In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (7 page)

This alteration was perhaps not so extraordinary as M. de Norpois
professed to find it. Odette had not believed that Swann would ever
consent to marry her; each time that she made the suggestive
announcement that some man about town had just married his mistress
she had seen him stiffen into a glacial silence, or at the most, if
she were directly to challenge him, asking: "Don't you think it very
nice, a very fine thing that he has done, for a woman who sacrificed
all her youth to him?" had heard him answer dryly: "But I don't say
that there's anything wrong in it. Everyone does what he himself
thinks right." She came very near, indeed, to believing that (as he
used to threaten in moments of anger) he was going to leave her
altogether, for she had heard it said, not long since, by a woman
sculptor, that "You cannot be surprised at anything men do, they're
such brutes," and impressed by the profundity of this maxim of
pessimism she had appropriated it for herself, and repeated it on
every possible occasion with an air of disappointment which seemed to
imply: "After all, it's not impossible in any way; it would be just my
luck." Meanwhile all the virtue had gone from the optimistic maxim
which had hitherto guided Odette through life: "You can do anything
with men when they're in love with you, they're such idiots!" a
doctrine which was expressed on her face by the same tremor of an
eyelid that might have accompanied such words as: "Don't be
frightened; he won't break anything." While she waited, Odette was
tormented by the thought of what one of her friends, who had been
married by a man who had not lived with her for nearly so long as
Odette herself had lived with Swann, and had had no child by him, and
who was now in a definitely respectable position, invited to the balls
at the Elysée and so forth, must think of Swann's behaviour. A
consultant more discerning than M. de Norpois would doubtless have
been able to diagnose that it was this feeling of shame and
humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the devilish
characteristics which she displayed were no essential part of her, no
irremediable evil, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed
come to pass, namely that a new rule of life, the matrimonial, would
put an end, with almost magic swiftness, to these painful incidents,
of daily occurrence but in no sense organic. Practically everyone was
surprised at the marriage, and this, in itself, is surprising. No
doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the
phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh,
a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the
world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent
elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very
few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature
comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that
they see. It would appear, none the less, that so far as Odette was
concerned people might have taken into account the fact that if,
indeed, she had never entirely understood Swann's mentality, at least
she was acquainted with the titles, and with all the details of his
studies, so much so that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as
that of her own dressmaker; while as for Swann himself she knew
intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world
must remain ignorant or merely laugh at them, and only a mistress or a
sister may gain possession of the revealing, cherished image; and so
strongly are we attached to such eccentricities, even to those of them
which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes
in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking
familiarity, such as we ourselves have with them, or our relatives
have, that amours of long standing have something of the sweetness and
strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another
creature receive their consecration when that creature adopts the same
point of view as ourself in judging one of our imperfections. And
among these special traits there were others, besides, which belonged
as much to his intellect as to his character, which, all the same,
because they had their roots in the latter, Odette had been able more
easily to discern. She complained that when Swann turned author, when
he published his essays, these characteristics were not to be found in
them as they were in his letters, or in his conversation, where they
abounded. She urged him to give them a more prominent place. She would
have liked that because it was these things that she herself preferred
in him, but since she preferred them because they were the things most
typical of himself, she was perhaps not wrong in wishing that they
might be found in his writings. Perhaps also she thought that his
work, if endowed with more vitality, so that it ultimately brought him
success, might enable her also to form what at the Verdurins' she had
been taught to value above everything else in the world—a salon.

