absolute, the reason for this new pleasure which Swann was tasting was
that he could emigrate for a moment into those few and distant parts of
himself which had remained almost foreign to his love and to his pain. In
this respect the personality, with which my great-aunt endowed him, of
'young Swann,' as distinct from the more individual personality of
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Charles Swann, was that in which he now most delighted. Once when,
because it was the birthday of the Princesse de Parme (and because she
could often be of use, indirectly, to Odette, by letting her have seats for
galas and jubilees and all that sort of thing), he had decided to send her a
basket of fruit, and was not quite sure where or how to order it, he had
entrusted the task to a cousin of his mother who, delighted to be doing a
commission for him, had written to him, laying stress on the fact that she
had not chosen all the fruit at the same place, but the grapes from Cra-
pote, whose speciality they were, the straw berries from Jauret, the pears
from Chevet, who always had the best, am soon, "every fruit visited and
examined, one by one, by myself." And ii the sequel, by the cordiality
with which the Princess thanked him, hi had been able to judge of the
flavour of the strawberries and of the ripe ness of the pears. But, most of
all, that "every fruit visited and examinee one by one, by myself" had brought balm to his sufferings by carrying hi mind off to a region which
he rarely visited, although it was his by right, as the heir of a rich and
respectable middle-class family in which had been handed down from
generation to generation the knowledge of the 'right places' and the art
of ordering things from shops.
Of a truth, he had too long forgotten that he was 'young Swann' not to
feel, when he assumed that part again for a moment, a keener pleasure
than he was capable of feeling at other times—when, indeed, he was
grown sick of pleasure; and if the friendliness of the middle-class people,
for whom he had never been anything else than 'young Swann,' was less
animated than that of the aristocrats (though more flattering, for all that,
since in the middle-class mind friendship is inseparable from respect), no
letter from a Royal Personage, offering him some princely entertainment,
could ever be so attractive to Swann as the letter which asked him to be a
witness, or merely to be present at a wedding in the family of some old
friends of his parents; some of whom had 'kept up' with him, like my
grandfather, who, the year before these events, had invited him to my
mother's wedding, while others barely knew him by sight, but were,
they thought, in duty bound to shew civility to the son, to the worthy
successor of the late M. Swann.
But, by virtue of his intimacy, already time-honoured, with so many of
them, the people of fashion, in a certain sense, were also a part of his
house, his service, and his family. He felt, when his mind dwelt upon his
brilliant connections, the same external support, the same solid comfort
as when he looked at the fine estate, the fine silver, the fine table-linen
which had come down to him from his forebears. And the thought that,
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if he were seized by a sudden illness and confined to the house, the
people whom his valet would instinctively run to find would be the Duc
de Chartres, the Prince de Reuss, the Duc de Luxembourg and the Baron
de Charlus, brought him the same consolation as our old Françoise de-
rived from the knowledge that she would, one day, be buried in her own
fine clothes, marked with her name, not darned at all (or so exquisitely
darned that it merely enhanced one's idea of the skill and patience of the
seamstress), a shroud from the constant image of which in her mind's
eye she drew a certain satisfactory sense, if not actually of wealth and
prosperity, at any rate of self-esteem. But most of all,—since in every one
of his actions and thoughts which had reference to Odette, Swann was
constantly subdued and swayed by the unconfessed feeling that he was,
perhaps not less dear, but at least less welcome to her than anyone, even
the most wearisome of the Verdurins' 'faithful,'—when he betook himself
to a world in which he was the paramount example of taste, a man
whom no pains were spared to attract, whom people were genuinely
sorry not to see, he began once again to believe in the existence of a hap-
pier life, almost to feel an appetite for it, as an invalid may feel who has
been in bed for months and on a strict diet, when he picks up a newspa-
per and reads the account of an official banquet or the advertisement of a
cruise round Sicily.
