The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (41 page)

Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to counteract those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, and which in fact he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which enchanted him even, for were they not so many characteristic features by virtue of which the essence of this woman revealed itself to him? And so, when she was in a happy mood because she was going to see the
Reine Topaze
,
¹⁰
or when her expression grew serious, worried, petulant because she was afraid of missing the flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable in order to set the seal upon a woman’s certificate of elegance, Swann, enraptured as we all are at times by the naturalness of a child or the verisimilitude of a portrait which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to the surface of her face that he could not refrain from touching it with his lips. “Ah, so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower-show, does she? She wants to be admired, does she? Very well, we’ll take her there, we can but obey.” As Swann was a little short-sighted, he had to resign himself to wearing spectacles at home when working, while to face the world he adopted a monocle as being less disfiguring. The first time that she saw it in his eye, she could not contain her joy: “I really do think—for a man, that is
to say—it’s tremendously smart! How nice you look with it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!” she concluded with a tinge of regret. He liked Odette to say these things, just as if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops independently of their sensuality, a weird disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to both simultaneously; yielding to the seductions of more and more rarefied works of art in the company of more and more vulgar women, taking a little servant-girl to a screened box at the theatre for the performance of a decadent piece he particularly wanted to see, or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, convinced, moreover, that a cultivated society woman would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to remain so prettily silent. But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her sympathies, to strive to be one with her in spirit, was a task so attractive that he tried to find enjoyment in the things that she liked, and did find a pleasure, not only in imitating her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because, as those habits and opinions had no roots in his own intelligence, they reminded him only of his love, for the sake of which he had preferred them to his own. If he went again to
Serge Panine
, if he looked out for opportunities of going to see Olivier Métra conduct,
¹¹
it was for the pleasure of being initiated into every one of Odette’s ideas and fancies, of feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes. This charm, which her favourite plays and pictures and places possessed, of drawing him
closer to her, struck him as being more mysterious than the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places with which she had no connection. Besides, having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to languish, and his man-of-the-world scepticism having permeated them without his being aware of it, he felt (or at least he had felt for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying) that the objects we admire have no absolute value in themselves, that the whole thing is a matter of period and class, is no more than a series of fashions, the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined. And as he considered that the importance Odette attached to receiving an invitation to a private view was not in itself any more ridiculous than the pleasure he himself had at one time felt in lunching with the Prince of Wales, so he did not think that the admiration she professed for Monte-Carlo or for the Righi was any more unreasonable than his own liking for Holland (which she imagined to be ugly) and for Versailles (which bored her to tears). And so he denied himself the pleasure of visiting those places, delighted to tell himself that it was for her sake, that he wished only to feel, to enjoy things with her.

Like everything else that formed part of Odette’s environment, and was no more, in a sense, than the means whereby he might see and talk to her more often, he enjoyed the society of the Verdurins. There, since at the heart of all their entertainments, dinners, musical evenings, games, suppers in fancy dress, excursions to the country, theatre outings, even the infrequent “gala evenings” when they entertained the “bores,” there was the presence of Odette, the sight of Odette, conversation
with Odette, an inestimable boon which the Verdurins bestowed on Swann by inviting him to their house, he was happier in the little “nucleus” than anywhere else, and tried to find some genuine merit in each of its members, imagining that this would lead him to frequent their society from choice for the rest of his life. Not daring to tell himself, lest he should doubt the truth of the suggestion, that he would always love Odette, at least in supposing that he would go on visiting the Verdurins (a proposition which,
a priori
, raised fewer fundamental objections on the part of his intelligence) he saw himself in the future continuing to meet Odette every evening; that did not, perhaps, come quite to the same thing as loving her for ever, but for the moment, while he loved her, to feel that he would not eventually cease to see her was all that he asked. “What a charming atmosphere!” he said to himself. “How entirely genuine is the life these people lead! How much more intelligent, more artistic, they are than the people one knows! And Mme Verdurin, in spite of a few trifling exaggerations which are rather absurd, what a sincere love of painting and music she has, what a passion for works of art, what anxiety to give pleasure to artists! Her ideas about some of the people one knows are not quite right, but then their ideas about artistic circles are still more wrong! Possibly I make no great intellectual demands in conversation, but I’m perfectly happy talking to Cottard, although he does trot out those idiotic puns. And as for the painter, if he is rather disagreeably pretentious when he tries to shock, still he has one of the finest brains that I’ve ever come across. Besides, what is most important, one feels quite free there, one does what one likes without constraint or fuss. What a flow of good humour
there is every day in that drawing-room! No question about it, with a few rare exceptions I never want to go anywhere else again. It will become more and more of a habit, and I shall spend the rest of my life there.”

