overwhelmed by such an honour, when Mme Swann had introduced them to this graceless little bourgeois woman, who, when confronted with Odette’s brilliant friends, remained on her guard, if not on what she herself called “the defensive,” for she always used stately language to describe the simplest things.

“I should never have suspected it,” was Mme Swann’s comment, “three Wednesdays running you’ve let me down.” “That’s quite true, Odette; it’s
simply ages, it’s an eternity
since I saw you last. You see I plead guilty; but I must tell you,” she went on with a vague and prudish air (for although a doctor’s wife she would never have dared to speak without periphrasis of rheumatism or of a chill on the kidneys), “that I have a lot of little
troubles
. As we all have, I dare say. And besides that I’ve had a crisis among my masculine staff. Without being more imbued than most with a sense of my own authority, I’ve been obliged, just to make an example you know, to give my Vatel notice;
⁸
I believe he was looking out anyhow for a more remunerative place. But his departure nearly brought about the resignation of the entire Ministry. My own maid refused to stay in the house a moment longer; oh, we have had some Homeric scenes. However, I held fast to the helm through thick and thin; the whole affair’s been a perfect object lesson, which won’t be lost on me, I can tell you. I’m afraid I’m boring you with all these stories about servants, but you know as well as I do what a business it is when one is obliged to set about rearranging one’s household.”

“Aren’t we to see anything of your delicious daughter?” she wound up. “No, my delicious daughter is dining with a friend,” replied Mme Swann, and then, turning to me: “I believe she’s written to you, asking you to come and see her tomorrow. And your
babies
?” she went on to Mme Cottard.

I breathed a sigh of relief. These words of Mme Swann’s, which proved to me that I could see Gilberte whenever I chose, gave me precisely the comfort which I had come to seek, and which at that time made my visits to Mme Swann so necessary. “No, I shall write her a note this evening. Besides, Gilberte and I can no longer see one another,” I added, pretending to attribute our separation to some mysterious cause, which gave me a further illusion of love, sustained as well by the affectionate way in which I spoke of Gilberte and she of me.

“You know she’s simply devoted to you,” said Mme Swann. “Really, you won’t come tomorrow?”

Suddenly I was filled with elation; the thought had just struck me—“After all, why not, since it’s her own mother who suggests it?” But at once I relapsed into my gloom. I was afraid lest Gilberte, on seeing me, might think that my indifference of late had been feigned, and it seemed wiser to prolong our separation. During these asides Mme Bontemps had been complaining of the insufferable dullness of politicians’ wives, for she affected to find everyone too deadly or too stupid for words, and to deplore her husband’s official position.

“Do you mean to say you can shake hands with fifty doctors’ wives, like that, one after the other?” she exclaimed to Mme Cottard, who, on the contrary, was full of benevolence towards everybody, and determined to do her duty in every respect. “Ah! you’re a woman of virtue! As for me, at the Ministry, of course I have my obligations. Well, it’s more than I can stand. You know what those officials’ wives are like, it’s all I can do not to put my tongue out at them. And my niece Albertine is just like me. You’ve no idea how insolent she is, that child. Last week, during my ‘at home,’ I had the wife of the Under Secretary of State for Finance, who told us that she knew nothing at all about cooking. ‘But surely, ma’am,’ my niece chipped in with her most winning smile, ‘you ought to know all about it, since your father was a scullion.’ ”

“Oh, I do love that story; I think it’s simply exquisite!” cried Mme Swann. “But certainly for the Doctor’s consultation days you should make a point of having a little
home
, with your flowers and books and all your pretty things,” she urged Mme Cottard.

“Straight out like that! Slap-bang, right in the face! She made no bones about it, I can tell you! And she didn’t give me a word of warning, the little minx; she’s as cunning as a monkey. You’re lucky to be able to hold yourself back; I do envy people who can hide what’s in their minds.” “But I’ve no need to do that, Mme Bontemps, I’m not so hard to please,” Mme Cottard gently expostulated. “For one thing, I’m not in such a privileged position as you,” she went on, slightly raising her voice as was her custom, as though to underline the remark, whenever she slipped into the conversation one of those delicate courtesies, those skilful flatteries which won her the admiration and assisted the career of her husband. “And besides I’m only too glad to do anything that can be of use to the Professor.”