If he was obliged to make excuses to his fashionable friends for not
paying them visits, it was precisely for the visits that he did pay her that
he sought to excuse himself to Odette. He still paid them (asking himself
at the end of each month whether, seeing that he had perhaps exhausted
her patience, and had certainly gone rather often to see her, it would be
enough if he sent her four thousand francs), and for each visit he found a
pretext, a present that he had to bring her, some information which she
required, M. de Charlus, whom he had met actually going to her house,
and who had insisted upon Swann's accompanying him. And, failing
any excuse, he would beg M. de Charlus to go to her at once, and to tell
her, as though spontaneously, in the course of conversation, that he had
just remembered something that he had to say to Swann, and would she
please send a message to Swann's house asking him to come to her then
and there; but as a rule Swann waited at home in vain, and M. de
Charlus informed him, later in the evening, that his device had not
proved successful. With the result that, if she was now frequently away
from Paris, even when she was there he scarcely saw her; that she who,
when she was in love with him, used to say, "I am always free" and
"What can it matter to me, what other people think?" now, whenever he 296
wanted to see her, appealed to the proprieties or pleaded some engage-
ment. When he spoke of going to a charity entertainment, or a private
view, or a first-night at which she was to be present, she would expostu-
late that he wished to advertise their relations in public, that he was
treating her like a woman off the streets. Things came to such a pitch
that, in an effort to save himself from being altogether forbidden to meet
her anywhere, Swann, remembering that she knew and was deeply at-
tached to my great-uncle Adolphe, whose friend he himself also had
been, went one day to see him in his little flat in the Rue de Bellechasse,
to ask him to use his influence with Odette. As it happened, she invari-
ably adopted, when she spoke to Swann about my uncle, a poetical tone,
saying: "Ah, he! He is not in the least like you; it is an exquisite thing, a great, a beautiful thing, his friendship for me. He's not the sort of man
who would have so little consideration for me as to let himself be seen
with me everywhere in public." This was embarrassing for Swann, who
did not know quite to what rhetorical pitch he should screw himself up
in speaking of Odette to my uncle. He began by alluding to her excel-
lence, a priori, the axiom of her seraphic super-humanity, the revelation of her inexpressible virtues, no conception of which could possibly be
formed. "I should like to speak to you about her," he went on, "you, who know what a woman supreme above all women, what an adorable being, what an angel Odette is. But you know, also, what life is in Paris.
Everyone doesn't see Odette in the light in which you and I have been
Privileged to see her. And so there are people who think that I am behav-
ing rather foolishly; she won't even allow me to meet her out of doors, at
the theatre. Now you, in whom she has such enormous confidence,
couldn't you say a few words for me to her, just to assure her that she ex-
aggerate the harm which my bowing to her in the street might do her?"
My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which
she would love him all the more; he advised Odette to let Swann meet
he; everywhere, and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told
Swann that she had just had a rude awakening; she had discovered that
my uncle was the same as other men; he had tried to take her by assault.
She calmed Swann, who, at first, was for rushing out to challenge my
uncle to a duel, but he refused to shake hands with him when they met
again. He regretted this rupture all the more because he had hoped, if he
had met my uncle Adolphe again sometimes and had contrived to talk
things over with him in strict confidence, to be able to get him to throw a
light on certain rumours with regard to the life that Odette had led, in
the old days, at Nice. For my uncle Adolphe used to spend the winter
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there, and Swann thought that it might indeed have been there, perhaps,
that he had first known Odette. The few words which some one had let
fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been Odette's lov-
er, had left Swann dumb foundered. But the very things which he
would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to learn
and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them, incorpor-
ated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted them, he
could no longer have understood their not existing. Only, each one of
them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the picture that he
had formed of his mistress. At one time indeed he felt that he could un-
derstand that this moral 'lightness,' of which he would never have sus-
pected Odette, was perfectly well known, and that at Baden or Nice,
when she had gone, in the past, to spend several months in one or the
other place, she had enjoyed a sort of amorous notoriety. He attempted,
in order to question them, to get into touch again with certain men of
that stamp; but these were aware that he knew Odette, and, besides, he
was afraid of putting the thought of her into their heads, of setting them
once more upon her track. But he, to whom, up till then, nothing could
have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life
of Baden or of Nice, now that he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a
'gay' life once in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find out
whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to
himself, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might,
at any moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish,
blinded and dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in
which had been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's
Septennat, in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais,
the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a
sad but splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and
he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant de-
