In Search Of Lost Time. Volumes 1 to 7

“You’d need to pay me a lot of money before I’d let any of that lot set foot inside my house,” Mme. Verdurin concluded, gazing imperially down on Swann.

She could scarcely have expected him to capitulate so completely as to echo the holy simplicity of the pianist’s aunt, who at once exclaimed: “To think of that, now! What surprises me is that they can get anybody to go near them; I’m sure I should be afraid; one can’t be too careful. How can people be so common as to go running after them?”

But he might, at least, have replied, like Forcheville: “Gad, she’s a duchess; there are still plenty of people who are impressed by that sort of thing,” which would at least have permitted Mme. Verdurin the final retort, “And a lot of good may it do them!” Instead of which, Swann merely smiled, in a manner which shewed, quite clearly, that he could not, of course, take such an absurd suggestion seriously. M. Verdurin, who was still casting furtive and intermittent glances at his wife, could see with regret, and could understand only too well that she was now inflamed with the passion of a Grand Inquisitor who cannot succeed in stamping out a heresy; and so, in the hope of bringing Swann round to a retractation (for the courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the ‘other side’), he broke in:

“Tell us frankly, now, what you think of them yourself. We shan’t repeat it to them, you may be sure.”

To which Swann answered: “Why, I’m not in the least afraid of the Duchess (if it is of the La Trémoïlles that you’re speaking). I can assure you that everyone likes going to see her. I don’t go so far as to say that she’s at all ‘deep’—” he pronounced the word as if it meant something ridiculous, for his speech kept the traces of certain mental habits which the recent change in his life, a rejuvenation illustrated by his passion for music, had inclined him temporarily to discard, so that at times he would actually state his views with considerable warmth—“but I am quite sincere when I say that she is intelligent, while her husband is positively a bookworm. They are charming people.”

His explanation was terribly effective; Mme. Verdurin now realised that this one state of unbelief would prevent her ‘little nucleus’ from ever attaining to complete unanimity, and was unable to restrain herself, in her fury at the obstinacy of this wretch who could not see what anguish his words were causing her, but cried aloud, from the depths of her tortured heart, “You may think so if you wish, but at least you need not say so to us.”

“It all depends upon what you call intelligence.” Forcheville felt that it was his turn to be brilliant. “Come now, Swann, tell us what you mean by intelligence.”

“There,” cried Odette, “that’s one of the big things I beg him to tell me about, and he never will.”

“Oh, but …” protested Swann.

“Oh, but nonsense!” said Odette.

“A water-butt?” asked the Doctor.

“To you,” pursued Forcheville, “does intelligence mean what they call clever talk; you know, the sort of people who worm their way into society?”

“Finish your sweet, so that they can take your plate away!” said Mme. Verdurin sourly to Saniette, who was lost in thought and had stopped eating. And then, perhaps a little ashamed of her rudeness, “It doesn’t matter; take your time about it; there’s no hurry; I only reminded you because of the others, you know; it keeps the servants back.”

“There is,” began Brichot, with a resonant smack upon every syllable, “a rather curious definition of intelligence by that pleasing old anarchist Fénelon …”

“Just listen to this!” Mme. Verdurin rallied Forcheville and the Doctor. “He’s going to give us Fénelon’s definition of intelligence. That’s interesting. It’s not often you get a chance of hearing that!”

But Brichot was keeping Fénelon’s definition until Swann should have given his own. Swann remained silent, and, by this fresh act of recreancy, spoiled the brilliant tournament of dialectic which Mme. Verdurin was rejoicing at being able to offer to Forcheville.

“You see, it’s just the same as with me!” Odette was peevish. “I’m not at all sorry to see that I’m not the only one he doesn’t find quite up to his level.”

