The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (47 page)

In spite of these manoeuvres he could not make it out clearly. Not that it mattered, for he had seen enough to assure himself that the letter was about some trifling incident which had no connexion with amorous relations; it was something to do with an uncle of Odette’s. Swann had read quite plainly at the beginning of the line: “I was right,” but did not understand what Odette had been right in doing, until suddenly a word which he had not been able at first to decipher came to light and made the whole sentence intelligible: “I was right to open the door; it was my uncle.” To open the door! So Forcheville had been there when Swann rang the bell, and she had sent him away, hence the sound that he had heard.

After that he read the whole letter. At the end she apologised for having treated Forcheville with so little ceremony, and reminded him that he had left his cigarette-case at her house, precisely what she had written to Swann after one of his first visits. But to Swann she had added: “If only you had forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have that back.” To Forcheville nothing of that sort: no allusion that might suggest any intrigue between them. And, really, he was obliged to admit that in all this Forcheville had been worse treated than himself, since Odette was writing to him to assure him that the visitor had been her uncle. From which it followed that he, Swann, was the man to whom she attached
importance and for whose sake she had sent the other away. And yet, if there was nothing between Odette and Forcheville, why not have opened the door at once, why have said, “I was right to open the door; it was my uncle.” If she was doing nothing wrong at that moment, how could Forcheville possibly have accounted for her not opening the door? For some time Swann stood there, disconsolate, bewildered and yet happy, gazing at this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a qualm, so absolute was her trust in his honour, but through the transparent screen of which had been disclosed to him, together with the secret history of an incident which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of Odette’s life, like a luminous section cut out of the unknown. Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of everything that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself. Now it had something to feed on, and Swann could begin to worry every day about the visits Odette received about five o’clock, could seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour. For Swann’s affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on it from the beginning by his ignorance of how she spent her days and by the mental lethargy which prevented him from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette’s life, but of those moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself firmly to that particular moment,
five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He decided to separate Odette from Forcheville by taking her away for a few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so he who in former days, on journeys, used always to seek out new people and crowded places, might now be seen morosely shunning human society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for Odette? And thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, sensual feeling he had originally experienced for Odette had done to alter Swann’s character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.

A month after the evening on which he had read Odette’s letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of confabulations between Mme Verdurin and several of her guests, and thought he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to a party at Chatou, to which he, Swann, had not been invited.

The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the painter, perhaps without thinking, exclaimed aloud: “There mustn’t be any light, and he
must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark so that things can become clear.”

Mme Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed an expression in which the two-fold desire to silence the speaker and to preserve an air of innocence in the eyes of the listener is neutralised into an intense vacuity wherein the motionless sign of intelligent complicity is concealed beneath an ingenuous smile, an expression which, common to everyone who has noticed a gaffe, instantaneously reveals it, if not to its perpetrator, at any rate to its victim. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had given up the struggle against the crushing difficulties of life, and. Swann anxiously counted the minutes that still separated him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he drove her home, he would be able to ask her for an explanation, make her promise either that she would not go to Chatou next day or that she would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her arms the anguish that tormented him. At last the carriages were ordered. Mme Verdurin said to Swann: “Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope,” trying, by the friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have said hitherto: “Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after.”

M. and Mme Verdurin invited Forcheville into their carriage. Swann’s was drawn up behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into his.

“Odette, we’ll take you,” said Mme Verdurin, “we’ve kept a little corner for you, beside M. de Forcheville.”

“Yes, Madame,” said Odette meekly.

“What! I thought I was to take you home,” cried Swann, flinging discretion to the wind, for the carriage-door hung open, the seconds were running out, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.

“But Mme Verdurin has asked me …”

“Come, you can quite well go home alone; we’ve left her with you quite often enough,” said Mme Verdurin.

“But I had something important to say to Mme de Crécy.”

“Very well, you can write it to her instead.”

“Good-bye,” said Odette, holding out her hand.

He tried hard to smile, but looked utterly dejected.

“Did you see the airs Swann is pleased to put on with us?” Mme Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. “I was afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette back. It’s positively indecent! Why doesn’t he say straight out that we keep a bawdy-house? I can’t conceive how Odette can stand such manners. He literally seems to be saying, ‘You belong to me!’ I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about it all, and I hope she’ll have the sense to understand me.”

A moment later she added, inarticulate with rage: “No, but, don’t you agree, the filthy creature …” unwittingly using, perhaps in obedience to the same obscure need to justify herself—like Françoise at Combray, when the chicken refused to die—the very words which the last convulsions of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the peasant who is engaged in taking its life.

And when Mme Verdurin’s carriage had moved on and Swann’s took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard some bad news.

