time, 'You belong to me!' I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about it
all, and I hope she will have the sense to understand me." A moment
later she added, inarticulate with rage: "No, but, don't you see, the filthy creature … " using unconsciously, and perhaps in satisfaction of 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 agony 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 bad news.
Swann sent him away; he preferred to walk, and it was on foot,
through the Bois, that he came home. He talked to himself, aloud, and in
the same slightly affected tone which he had been used to adopt when
describing the charms of the 'little nucleus' and extolling the magnanim-
ity 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 charming, if
they were diverted to others than himself, so the Verdurins' drawing-
room, which, not an hour before, had still seemed to him amusing,
272
inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with a sort of moral aris-
tocracy, now that it was another than himself whom Odette was going to
meet there, to love there without restraint, laid bare to him all its ab-
surdities, its stupidity, its shame.
He drew a fanciful picture, at which he shuddered in disgust, of the
party next evening at Chatou. "Imagine going to Chatou, of all places!
Like a lot of drapers after closing time! Upon my word, these people are
sublime in their smugness; they can't really exist; they must all have
come out of one of Labiche's plays!"
The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. "Could anything be
more grotesque than the lives of these little creatures, 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 to-morrow at Chatou!" Alas!
there would be the painter there also, 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 the country, "for she is so vulgar in that way, and, poor little thing, she is such a 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 a fetid
form of 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 im-
age find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The least
sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale exhala-
tions. It is really impossible to believe that any human being is incapable
of understanding that, in allowing herself merely to smile at the expense
of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is cast-
ing herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will
in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles
in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap
obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Ver-
durin!" he cried, tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his
body. "God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of
that sewer, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But hu-
man 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
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not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms
might, perchance, be directed at himself, and might have the effect of de-
taching 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's fond of Art!" She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville,
as she had so often done for himself: "You can make room for M. de
Forcheville there, can't you, Odette?"… '"In the dark!' Codfish!
Pander!" … 'Pander' was the name he applied also to the music which
would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze in 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 censorous attitude towards the arts, such as
Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of education in France.
In a word, the life which they led at the Verdurins', which he had so
often described as 'genuine,' seemed to him now the worst possible form
of life, and their 'little nucleus' the most degraded class of society. "It really is," he repeated, "beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. Beyond a doubt, the august words of the
Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When one comes to think of it, surely
people 'in society' (and, though one may find fault with them now and
then, still, after all they are a very different matter from that gang of
blackmailers) shew a profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or
even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound intuition
there is in that ' Noli me tangere' motto of the Faubourg Saint-Germain."
He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, he
had almost reached his own house, and still, for he had not yet thrown
off the intoxication of grief, or his whim of insincerity, but was ever more
and more exhilarated by the false intonation, the artificial sonority of his
own voice, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the night:
"People 'in society' have their failings, as no one knows better than I; but, after all, they are people to whom some things, at least, are impossible.
So-and-so" (a fashionable woman whom he had known) "was far from
being perfect, but, after all, one did find in her a fundamental delicacy, a
loyalty in her conduct which made her, whatever happened, incapable of
a felony, which fixes a vast gulf between her and an old hag like Verdur-
in. Verdurin! What a name! Oh, there's something complete about them,
something almost fine in their trueness to type; they're the most perfect
specimens of their disgusting class! Thank God, it was high time that I
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stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse with such infamy,
such dung."
But, just as the virtues which he had still attributed, an hour or so
earlier, to the Verdurins, would not have sufficed, even although the
Verdurins had actually possessed them, if they had not also favoured
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 power-
less, if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to
unstop the vials of his wrath and to make him scarify their 'infamy.'
Doubtless Swann's voice shewed a finer perspicacity than his own when
it refused to utter those words full of disgust at the Verdurins and their
circle, and of joy at his having shaken himself free of it, save in an artifi-
cial and rhetorical tone, and as though his words had been chosen rather
to appease his anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact,
while he abandoned himself to invective, were probably, though he did
not know it, occupied with a wholly different matter, for once he had
reached his house, no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him
than he suddenly struck his forehead, and, making his servant open the
door again, dashed out into the street shouting, in a voice which, this
time, was quite natural; "I believe I have found a way of getting invited
to the dinner at Chatou to-morrow!" But it must have been a bad way,
for M. 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:
"Why, aren't we going to see M. Swann this evening? He is quite what
you might call a personal friend… " "I sincerely trust that we sha'n't!"
cried Mme. Verdurin. "Heaven preserve us from him; he's too deadly for
words, a stupid, ill-bred boor."
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment
blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth
which contradicted everything that he had previously believed, but was
supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; with timorous emotion
he
bowed
his
head
over
his
plate,
and
merely
replied:
"Oh—oh—oh—oh—oh!" traversing, in an orderly retirement of his
forces, into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole
275
compass of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann at the
Verdurins'.