“These de La Trémouailles whom Mme. Verdurin has exhibited to us as so little to be desired,” inquired Brichot, articulating vigorously, “are they, by any chance, descended from the couple whom that worthy old snob, Sévigné, said she was delighted to know, because it was so good for her peasants? True, the Marquise had another reason, which in her case probably came first, for she was a thorough journalist at heart, and always on the look-out for ‘copy.’ And, in the journal which she used to send regularly to her daughter, it was Mme. de La Trémouaille, kept well-informed through all her grand connections, who supplied the foreign politics.”

“Oh dear, no. I’m quite sure they aren’t the same family,” said Mme. Verdurin desperately.

Saniette who, ever since he had surrendered his untouched plate to the butler, had been plunged once more in silent meditation, emerged finally to tell them, with a nervous laugh, a story of how he had once dined with the Duc de La Trémoïlle, the point of which was that the Duke did not know that George Sand was the pseudonym of a woman. Swann, who really liked Saniette, felt bound to supply him with a few facts illustrative of the Duke’s culture, which would prove that such ignorance on his part was literally impossible; but suddenly he stopped short; he had realised, as he was speaking, that Saniette needed no proof, but knew already that the story was untrue for the simple reason that he had at that moment invented it. The worthy man suffered acutely from the Verdurins’ always finding him so dull; and as he was conscious of having been more than ordinarily morose this evening, he had made up his mind that he would succeed in being amusing, at least once, before the end of dinner. He surrendered so quickly, looked so wretched at the sight of his castle in ruins, and replied in so craven a tone to Swann, appealing to him not to persist in a refutation which was already superfluous, “All right; all right; anyhow, even if I have made a mistake that’s not a crime, I hope,” that Swann longed to be able to console him by insisting that the story was indubitably true and exquisitely funny. The Doctor, who had been listening, had an idea that it was the right moment to interject “Se non è vero,” but he was not quite certain of the words, and was afraid of being caught out.

After dinner, Forcheville went up to the Doctor. “She can’t have been at all bad looking, Mme. Verdurin; anyhow, she’s a woman you can really talk to; that’s all I want. Of course she’s getting a bit broad in the beam. But Mme. de Crécy! There’s a little woman who knows what’s what, all right. Upon my word and soul, you can see at a glance she’s got the American eye, that girl has. We are speaking of Mme. de Crécy,” he explained, as M. Verdurin joined them, his pipe in his mouth. “I should say that, as a specimen of the female form—”

“I’d rather have it in my bed than a clap of thunder!” the words came tumbling from Cottard, who had for some time been waiting in vain until Forcheville should pause for breath, so that he might get in his hoary old joke, a chance for which might not, he feared, come again, if the conversation should take a different turn; and he produced it now with that excessive spontaneity and confidence which may often be noticed attempting to cover up the coldness, and the slight flutter of emotion, inseparable from a prepared recitation. Forcheville knew and saw the joke, and was thoroughly amused. As for M. Verdurin, he was unsparing of his merriment, having recently discovered a way of expressing it by a symbol, different from his wife’s, but equally simple and obvious. Scarcely had he begun the movement of head and shoulders of a man who was ‘shaking with laughter’ than he would begin also to cough, as though, in laughing too violently, he had swallowed a mouthful of smoke from his pipe. And by keeping the pipe firmly in his mouth he could prolong indefinitely the dumb-show of suffocation and hilarity. So he and Mme. Verdurin (who, at the other side of the room, where the painter was telling her a story, was shutting her eyes preparatory to flinging her face into her hands) resembled two masks in a theatre, each representing Comedy, but in a different way.

M. Verdurin had been wiser than he knew in not taking his pipe out of his mouth, for Cottard, having occasion to leave the room for a moment, murmured a witty euphemism which he had recently acquired and repeated now whenever he had to go to the place in question: “I must just go and see the Duc d’Aumale for a minute,” so drolly, that M. Verdurin’s cough began all over again.

“Now, then, take your pipe out of your mouth; can’t you see, you’ll choke if you try to bottle up your laughter like that,” counselled Mme. Verdurin, as she came round with a tray of liqueurs.