Among the people to whom this sort of marriage appeared ridiculous,
people who in their own case would ask themselves, "What will M. de
Guermantes think, what will Bréauté say when I marry Mlle. de
Montmorency?", among the people who cherished that sort of social
ideal would have figured, twenty years earlier, Swann himself, the
Swarm who had taken endless pains to get himself elected to the Jockey
Club, and had reckoned at that time on making a brilliant marriage
which, by consolidating his position, would have made him one of the
most conspicuous figures in Paris. Only, the visions which a marriage
like that suggests to the mind of the interested party need, like all
visions, if they are not to fade away and be altogether lost, to
receive sustenance from without. Your most ardent longing is to
humiliate the man who has insulted you. But if you never hear of him
again, having removed to some other place, your enemy will come to
have no longer the slightest importance for you. If one has lost sight
for a score of years of all the people on whose account one would have
liked to be elected to the Jockey Club or the Institute, the prospect
of becoming a member of one or other of those corporations will have
ceased to tempt one. Now fully as much as retirement, ill–health or
religious conversion, protracted relations with a woman will
substitute fresh visions for the old. There was not on Swann's part,
when he married Odette, any renunciation of his social ambitions, for
from these ambitions Odette had long ago, in the spiritual sense of
the word, detached him. Besides, had he not been so detached, his
marriage would have been all the more creditable. It is because they
imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a
purely private happiness that, as a general rule, 'impossible'
marriages are the happiest of all. (One cannot very well include among
the 'impossible' marriages those that are made for money, there being
no instance on record of a couple, of whom the wife or even the
husband has thus sold himself, who have not sooner or later been
admitted into society, if only by tradition, and on the strength of so
many precedents, and so as not to have two conflicting standards.)
Perhaps, on the other hand, the artistic, if not the perverse side of
Swann's nature would in any event have derived a certain amount of
pleasure from coupling with himself, in one of those crossings of
species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, a creature
of a different race, archduchess or prostitute, from contracting a
royal alliance or from marrying beneath him. There had been but one
person in all the world whose opinion he took into consideration
whenever he thought of his possible marriage with Odette; that was,
and from no snobbish motive, the Duchesse de Guermantes. With whom
Odette, on the contrary, was but little concerned, thinking only of
those people whose position was immediately above her own, rather than
in so vague an empyrean. But when Swann in his daydreams saw Odette as
already his wife he invariably formed a picture of the moment in which
he would take her—her, and above all her daughter—to call upon the
Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her
father–in–law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes). He had no desire to
introduce them anywhere else, but his heart would soften as he
invented—uttering their actual words to himself—all the things that
the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the
affection that she would shew for Gilberte, spoiling her, making him
proud of his child. He enacted to himself the scene of this
introduction with the same precision in each of its imaginary details
that people shew when they consider how they would spend, supposing
they were to win it, a lottery prize the amount of which they have
arbitrarily determined. In so far as a mental picture which
accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to be its motive, so it
might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to present
her and Gilberte, without anyone's else being present, without, if
need be, anyone's else ever coming to know of it, to the Duchesse de
Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had
entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely that one the
realisation of which proved to be forbidden him by a veto so absolute
that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess would never possibly
come to know them. We shall see also that, on the contrary, the
Duchesse de Guermantes did associate with Odette and Gilberte after
the death of Swann. And doubtless he would have been wiser—seeing
that he could attach so much importance to so small a matter—not to
have formed too dark a picture of tie future, in this connexion, but
to have consoled himself with the hope that the meeting of the ladies
might indeed take place when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The
laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about
every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had
believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is
rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to
accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to
fruition only when we have ceased to desire it—have ceased, possibly,
to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, had
there not been already, in his life, as it were a prefiguration of
what was to happen after his death, a posthumous happiness in this
marriage with this Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she
had not been pleasing to him at first sight—whom he had married when
he no longer loved her, when the creature that, in Swann, had so
longed to live, had so despaired of living all its life in company
with Odette, when that creature was extinct?

I began next to speak of the Comte de Paris, to ask whether he was not
one of Swann's friends, for I was afraid lest the conversation should
drift away from him. "Why, yes!" replied M. de Norpois, turning
towards me and fixing upon my modest person the azure gaze in which
floated, as in their vital element, his immense capacity for work and
his power of assimilation. And "Upon my word," he added, once more
addressing my father, "I do not think that I shall be overstepping the
bounds of the respect which I have always professed for the Prince
(although without, you understand, maintaining any personal relations
with him, which would inevitably compromise my position, unofficial as
that may be), if I tell you of a little episode which is not without
point; no more than four years ago, at a small railway station in one
of the countries of Central Europe, the Prince happened to set eyes on
Mme. Swann. Naturally, none of his circle ventured to ask his Royal
Highness what he thought of her. That would not have been seemly. But
when her name came up by chance in conversation, by certain
signs—imperceptible, if you like, but quite unmistakable—the Prince
appeared willing enough to let it be understood that his impression of
her had, in a word, been far from unfavourable."

"But there could have been no possibility, surely, of her being
presented to the Comte de Paris?" inquired my father.

"Well, we don't know; with Princes one never does know," replied M.
de Norpois. "The most exalted, those who know best how to secure what
is due to them, are as often as not the last to let themselves be
embarrassed by the decrees of popular opinion, even by those for which
there is most justification, especially when it is a question of their
rewarding a personal attachment to themselves. Now it is certain that
the Comte de Paris has always most graciously recognised the devotion
of Swann, who is, for that matter, a man of character, in spite of it
all."

"And what was your own impression, your Excellency? Do tell us!" my
mother asked, from politeness as well as from curiosity.

All the energy of the old connoisseur broke through the habitual
moderation of his speech as he answered: "Quite excellent!"

And knowing that the admission that a strong impression has been made
on one by a woman takes its place, provided that one makes it in a
playful tone, in a certain category of the art of conversation that is
highly appreciated, he broke into a little laugh that lasted for
several seconds, moistening the old diplomat's blue eyes and making
his nostrils, with their network of tiny scarlet veins, quiver. "She
is altogether charming!"

"Was there a writer of the name of Bergotte at this dinner, sir?" I
asked timidly, still trying to keep the conversation to the subject of
the Swanns.

"Yes, Bergotte was there," replied M. de Norpois, inclining his head
courteously towards me, as though in his desire to be pleasant to my
father he attached to everything connected with him a real importance,
even to the questions of a boy of my age who was not accustomed to see
such politeness shewn to him by persons of his. "Do you know him?" he
went on, fastening on me that clear gaze, the penetration of which had
won the praise of Bismarck.