- - -
And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann and Odette to-
gether became an obstacle in the way of their meeting. She no longer said
to him, as she had said in the early days of their love: "We shall meet,
anyhow, to-morrow evening; there's a supper-party at the Verdurins',"
but "We sha'n't be able to meet to-morrow evening; there's a supper-
party at the Verdurins'." Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the
Opéra-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cléopâtre, and Swann could read in
her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go, which, but a little
time before, he could not have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it
flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him.
"Yet I'm not really angry," he assured himself, "when I see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that dunghill of cacophony. I'm
disappointed; not for myself, but for her; disappointed to find that, after
living for more than six months in daily contact with myself, she has not
been capable of improving her mind even to the point of spontaneously
eradicating from it a taste for Victor Massé! More than that, to find that
she has not arrived at the stage of understanding that there are evenings
on which anyone with the least shade of refinement of feeling should be
willing to forego an amusement when she is asked to do so. She ought to
have the sense to say: 'I shall not go,' if it were only from policy, since it
is by what she answers now that the quality of her soul will be determ-
ined once and for all." And having persuaded himself that it was solely,
after all, in order that he might arrive at a favourable estimate of Odette's
spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening
instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted the same line of reas-
oning with her, with the same degree of insincerity as he had used with
himself, or even with a degree more, for in her case he was yielding also
to the desire to capture her by her own self-esteem.
"I swear to you," he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, "that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish
man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thou-
sand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have been
tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if, after
all, you tell me that you are not going. But my occupations, my pleasures
are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come when, see-
ing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach
me with not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I
276
was going to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which
love cannot long resist. You see, your Nuit de Cléopâtre (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed
one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of
charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forego-
ing a pleasure. For if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you
are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at least perceptible en-
tity. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may
come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its
life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself, a hundred times a
day, against a wall of glass, always mistaking it for water. Do you realise
that your answer will have the effect—I do not say of making me cease
from that moment to love you, that goes without saying, but of making
you less attractive to my eyes when I realise that you are not a person,
that you are beneath everything in the world and have not the intelli-
gence to raise yourself one inch higher? Obviously, I should have pre-
ferred to ask you, as though it had been a matter of little or no import-
ance, to give up your Nuit de Cléopâtre (since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a name), in the hope that you would go to it none the
less. But, since I had resolved to weigh you in the balance, to make so
grave an issue depend upon your answer, I considered it more honour-
able to give you due warning."
Meanwhile, Odette had shewn signs of increasing emotion and uncer-
tainty. Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped
that it was to be included among the scenes of reproach or supplication,
scenes which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without
paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that men
would not make unless they were in love; that, from the moment when
they were in love, it was superfluous to obey them, since they would
only be more in love later on. And so, she would have heard Swann out
with the utmost tranquillity had she not noticed that it was growing late,
and that if he went on speaking for any length of time she would "never"
as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed, "get
there in time for the Overture."
On other occasions he had assured himself that the one thing which,
more than anything else, would make him cease to love her, would be
her refusal to abandon the habit of lying. "Even from the point of view of coquetry, pure and simple," he had told her, "can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying? By a frank admission—how many faults you might redeem! Really, you are far less
277
intelligent than I supposed!" In vain, however, did Swann expound to
her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying; they might have suc-
ceeded in overthrowing any universal system of mendacity, but Odette
had no such system; she contented herself, merely, whenever she wished
Swann to remain in ignorance of anything that she had done, with not
telling him of it. So that a lie was, to her, something to be used only as a
special expedient; and the one thing that could make her decide whether
she should avail herself of a lie or not was a reason which, too, was of a
special and contingent order, namely the risk of Swann's discovering
that she had not told him the truth.
Physically, she was passing through an unfortunate phase; she was
growing stouter, and the expressive, sorrowful charm, the surprised,
wistful expressions which she had formerly had, seemed to have van-
ished with her first youth, with the result that she became most precious
to Swann at the very moment when he found her distinctly less good-
looking. He would gaze at her for hours on end, trying to recapture the
charm which he had once seen in her and could not find again. And yet
the knowledge that, within this new and strange chrysalis, it was still
Odette that lurked, still the same volatile temperament, artful and evas-
ive, was enough to keep Swann seeking, with as much passion as ever, to
captivate her. Then he would look at photographs of her, taken two
years before, and would remember how exquisite she had been. And
that would console him, a little, for all the sufferings that he voluntarily
endured on her account.
When the Verdurins took her off to Saint-Germain, or to Chatou, or to
Meulan, as often as not, if the weather was fine, they would propose to
remain there for the night, and not go home until next day. Mme. Ver-
durin would endeavour to set at rest the scruples of the pianist, whose
aunt had remained in Paris: "She will be only too glad to be rid of you for a day. How on earth could she be anxious, when she knows you're with
us? Anyhow, I'll take you all under my wing; she can put the blame on
me."