And as the qualities which he supposed to be intrinsic to the Verdurins were no more than the superficial reflection of pleasures which he had enjoyed in their society through his love for Odette, those qualities became more serious, more profound, more vital, when those pleasures were too. Since Mme Verdurin often gave Swann what alone could constitute his happiness—since, on an evening when he felt anxious because Odette had talked rather more to one of the party than to another, and, irritated by this, would not take the initiative of asking her whether she was coming home with him, Mme Verdurin brought peace and joy to his troubled spirit by saying spontaneously: “Odette, you’ll see M. Swann home, won’t you?”; and since, when the summer holidays were impending and he had asked himself uneasily whether Odette might not leave Paris without him, whether he would still be able to see her every day, Mme Verdurin had invited them both to spend the summer with her in the country—Swann, unconsciously allowing gratitude and self-interest to infiltrate his intelligence and to influence his ideas, went so far as to proclaim that Mme Verdurin was “a great soul.” Should one of his old fellow-students from the École du Louvre speak to him of some delightful or eminent people he had come across, “I’d a hundred times rather have the Verdurins” he would reply. And, with a solemnity of diction that was new in him: “They are magnanimous creatures, and magnanimity is, after all, the one thing that matters, the one thing that
gives us distinction here on earth. You see, there are only two classes of people, the magnanimous, and the rest; and I have reached an age when one has to take sides, to decide once and for all whom one is going to like and dislike, to stick to the people one likes, and, to make up for the time one has wasted with the others, never to leave them again as long as one lives. And so,” he went on, with the slight thrill of emotion which a man feels when, even without being fully aware of it, he says something not because it is true but because he enjoys saying it, and listens to his own voice uttering the words as though they came from someone else, “the die is now cast. I have elected to love none but magnanimous souls, and to live only in an atmosphere of magnanimity. You ask me whether Mme Verdurin is really intelligent. I can assure you that she has given me proofs of a nobility of heart, of a loftiness of soul, to which no one could possibly attain without a corresponding loftiness of mind. Without question, she has a profound understanding of art. But it is not, perhaps, in that that she is most admirable; every little action, ingeniously, exquisitely kind, which she has performed for my sake, every thoughtful attention, every little gesture, quite domestic and yet quite sublime, reveals a more profound comprehension of existence than all your text-books of philosophy.”

He might have reminded himself that there were various old friends of his family who were just as simple as the Verdurins, companions of his youth who were just as fond of art, that he knew other “great-hearted” people, and that nevertheless, since he had opted in favour of simplicity, the arts, and magnanimity, he had entirely ceased to see them. But these people did not know
Odette, and, if they had known her, would never have thought of introducing her to him.

And so, in the whole of the Verdurin circle, there was probably not a single one of the “faithful” who loved them, or believed that he loved them, as dearly as did Swann. And yet, when M. Verdurin had said that he did not take to Swann, he had not only expressed his own sentiments, he had divined those of his wife. Doubtless Swann had too exclusive an affection for Odette, of which he had neglected to make Mme Verdurin his regular confidante; doubtless the very discretion with which he availed himself of the Verdurins’ hospitality, often refraining from coming to dine with them for a reason which they never suspected and in place of which they saw only an anxiety on his part not to have to decline an invitation to the house of some “bore” or other, and doubtless, too, despite all the precautions which he had taken to keep it from them, the gradual discovery which they were making of his brilliant position in society—doubtless all this contributed to their growing irritation with Swann. But the real, the fundamental reason was quite different. The fact was that they had very quickly sensed in him a locked door, a reserved, impenetrable chamber in which he still professed silently to himself that the Princesse de Sagan was not grotesque and that Cottard’s jokes were not amusing, in a word, for all that he never deviated from his affability or revolted against their dogmas, an impermeability to those dogmas, a resistance to complete conversion, the like of which they had never come across in anyone before. They would have forgiven him for associating with “bores” (to whom, as it
happened, in his heart of hearts he infinitely preferred the Verdurins and all the little “nucleus”) had he consented to set a good example by openly renouncing those “bores” in the presence of the “faithful.” But that was an abjuration which they realised they were powerless to extort from him.

How different he was from a “newcomer” whom Odette had asked them to invite, although she herself had met him only a few times, and on whom they were building great hopes—the Comte de Forcheville! (It turned out that he was Saniette’s brother-in-law, a discovery which filled all the faithful with amazement: the manners of the old palaeographer were so humble that they had always supposed him to be socially inferior to themselves, and had never expected to learn that he came from a rich and relatively aristocratic background.) Of course, Forcheville was a colossal snob, which Swann was not; of course he would never dream of placing, as Swann now did, the Verdurin circle above all others. But he lacked that natural refinement which prevented Swann from associating himself with the more obviously false accusations that Mme Verdurin levelled at people he knew. As for the vulgar and pretentious tirades in which the painter sometimes indulged, the commercial traveller’s pleasantries which Cottard used to hazard, and for which Swann, who liked both men sincerely, could easily find excuses without having either the heart or the hypocrisy to applaud them, Forcheville by contrast was of an intellectual calibre to be dumbfounded, awestruck by the first (without in the least understanding them) and to revel in the second. And as it happened, the very first dinner at
the Verdurins’ at which Forcheville was present threw a glaring light upon all these differences, brought out his qualities and precipitated Swann’s fall from grace.

There was at this dinner, besides the usual party, a professor from the Sorbonne, one Brichot, who had met M. and Mme Verdurin at a watering-place somewhere and who, if his university duties and scholarly labours had not left him with very little time to spare, would gladly have come to them more often. For he had the sort of curiosity and superstitious worship of life which, combined with a certain scepticism with regard to the object of their studies, earns for some intelligent men of whatever profession, doctors who do not believe in medicine, schoolmasters who do not believe in Latin exercises, the reputation of having broad, brilliant and indeed superior minds. He affected, when at Mme Verdurin’s, to choose his illustrations from among the most topical subjects of the day when he spoke of philosophy or history, principally because he regarded those sciences as no more than a preparation for life, and imagined that he was seeing put into practice by the “little clan” what hitherto he had known only from books, and perhaps also because, having had instilled into him as a boy, and having unconsciously preserved, a reverence for certain subjects, he thought that he was casting aside the scholar’s gown when he ventured to treat those subjects with a conversational licence which in fact seemed daring to him only because the folds of the gown still clung.