“What a delightful man your husband is; he has the wit of a dozen!” declared Forcheville to Mme. Cottard. “Thank you, thank you, an old soldier like me can never say ‘No’ to a drink.”

“M. de Forcheville thinks Odette charming,” M. Verdurin told his wife.

“Why, do you know, she wants so much to meet you again some day at luncheon. We must arrange it, but don’t on any account let Swann hear about it. He spoils everything, don’t you know. I don’t mean to say that you’re not to come to dinner too, of course; we hope to see you very often. Now that the warm weather’s coming, we’re going to have dinner out of doors whenever we can. That won’t bore you, will it, a quiet little dinner, now and then, in the Bois? Splendid, splendid, that will be quite delightful….

“Aren’t you going to do any work this evening, I say?” she screamed suddenly to the little pianist, seeing an opportunity for displaying, before a ‘newcomer’ of Forcheville’s importance, at once her unfailing wit and her despotic power over the ‘faithful.’

“M. de Forcheville was just going to say something dreadful about you,” Mme. Cottard warned her husband as he reappeared in the room. And he, still following up the idea of Forcheville’s noble birth, which had obsessed him all through dinner, began again with: “I am treating a Baroness just now, Baroness Putbus; weren’t there some Putbuses in the Crusades? Anyhow they’ve got a lake in Pomerania that’s ten times the size of the Place de la Concorde. I am treating her for dry arthritis; she’s a charming woman. Mme. Verdurin knows her too, I believe.”

Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone with Mme. Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with: “He’s an interesting man, too; you can see that he knows some good people. Gad! but they get to know a lot of things, those doctors.”

“D’you want me to play the phrase from the sonata for M. Swann?” asked the pianist.

“What the devil’s that? Not the sonata-snake, I hope!” shouted M. de Forcheville, hoping to create an effect. But Dr. Cottard, who had never heard this pun, missed the point of it, and imagined that M. de Forcheville had made a mistake. He dashed in boldly to correct it: “No, no. The word isn’t serpent-à-sonates, it’s serpent-à-sonnettes!” he explained in a tone at once zealous, impatient, and triumphant.

Forcheville explained the joke to him. The Doctor blushed.

“You’ll admit it’s not bad, eh, Doctor?”

“Oh! I’ve known it for ages.”

Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves above it—and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley—the little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville.

“Ah! you’ve come too late!” Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the ‘faithful,’ whose invitation had been only ‘to look in after dinner,’ “we’ve been having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence! But he’s gone. Isn’t that so, M. Swann? I believe it’s the first time you’ve met him,” she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her that Swann owed the introduction. “Isn’t that so; wasn’t he delicious, our Brichot?”

Swann bowed politely.

“No? You weren’t interested?” she asked dryly.

“Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little too peremptory, a little too jovial for my taste. I should like to see him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one feels that he knows a great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound fellow.”

The party broke up very late. Cottard’s first words to his wife were: “I have rarely seen Mme. Verdurin in such form as she was to-night.”

“What exactly is your Mme. Verdurin? A bit of a bad hat, eh?” said Forcheville to the painter, to whom he had offered a ‘lift.’ Odette watched his departure with regret; she dared not refuse to let Swann take her home, but she was moody and irritable in the carriage, and, when he asked whether he might come in, replied, “I suppose so,” with an impatient shrug of her shoulders. When they had all gone, Mme. Verdurin said to her husband: “Did you notice the way Swann laughed, such an idiotic laugh, when we spoke about Mme. La Trémoïlle?”

She had remarked, more than once, how Swann and Forcheville suppressed the particle ‘de’ before that lady’s name. Never doubting that it was done on purpose, to shew that they were not afraid of a title, she had made up her mind to imitate their arrogance, but had not quite grasped what grammatical form it ought to take. Moreover, the natural corruptness of her speech overcoming her implacable republicanism, she still said instinctively “the de La Trémoïlles,” or, rather (by an abbreviation sanctified by the usage of music-hall singers and the writers of the ‘captions’ beneath caricatures, who elide the ‘de’), “the d’La Trémoïlles,” but she corrected herself at once to “Madame La Trémoïlle.—The Duchess, as Swann calls her,” she added ironically, with a smile which proved that she was merely quoting, and would not, herself, accept the least responsibility for a classification so puerile and absurd.