“But Madame, it’s what one is able to do! I expect you’re not highly strung. Do you know, whenever I see the War Minister’s wife grimacing, I start imitating her at once. It’s a dreadful thing to have a temperament like mine.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mme Cottard, “I’ve heard that she had a twitch. My husband knows someone else who occupies a very high position, and it’s only natural, when these gentlemen get talking together . . .”

“And then you know, it’s just the same with the Head of Protocol, who’s a hunchback. He has only to be in my house five minutes before my fingers are itching to stroke his hump. I can’t help it. My husband says I’ll cost him his place. What if I do! Pooh to the Ministry! Yes, pooh to the Ministry! I should like to have that printed as a motto on my notepaper. I can see I’m shocking you; you’re so good, but I must say there’s nothing amuses me like a little devilry now and then. Life would be dreadfully monotonous without it.”

And she went on talking about the Ministry all the time, as though it had been Mount Olympus. To change the subject, Mme Swann turned to Mme Cottard: “But you’re looking very elegant today. Redfern
fecit
?”

“No, you know I always swear by Raudnitz. Besides, it’s only an old thing I’ve had done up.”

“Well, well! it’s really smart!”

“Guess how much . . . No, change the first figure!”

“You don’t say so! Why, it’s dirt cheap, it’s a gift! Three times that at least, I was told.”

“That’s how history comes to be written,” concluded the doctor’s wife. And pointing to a neck-ribbon which had been a present from Mme Swann: “Look, Odette! Do you recognise it?”

Through the gap between a pair of curtains a head peeped with ceremonious deference, making a playful pretence of being afraid of disturbing the party: it was Swann. “Odette, the Prince d’Agrigente is with me in my study and wants to know if he may pay his respects to you. What am I to tell him?” “Why, that I shall be delighted,” Odette replied, secretly flattered but without losing anything of the composure which came to her all the more easily since she had always, even as a cocotte, been accustomed to entertain men of fashion. Swann disappeared to deliver the message, to return presently with the Prince, unless in the meantime Mme Verdurin had arrived.

When he married Odette Swann had insisted on her ceasing to frequent the little clan. (He had several good reasons for this stipulation, and even if he had had none, would have made it none the less in obedience to a law of ingratitude which admits of no exception and proves that every go-between is either lacking in foresight or else singularly disinterested.) He had conceded only that Odette might exchange visits with Mme Verdurin once a year, and even this seemed excessive to some of the “faithful,” indignant at the insult offered to the Mistress who for so many years had treated Odette and even Swann himself as the spoiled children of her house. For if it contained false brethren who defaulted on certain evenings in order that they might secretly accept an invitation from Odette, ready, in the event of discovery, with the excuse that they were curious to meet Bergotte (although the Mistress assured them that he never went to the Swanns’ and was totally devoid of talent—in spite of which she made the most strenuous efforts, to quote one of her favourite expressions, to “attract” him), the little group had its “diehards” too. And these—though ignorant of those refinements of convention which often dissuade people from the extreme attitude one would like to see them adopt in order to annoy someone else—would have wished Mme Verdurin but had never managed to prevail upon her to sever all relations with Odette and thus deprive her of the satisfaction of saying with a laugh: “We seldom go to the Mistress’s now, since the Schism. It was all very well while my husband was still a bachelor, but when one is married, you know, it isn’t always so easy . . . If you must know, M. Swann can’t abide old Ma Verdurin, and he wouldn’t much like the idea of my going there regularly as I used to. And I, dutiful spouse . . .” Swann would accompany his wife to their annual evening there but would take care not to be in the room when Mme Verdurin came to call on Odette. And so, if the Mistress was in the drawing-room, the Prince d’Agrigente would enter it alone. Alone, too, he was presented to her by Odette, who preferred that Mme Verdurin should be left in ignorance of the names of her humbler guests and, seeing more than one strange face in the room, might be led to believe that she was mixing with the cream of the aristocracy, a device which proved so successful that Mme Verdurin said to her husband that evening with profound contempt: “Charming people, her friends! I met all the flower of Reaction!”

