The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (33 page)

If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct for him to make no attempt to cultivate, but among whom he glimpsed a woman possessed of a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his “high horse” and to stave off the desire she had kindled in him, to substitute a different pleasure for the pleasure which he might have tasted in her company by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new happiness as if, instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in his own rooms and looked at views of Paris. He did not immure himself in the edifice of his social relations, but had made of them, so as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers carry about with them. Any part of it that was not portable or could not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would have given away for nothing, however enviable it might appear to others. How often
had his credit with a duchess, built up over the years by her desire to ingratiate herself with him without having found an opportunity to do so, been squandered in a moment by his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph which would put him in touch at once with one of her stewards whose daughter he had noticed in the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust of bread. Indeed he would laugh about it afterwards, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements, an element of caddishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the notion that their idleness offers to their intelligence objects as worthy of interest as any that might be offered by art or learning, the notion that “Life” contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written. So, at least, he affirmed, and had no difficulty in persuading even the most sharp-witted of his society friends, notably the Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to entertain with accounts of the intriguing adventures that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in a train and taken her home with him, before discovering that she was the sister of a reigning monarch in whose hands were gathered at that moment all the threads of European politics, of which Swann was thus kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, by the complex play of circumstances, it depended upon the choice which this conclave was about to make whether he might or might not become the lover of somebody’s cook.

It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals and academicians with whom he was
most intimately associated that Swann so cynically compelled to serve him as panders. All his friends were accustomed to receive, from time to time, letters calling on them for a word of recommendation or introduction, with a diplomatic adroitness which, persisting throughout all his successive love affairs and varying pretexts, revealed, more glaringly than the clumsiest indiscretion, a permanent disposition and an identical quest. I used often to be told, many years later, when I began to take an interest in his character because of the similarities which, in wholly different respects, it offered to my own, how, when he used to write to my grandfather (who had not yet become my grandfather, for it was about the time of my birth that Swann’s great love affair began, and it made a long interruption in his amatory practices), the latter, recognising his friend’s handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim: “Here’s Swann asking for something. On guard!” And, either from distrust or from the unconscious spirit of devilry which urges us to offer a thing only to those who do not want it, my grandparents would offer a blunt refusal to the most easily satisfied of his requests, as when he begged them to introduce him to a girl who dined with them every Sunday, and whom they were obliged, whenever Swann mentioned her, to pretend that they no longer saw, although they would be wondering all through the week whom they could invite with her, and often ended up with no one, sooner than get in touch with the man who would so gladly have accepted.

Occasionally a couple of my grandparents’ acquaintance, who had been complaining for some time that they no longer saw Swann, would announce with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make my grandparents
envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather would not want to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my grandmother as he hummed the air of:

or of:

or of:

A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann’s new friend: “What about Swann? Do you still see as much of him as ever?” the other’s face would fall: “Never mention his name to me again!”

“But I thought you were such friends …”

He had been intimate in this way for several months with some cousins of my grandmother, dining almost every evening at their house. Suddenly, and without any warning, he ceased to appear. They supposed him to be ill, and the lady of the house was about to send to inquire for him when she found in the pantry a letter in his hand, which her cook had left by accident in the housekeeping book. In this he announced that he was leaving Paris and would not be able to come to the house again. The cook had been his mistress, and on breaking off relations she was the only member of the household whom he had thought it necessary to inform.

But when his mistress of the moment was a woman of rank, or at least one whose birth was not so lowly nor her position so irregular that he was unable to arrange for her reception in “society,” then for her sake he would return to it, but only to the particular orbit in which she moved or into which he had drawn her. “No good depending on Swann for this evening,” people would say. “Don’t you remember, it’s his American’s night at the Opera?” He would secure invitations for her to the most exclusive salons, to those houses where he himself went regularly for weekly dinners or for poker; every evening, after a slight wave imparted to his stiff red hair had tempered with a certain softness the ardour of his bold green eyes, he would select a flower for his buttonhole and set out to meet his mistress at the house of one or other of the women of his circle; and then, thinking of the affection and admiration which the fashionable people, by whom he was so highly sought-after and whom he would meet again there, would lavish on him in the presence of the woman he loved, he would find a fresh charm in that worldly existence which had begun to pall, but whose substance, pervaded and warmly coloured by the bright flame that now flickered in its midst, seemed to him beautiful and rare since he had incorporated in it a new love.