“I don’t mind saying that I thought him extremely stupid.”

M. Verdurin took it up. “He’s not sincere. He’s a crafty customer, always hovering between one side and the other. He’s always trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. What a difference between him and Forcheville. There, at least, you have a man who tells you straight out what he thinks. Either you agree with him or you don’t. Not like the other fellow, who’s never definitely fish or fowl. Did you notice, by the way, that Odette seemed all out for Forcheville, and I don’t blame her, either. And then, after all, if Swann tries to come the man of fashion over us, the champion of distressed Duchesses, at any rate the other man has got a title; he’s always Comte de Forcheville!” he let the words slip delicately from his lips, as though, familiar with every page of the history of that dignity, he were making a scrupulously exact estimate of its value, in relation to others of the sort.

“I don’t mind saying,” Mme. Verdurin went on, “that he saw fit to utter some most venomous, and quite absurd insinuations against Brichot. Naturally, once he saw that Brichot was popular in this house, it was a way of hitting back at us, of spoiling our party. I know his sort, the dear, good friend of the family, who pulls you all to pieces on the stairs as he’s going away.”

“Didn’t I say so?” retorted her husband. “He’s simply a failure; a poor little wretch who goes through life mad with jealousy of anything that’s at all big.”

Had the truth been known, there was not one of the ‘faithful’ who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of reserve on Swann’s part, undraped in any such conventional formula as “Of course, I don’t want to say anything—” to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least ‘freedom of speech’ is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin. In his case as in theirs it was the novelty of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his designs.

Swann was still unconscious of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins’, and continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light, through the admiring eyes of love.

As a rule he made no appointments with Odette except for the evenings; he was afraid of her growing tired of him if he visited her during the day as well; at the same time he was reluctant to forfeit, even for an hour, the place that he held in her thoughts, and so was constantly looking out for an opportunity of claiming her attention, in any way that would not be displeasing to her. If, in a florist’s or a jeweller’s window, a plant or an ornament caught his eye, he would at once think of sending them to Odette, imagining that the pleasure which the casual sight of them had given him would instinctively be felt, also, by her, and would increase her affection for himself; and he would order them to be taken at once to the Rue La pérouse, so as to accelerate the moment in which, as she received an offering from him, he might feel himself, in a sense, transported into her presence. He was particularly anxious, always, that she should receive these presents before she went out for the evening, so that her sense of gratitude towards him might give additional tenderness to her welcome when he arrived at the Verdurins’, might even—for all he knew—if the shopkeeper made haste, bring him a letter from her before dinner, or herself, in person, upon his doorstep, come on a little extraordinary visit of thanks. As in an earlier phase, when he had experimented with the reflex action of anger and contempt upon her character, he sought now by that of gratification to elicit from her fresh particles of her intimate feelings, which she had never yet revealed.