Swann dismissed him; he wanted to walk, and returned home on foot through the Bois, talking to himself, aloud, in the same slightly artificial tone he used to adopt when enumerating the charms of the “little nucleus” and extolling the magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles, the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found them pleasing, if they were addressed to others, so the Verdurins’ salon, which, not an hour before, had still seemed to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with a sort of moral nobility, exhibited to him all its absurdities, its foolishness, its ignominy, now that it was another than himself whom Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint.

He pictured to himself with disgust the party next evening at Chatou. “Imagine going to Chatou! Like a lot of drapers after shutting up shop! Upon my word, these people are really sublime in their bourgeois mediocrity, they can’t be real, they must all have come out of a Labiche comedy!”

The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. “Could anything be more grotesque than the lives of these nonentities, hanging on to one another like that. They’d imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul they would, if they didn’t all meet again tomorrow at
Chatou!
” Alas! there would also be the painter, the painter who enjoyed match-making, who would invite Forcheville to come with Odette to his studio. He could see Odette in a dress far too smart for a country outing, “because she’s so vulgar, and, poor little thing, such an absolute fool!”

He could hear the jokes that Mme Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the “bore” might
be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them, laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. “What fetid humour!” he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar. “How in God’s name can a creature made in his image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The least sensitive nose must turn away in horror from such stale exhalations. It’s really impossible to believe that a human being can fail to understand that, in allowing herself to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is sinking into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I inhabit a plane so infinitely far above the sewers in which these filthy vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!” he shouted, tossing up his head and proudly throwing back his shoulders. “God knows I’ve honestly tried to pull Odette out of that quagmire, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end,” he concluded, as though this sacred mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might perhaps be directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from him.

He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and the grimaces of Mme Verdurin in
terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by Beethoven’s music. “Idiot, liar!” he shouted, “and a creature like that imagines that she loves
Art
!” She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for him: “You can make room for M. de Forcheville, there, can’t you, Odette?” … “ ‘In the dark!’ ” (he remembered the painter’s words) “filthy old procuress!” “Procuress” was the name he applied also to the music which would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze into each other’s eyes, to feel for each other’s hands. He felt that there was much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorious attitude towards the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of education in France.

In a word, the life they led at the Verdurins’, which he had so often described as “the true life,” seemed to him now the worst of all, and their “little nucleus” the lowest of the low. “It really is,” he said, “beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. No doubt about it, the august words of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When you come to think of it, surely people ‘in society’ (with whom one may find fault now and then but who are after all a very different matter from that riff-raff) show a profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or even to soil the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound intuition there is in that
‘Noli me tangere’
of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”

He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, had almost reached his own house, and still, having not yet shaken off the intoxication of his misery and pain and the inspired insincerity which the counterfeit tones and artificial sonority of his own voice raised
to ever more exhilarating heights, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the night: “Society people have their failings, as no one knows better than I; but there are certain things they simply wouldn’t stoop to. So-and-so” (a fashionable woman whom he had known) “was far from being perfect, but she did after all have a fundamental decency, a sense of honour in her dealings which would have made her incapable, whatever happened, of any sort of treachery and which puts a vast gulf between her and an old hag like Verdurin. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, it must be said that they’re perfect specimens of their disgusting kind! Thank God, it was high time that I stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse with such infamy, such dung.”

But, just as the virtues which he had still attributed to the Verdurins an hour or so earlier would not have sufficed, even if the Verdurins had actually possessed them, if they had not also encouraged and protected his love, to excite Swann to that state of intoxication in which he waxed tender over their magnanimity—an intoxication which, even when disseminated through the medium of other persons, could have come to him from Odette alone—so the immorality (had it really existed) which he now found in the Verdurins would have been powerless, if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to unleash his indignation and make him fulminate against their “infamy.” And doubtless Swann’s voice was more perspicacious than Swann himself when it refused to utter those words full of disgust with the Verdurins and their circle, and of joy at having shaken himself free of it, save in an artificial and rhetorical tone and as though they had been chosen rather to appease his
anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact, while he abandoned himself to his invective, were probably, though he did not realise it, occupied with a wholly different matter, for having reached home, no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him than he suddenly struck his forehead, and reopening it, dashed out again exclaiming, in a voice which, this time, was quite natural: “I think I’ve found a way of getting invited to the dinner at Chatou tomorrow!” But it must have been a bad way, for Swann was not invited. Dr Cottard, who, having been summoned to attend a serious case in the country, had not seen the Verdurins for some days and had been prevented from appearing at Chatou, said on the evening after this dinner, as he sat down to table at their house: “But aren’t we going to see M. Swann this evening? He’s quite what you might call a personal friend of …”