But, whereas each of these liaisons, or each of these flirtations, had been the realisation, more or less complete, of a dream born of the sight of a face or a body which Swann had spontaneously, without effort on his part, found attractive, on the contrary when, one evening at the theatre, he was introduced to Odette de Crécy by an old friend of his, who had spoken of her as a ravishing creature
with whom he might possibly come to an understanding, but had made her out to be harder of conquest than she actually was in order to appear to have done him a bigger favour by the introduction, she had struck Swann not, certainly, as being devoid of beauty, but as endowed with a kind of beauty which left him indifferent, which aroused in him no desire, which gave him, indeed, a sort of physical repulsion, as one of those women of whom all of us can cite examples, different for each of us, who are the converse of the type which our senses demand. Her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones were too prominent, her features too tightly drawn, to be attractive to him. Her eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood. Some time after this introduction at the theatre she had written to ask Swann whether she might see his collections, which would very much interest her, “an ignorant woman with a taste for beautiful things,” adding that she felt she would know him better when once she had seen him in his “
home
,”
⁹
where she imagined him to be “so comfortable with his tea and his books,” though she had to admit that she was surprised that he should live in a neighbourhood which must be so depressing, and was “not nearly
smart
enough for such a very
smart
man.” And when he allowed her to come she had said to him as she left how sorry she was to have stayed so short a time in a house into which she was so glad to have found her way at last, speaking of him as though he had meant something more to her than the rest of the people she knew, and appearing to establish between their two selves a kind of romantic bond which had
made him smile. But at the time of life, tinged already with disenchantment, which Swann was approaching, when a man can content himself with being in love for the pleasure of loving without expecting too much in return, this mutual sympathy, if it is no longer as in early youth the goal towards which love inevitably tends, is nevertheless bound to it by so strong an association of ideas that it may well become the cause of love if it manifests itself first. In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would appear—since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure—that the taste for a woman’s beauty must play the largest part in it, love may come into being, love of the most physical kind, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains—filled with the admiration which beauty inspires—for us to remember what follows. And if she begins in the middle—where hearts are joined and where it sings of our existing, henceforward, for one another only—we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner without hesitation at the appropriate passage.

Odette de Crécy came again to see Swann; her visits
grew more frequent, and doubtless each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he spontaneously admired. It must be remarked that Odette’s face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was, because the forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over the ears; while as for her figure—and she was admirably built—it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the best-dressed women in Paris) so much did the corsage, jutting out as though over an imaginary stomach and ending in a sharp point, beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, give a woman the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice follow quite independently, according to the whim of their designer or the consistency of their material, the line which led them to the bows, the festoons of lace, the fringes of dangling jet beads, or carried them along the busk, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the architecture of these fripperies drew them towards or away from her own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely buried.

But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think
with a smile of her telling how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him that it might not be too long, and the way she had gazed at him then, with a look of shy entreaty which gave her a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with a ribbon of black velvet. “And won’t you,” she had ventured, “come just once and have tea with me?” He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay—which, in reality, he had abandoned years ago—on Vermeer of Delft. “I know that I’m quite useless,” she had replied, “a pitiful creature like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!” she had added, with the self-satisfied air which an elegant woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to undertake, without fear of soiling her fingers, some grubby task, such as cooking the dinner, “really getting down to it” herself. “You’ll only laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me” (she meant Vermeer), “I’ve never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some idea of what’s going on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head which I feel sure is always puzzling away about things; to be able to say ‘There, that’s what he’s thinking about!’ What a joy it would be to be able to help you with your work.”

He had excused himself on the grounds of his fear of forming new friendships, which he gallantly described as his fear of being made unhappy. “You’re afraid of affection?
How odd that is, when I go about seeking nothing else, and would give my soul to find it!” she had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had been genuinely touched. “Some woman must have made you suffer. And you think that the rest are all like her. She can’t have understood you: you’re such an exceptional person. That’s what I liked about you from the start; I felt that you weren’t like everybody else.”