If this attempt failed, M. Verdurin would set off across country until
he came to a telegraph office or some other kind of messenger, after first
finding out which of the 'faithful' had anyone whom they must warn.
But Odette would thank him, and assure him that she had no message
for anyone, for she had told Swann, once and for all, that she could not
possibly send messages to him, before all those people, without com-
promising herself. Sometimes she would be absent for several days on
end, when the Verdurins took her to see the tombs at Dreux, or to
278
Compiègne, on the painter's advice, to watch the sun setting through the
forest—after which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.
"To think that she could visit really historic buildings with me, who
have spent ten years in the study of architecture, who am constantly
bombarded, by people who really count, to take them over Beauvais or
Saint-Loup-de-Naud, and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of
that she trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded of
creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of Louis-Phil-
ippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs much knowledge of art, I
should say, to do that; though, surely, even without any particularly re-
fined sense of smell, one would not deliberately choose to spend a holi-
day in the latrines, so as to be within range of their fragrant exhalations."
But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds—alas, without al-
lowing him to appear there, as though by accident, at her side, for, as she
said, that would "create a dreadful impression,"—he would plunge into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library, the railway
timetable, from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the af-
ternoon, in the evening, even in the morning. The ways? More than that,
the authority, the right to join her. For, after all, the time-table, and the
trains themselves, were not meant for dogs. If the public were carefully
informed, by means of printed advertisements, that at eight o'clock in the
morning a train started for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that
could only be because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which
permission from Odette would be superfluous; an act, moreover, which
might be performed from a motive altogether different from the desire to
see Odette, since persons who had never even heard of her performed it
daily, and in such numbers as justified the labour and expense of stoking
the engines.
So it came to this; that she could not prevent him from going to Pierre-
fonds if he chose to do so. Now that was precisely what he found that he
did choose to do, and would at that moment be doing were he, like the
travelling public, not acquainted with Odette. For a long time past he
had wanted to form a more definite impression of Viollet-le-Duc's work
as a restorer. And the weather being what it was, he felt an overwhelm-
ing desire to spend the day roaming in the forest of Compiègne.
It was, indeed, a piece of bad luck that she had forbidden him access to
the one spot that tempted him to-day. To-day! Why, if he went down
there, in defiance of her prohibition, he would be able to see her that
very day! But then, whereas, if she had met, at Pierrefonds, some one
who did not matter, she would have hailed him with obvious pleasure:
279
"What, you here?" and would have invited him to come and see her at
the hotel where she was staying with the Verdurins, if, on the other
hand, it was himself, Swann, that she encountered there, she would be
annoyed, would complain that she was being followed, would love him
less in consequence, might even turn away in anger when she caught
sight of him. "So, then, I am not to be allowed to go away for a day any-
where!" she would reproach him on her return, whereas in fact it was he
himself who was not allowed to go.
He had had the sudden idea, so as to contrive to visit Compiègne and
Pierrefonds without letting it be supposed that his object was to meet
Odette, of securing an invitation from one of his friends, the Marquis de
Forestelle, who had a country house in that neighbourhood. This friend,
to whom Swann suggested the plan without disclosing its ulterior pur-
pose, was beside himself with joy; he did not conceal his astonishment at
Swann's consenting at last, after fifteen years, to come down and visit his
property, and since he did not (he told him) wish to stay there, promised
to spend some days, at least, in taking him for walks and excursions in
the district. Swann imagined himself down there already with M. de For-
estelle. Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not succeed in seeing
her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil where, not know-
ing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he
would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her suddenly ap-
pearing: in the courtyard of the Château, now beautiful in his eyes since
it was on her account that he had gone to visit it; in all the streets of the
town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest,
roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset;—innumerable and
alternative hiding-places, to which would fly simultaneously for refuge,
in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided
heart. "We mustn't, on any account," he would warn M. de Forestelle,
"run across Odette and the Verdurins. I have just heard that they are at
Pierrefonds, of all places, to-day. One has plenty of time to see them in
Paris; it would hardly be worth while coming down here if one couldn't
go a yard without meeting them." And his host would fail to understand
why, once they had reached the place, Swann would change his plans
twenty times in an hour, inspect the dining-rooms of all the hotels in
Compiègne without being able to make up his mind to settle down in
any of them, although he had found no trace anywhere of the Verdurins,
seeming to be in search of what he had claimed to be most anxious to
avoid, and would in fact avoid, the moment he found it, for if he had
come upon the little 'group,' he would have hastened away at once with
280
studied indifference, satisfied that he had seen Odette and she him, espe-
cially that she had seen him when he was not, apparently, thinking about
her. But no; she would guess at once that it was for her sake that he had
come there. And when M. de Forestelle came to fetch him, and it was
time to start, he excused himself: "No, I'm afraid not; I can't go to
Pierrefonds to-day. You see, Odette is there." And Swann was happy in
spite of everything in feeling that if he, alone among mortals, had not the
right to go to Pierrefonds tha