Often she was embarrassed by lack of money, and under pressure from a creditor would come to him for assistance. He enjoyed this, as he enjoyed everything which could impress Odette with his love for herself, or merely with his influence, with the extent of the use that she might make of him. Probably if anyone had said to him, at the beginning, “It’s your position that attracts her,” or at this stage, “It’s your money that she’s really in love with,” he would not have believed the suggestion, nor would he have been greatly distressed by the thought that people supposed her to be attached to him, that people felt them, to be united by any ties so binding as those of snobbishness or wealth. But even if he had accepted the possibility, it might not have caused him any suffering to discover that Odette’s love for him was based on a foundation more lasting than mere affection, or any attractive qualities which she might have found in him; on a sound, commercial interest; an interest which would postpone for ever the fatal day on which she might be tempted to bring their relations to an end. For the moment, while he lavished presents upon her, and performed all manner of services, he could rely on advantages not contained in his person, or in his intellect, could forego the endless, killing effort to make himself attractive. And this delight in being a lover, in living by love alone, of the reality of which he was inclined to be doubtful, the price which, in the long run, he must pay for it, as a dilettante in immaterial sensations, enhanced its value in his eyes—as one sees people who are doubtful whether the sight of the sea and the sound of its waves are really enjoyable, become convinced that they are, as also of the rare quality and absolute detachment of their own taste, when they have agreed to pay several pounds a day for a room in an hotel, from which that sight and that sound may be enjoyed.

One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a ‘kept’ woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the ‘kept’ woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer, resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness, which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother’s face, and on the faces of friends; that Odette, whose conversation had so frequently turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his collections, his room, his old servant, his banker, who kept all his title-deeds and bonds;—the thought of the banker reminded him that he must call on him shortly, to draw some money. And indeed, if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy, and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself diminished. And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not precisely what was implied by ‘keeping’ a woman (as if, in fact, that idea of ‘keeping’ could be derived from elements not at all mysterious nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life, such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn in places and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying the household accounts and the rent, had locked up in a drawer in the old writing-desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to Odette, since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of ‘kept’ woman. He could not explore the idea further, for a sudden access of that mental lethargy which was, with him, congenital, intermittent and providential, happened, at that moment, to extinguish every particle of light in his brain, as instantaneously as, at a later period, when electric lighting had been everywhere installed, it became possible, merely by fingering a switch, to cut off all the supply of light from a house. His mind fumbled, for a moment, in the darkness, he took off his spectacles, wiped the glasses, passed his hands over his eyes, but saw no light until he found himself face to face with a wholly different idea, the realisation that he must endeavour, in the coming month, to send Odette six or seven thousand-franc notes instead of five, simply as a surprise for her and to give her pleasure.

In the evening, when he did not stay at home until it was time to meet Odette at the Verdurins’, or rather at one of the open-air restaurants which they liked to frequent in the Bois and especially at Saint-Cloud, he would go to dine in one of those fashionable houses in which, at one time, he had been a constant guest. He did not wish to lose touch with people who, for all that he knew, might be of use, some day, to Odette, and thanks to whom he was often, in the meantime, able to procure for her some privilege or pleasure. Besides, he had been used for so long to the refinement and comfort of good society that, side by side with his contempt, there had grown up also a desperate need for it, with the result that, when he had reached the point after which the humblest lodgings appeared to him as precisely on a par with the most princely mansions, his senses were so thoroughly accustomed to the latter that he could not enter the former without a feeling of acute discomfort. He had the same regard—to a degree of identity which they would never have suspected—for the little families with small incomes who asked him to dances in their flats (“straight upstairs to the fifth floor, and the door on the left”) as for the Princesse de Parme, who gave the most splendid parties in Paris; but he had not the feeling of being actually ‘at the ball’ when he found himself herded with the fathers of families in the bedroom of the lady of the house, while the spectacle of wash-hand-stands covered over with towels, and of beds converted into cloak-rooms, with a mass of hats and great-coats sprawling over their counterpanes, gave him the same stifling sensation that, nowadays, people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive from a smoking lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven; while he changed his clothes, he would be wondering, all the time, about Odette, and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette gave to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar charm as to those in which she was at his side. He would get into his carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in after him and had settled down upon his knee, like a pet animal which he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table, unobserved by his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm himself with it, and, as a feeling of languor swept over him, would give way to a slight shuddering movement which contracted his throat and nostrils—a new experience, this,—as he fastened the bunch of columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the Verdurins’, and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray, where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed, thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise, he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner, trained and twined by the gardener’s skilful hand, there ran all about his table currant-bush and rose.