tails that made up the daily round on the Côte d'Azur in those days, if it
could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in
the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the aes-
thete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence,
so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair
Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He would sit, often, without saying a
word to her, only gazing at her and dreaming; and she would comment:
"You do look sad!" It was not very long since, from the idea that she was an excellent creature, comparable to the best women that he had known,
he had passed to that of her being 'kept'; and yet already, by an inverse
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process, he had returned from the Odette de Crécy, perhaps too well
known to the holiday-makers, to the 'ladies' men' of Nice and Baden, to
this face, the expression on which was so often gentle, to this nature so
eminently human. He would ask himself: "What does it mean, after all,
to say that everyone at Nice knows who Odette de Crécy is? Reputations
of that sort, even when they're true, are always based upon other
people's ideas"; he would reflect that this legend—even if it were authen-
tic—was something external to Odette, was not inherent in her like a
mischievous and ineradicable personality; that the creature who might
have been led astray was a woman with frank eyes, a heart full of pity
for the sufferings of others, a docile body which he had pressed tightly in
his arms and explored with his fingers, a woman of whom he might one
day come into absolute possession if he succeeded in making himself in-
dispensable to her. There she was, often tired, her face left blank for the
nonce by that eager, feverish preoccupation with the unknown things
which made Swann suffer; she would push back her hair with both
hands; her forehead, her whole face would seem to grow larger; then,
suddenly, some ordinary human thought, some worthy sentiment such
as is to be found in all creatures when, in a moment of rest or meditation,
they are free to express themselves, would flash out from her eyes like a
ray of gold. And immediately the whole of her face would light up like a
grey landscape, swathed in clouds which, suddenly, are swept away and
the dull scene transfigured, at the moment of the sun's setting. The life
which occupied Odette at such times, even the future which she seemed
to be dreamily regarding, Swann could have shared with her. No evil
disturbance seemed to have left any effect on them. Rare as they became,
those moments did not occur in vain. By the process of memory, Swann
joined the fragments together, abolished the intervals between them,
cast, as in molten gold, the image of an Odette compact of kindness and
tranquillity, for whom he was to make, later on (as we shall see in the
second part of this story) sacrifices which the other Odette would never
have won from him. But how rare those moments were, and how seldom
he now saw her! Even in regard to their evening meetings, she would
never tell him until the last minute whether she would be able to see
him, for, reckoning on his being always free, she wished first to be cer-
tain that no one else would offer to come to her. She would plead that
she was obliged to wait for an answer which was of the very greatest im-
portance, and if, even after she had made Swann come to her house, any
of her friends asked her, half-way through the evening, to join them at
some theatre, or at supper afterwards, she would jump for joy and dress
299
herself with all speed. As her toilet progressed, every movement that she
made brought Swann nearer to the moment when he would have to part
from her, when she would fly off with irresistible force; and when at
length she was ready, and, Plunging into her mirror a last glance
strained and brightened by her anxiety to look well, smeared a little
salve on her lips, fixed a stray loci of hair over her brow, and called for
her cloak of sky-blue silk with golden tassels, Swann would be looking
so wretched that she would be unable to restrain a gesture of impatience
as she flung at him: "So that is how you thank me for keeping you here
till the last minute! And I thought I was being so nice to you. Well, I shall
know better another time!" Sometime … at the risk of annoying her, he
made up his mind that he would find out where she had gone, and even
dreamed of a defensive alliance with Forcheville, who might perhaps
have been able to tell him. But anyhow, when he knew with whom she
was spending the evening, it was very seldom that he could not discov-
er, among all his innumerable acquaintance, some one who knew—if
only indirectly—the man with whom she had gone out, and could easily
obtain this or that piece of information about him. And while he was
writing to one of his friends, asking him to try to get a little light thrown
upon some point or other, he would feel a sense of relief on ceasing to
vex himself with questions to which there was no answer and transfer-
ring to some one else the strain of interrogation. It is true that Swann was
little the wiser for such information as he did receive. To know a thing
does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the
things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our
minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the
illusion of a sort of power to control them. He was quite happy whenev-
er M. de Charlus was with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus
and her nothing untoward could ever happen, that when M. de Charlus
went anywhere with her, it was out of friendship for himself, and that he
would make no difficulty about telling him everything that she had
done. Sometimes she had declared so emphatically to Swann that it was
impossible for him to see her on a particular evening, she seemed to be
looking forward so keenly to some outing, that Swann attached a very
real importance to the fact that M. de Charlus was free to accompany
her. Next day, without daring to put many questions to M. de Charlus,
he would force him, by appearing not quite to understand his first an-
swers, to give him more, after each of which he would feel himself in-
creasingly relieved, for he very soon learned that Odette had spent her
evening in the most innocent of dissipations.