Odette was living, with respect to Mme Verdurin, under a converse illusion. Not that the latter’s salon had even begun, at that time, to develop into what we shall one day see it become. Mme Verdurin had not yet reached the period of incubation in which one dispenses with the big parties where the few brilliant specimens recently acquired would be lost in the crowd, and prefers to wait until the generative force of the ten just men whom one has succeeded in attracting shall have multiplied those ten seventy-fold. As Odette was not to be long now in doing, Mme Verdurin did indeed entertain the idea of “society” as her final objective, but her zone of attack was as yet so restricted, and moreover so remote from that by way of which Odette stood some chance of arriving at an identical goal, of breaking through, that the latter remained in total ignorance of the strategic plans which the Mistress was elaborating. And it was with the most perfect sincerity that Odette, when anyone spoke to her of Mme Verdurin as a snob, would answer, laughing: “Oh, no, quite the opposite! For one thing, she hasn’t the basis for it: she doesn’t know anyone. And then, to do her justice, I must say that she seems quite content with things as they are. No, what she likes are her Wednesdays, good talkers.” And in her heart of hearts she envied Mme Verdurin (for all that she did not despair of having herself, in so eminent a school, succeeded in acquiring them) those arts to which the Mistress attached such paramount importance, although they did no more than discriminate between shades of the non-existent, sculpture the void, and were, strictly speaking, the Arts of Nonentity: to wit those, in the lady of a house, of knowing how to “bring people together,” how to “group,” to “draw out,” to “keep in the background,” to act as a “connecting link.”

At all events Mme Swann’s friends were impressed when they saw in her house a lady of whom they were accustomed to think only as in her own, in an inseparable setting of guests, in the midst of her little group which they were astonished to behold thus evoked, summarised, compressed into a single armchair in the bodily form of the Mistress, the hostess turned visitor, muffled in her cloak with its grebe trimming, as fluffy as the white furs that carpeted that drawing-room, embowered in which Mme Verdurin was a drawing-room in herself. The more timid among the women thought it prudent to retire, and using the plural, as people do when they mean to hint to the rest of the room that it is wiser not to tire a convalescent who is out of bed for the first time, “Odette,” they murmured, “we’re going to leave you.” They envied Mme Cottard, whom the Mistress called by her Christian name.

“Can I drop you anywhere?” Mme Verdurin asked her, unable to bear the thought that one of the faithful was going to remain behind instead of following her from the room.

“Oh, but this lady has been so very kind as to say she’ll take me,” replied Mme Cottard, not wishing to appear to be forgetting, when approached by a more illustrious personage, that she had accepted the offer which Mme Bontemps had made to drive her home behind her cockaded coachman. “I must say that I’m always specially grateful to the friends who are so kind as to take me with them in their vehicles. It’s a regular godsend to me who have no charioteer.”

“Especially,” broke in the Mistress, hardly daring to say anything, since she knew Mme Bontemps slightly and had just invited her to her Wednesdays, “as at Mme de Crécy’s house you’re not very near home. Oh, good gracious, I shall never get into the habit of saying Mme Swann!” It was a recognised joke in the little clan, among those who were not over-endowed with wit, to pretend that they could never grow used to saying “Mme Swann”: “I’ve been so accustomed to saying Mme de Crécy that I nearly went wrong again!” Only Mme Verdurin, when she spoke to Odette, was not content with the nearly, but went wrong on purpose.

“Don’t you feel afraid, Odette, living out in the wilds like this? I’m sure I shouldn’t feel at all comfortable, coming home after dark. Besides, it’s so damp. It can’t be at all good for your husband’s eczema. You haven’t rats in the house, I hope!” “Oh, dear no. What a horrid idea!” “That’s a good thing; I was told you had. I’m glad to know it’s not true, because I have a perfect horror of the creatures, and I should never have come to see you again. Good-bye, my dear child, we shall meet again soon; you know what a pleasure it is to me to see you. You don’t know how to arrange chrysanthemums,” she added as she prepared to leave the room, Mme Swann having risen to escort her. “They are Japanese flowers; you must arrange them the same way as the Japanese.”