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"But what do you mean, my dear Mémé, I don't quite understand… .
You didn't go straight from her house to the Musée Grévin? Surely you
went somewhere else first? No? That is very odd! You don't know how
amusing you are, my dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on
to the Chat Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours?
That's strange. After all, it wasn't a bad idea; she must have known
dozens of people there? No? She never spoke to a soul? How extraordin-
ary! Then you sat there like that, just you and she, all by yourselves? I
can picture you, sitting there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Mémé;
I'm exceedingly fond of you."
Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so often happened,
when talking to friends who knew nothing of his love, friends to whom
he hardly listened, to hear certain detached sentences (as, for instance, "I saw Mme. de Crécy yesterday; she was with a man I didn't know."), sentences which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a solid state,
grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him as they lay there irre-
movable,—how charming, by way of contrast, were the words: "She
didn't know a soul; she never spoke to a soul." How freely they coursed
through him, how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to breathe!
And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette must find
him very dull if those were the pleasures that she preferred to his com-
pany. And their very insignificance, though it reassured him, pained him
as if her enjoyment of them had been an act of treachery.
Even when he could not discover where she had gone, it would have
sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then felt, for which Odette's pres-
ence, the charm of her company, was the sole specific (a specific which in
the long run served, like many other remedies, to aggravate the disease,
but at least brought temporary relief to his sufferings), it would have suf-
ficed, had Odette only permitted him to remain in her house while she
was out, to wait there until that hour of her return, into whose stillness
and peace would flow, to be mingled and lost there, all memory of those
intervening hours which some sorcery, some cursed spell had made him
imagine as, somehow, different from the rest. But she would not; he
must return home; he forced himself, on the way, to form various plans,
ceased to think of Odette; he even reached the stage, while he undressed,
of turning over all sorts of happy ideas in his mind: it was with a light
heart, buoyed with the anticipation of going to see some favourite work
of art on the morrow, that he jumped into bed and turned out the light;
but no sooner had he made himself ready to sleep, relaxing a self-control
of which he was not even conscious, so habitual had it become, than an
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icy shudder convulsed his body and he burst into sobs. He did not wish
to know why, but dried his eyes, saying with a smile: "This is delightful; I'm becoming neurasthenic." After which he could not save himself from
utter exhaustion at the thought that, next day, he must begin afresh his
attempt to find out what Odette had been doing, must use all his influ-
ence to contrive to see her. This compulsion to an activity without res-
pite, without variety, without result, was so cruel a scourge that one day,
noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that
he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not
concern himself with anything further, that it was his malady which was
going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant
end. If indeed, at this period, it often happened that, though without ad-
mitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape
not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of
his struggle.
And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no
longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when
at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone
to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of
Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was in
love with some one else would distract his mind from the question of
Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new develop-
ments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little time to
have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even days when
he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was cured.
But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place the same
pain, a sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were, diluted in the
torrent of different impressions. But it had not stirred from its place.
Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had awakened him.
Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly im-
portant matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he
had lived long enough in the world to know that such matters are never
anything else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time
the effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he
would pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might
have wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There
emerged, however, from this unexplored tract, certain occupations
which reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with
some obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch
as they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning
302
as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the ne-
cessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which she
referred, from time to time, to "the day when I go with my friend to the
Hippodrome," if, when he felt unwell and had thought, "Perhaps Odette would be kind and come to see me," he remembered, suddenly, that it
was one of those very days, he would correct himself with an "Oh, no!
It's not worth while asking her to come; I should have thought of it be-
fore, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the Hippodrome.
We must confine ourselves to what is possible; no use wasting our time
in proposing things that can't be accepted and are declined in advance."
And this duty that was incumbent upon Odette, of going to the Hippo-
drome, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely
ineluctable in itself; but the mark of necessity which stamped it seemed
to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely con-
nected with it. If, when Odette, in the street, had acknowledged the sa-
lute of a passer-by, which had aroused Swann's jealousy, she replied to
his questions by associating the stranger with any of the two or three
paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him; if, for