Swann's Way, page 25
“Well, if you say so,” bantered Odette, adding, “You know I’m not fishing for compliments” (the last three words she spoke in English).
“Well, all right then, bring your friend along, if he’s nice!”
The “little set” of the Verdurins had no connection with the social strata in which Swann moved; and true-blue men of fashion would not have seen the point of gaining an introduction to the Verdurins’ circle while enjoying such an exalted position as his. But Swann was such a lover of women that, once he had met wellnigh every lady who belonged to the aristocracy and reached the conclusion that he had nothing more to learn from any of them, he came to see the naturalisation certificate, the patent of nobility, as it were, bestowed upon him by the high society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain as a mere currency or letter of credit, that is as something quite devoid of value in itself but which enabled him to enjoy a temporary position of privilege in some backwater of a country-town or an undistinguished Parisian circle, while he pursued the daughter of the local squire, or of the town clerk, who had caught his roving eye. For the desire, or the love, that he felt at such times, roused in him the sort of vanity which, though he had by now outgrown it in everyday intercourse, may well have been what had originally spurred him towards the fashionable life of frittering away one’s intellectual gifts in frivolous pastimes and exploiting one’s artistic erudition only to advise society ladies on paintings to buy and furnishings for their town houses; and it was this vanity which made him want to dazzle any new lady friend whom he fancied with a form of glamour that was not implicit in the unadorned name of Swann. This desire was particularly potent if the new lady friend was of humble extraction. In the same way as a man of intelligence will have no fear of appearing stupid to another man of intelligence, the man with pretensions to elegance will have no fear of his elegance going unrecognised by a great lord, but by an uncouth bumpkin. Since the beginning of time, three-quarters of all the wit displayed and of all the lies told out of vanity by people who in doing so have only belittled themselves, have been designed to impress social inferiors. Swann, who could be natural and casual with a duchess, would show off for the eyes of a housemaid and cringe at the thought of being despised by her.
Unlike so many people who, out of laziness or from a resigned appreciation of the duty laid upon them by their exalted social position (to stay moored for ever at the same berth, forgo until the day they die any pleasures which life brings their way from beyond the social territory within which they exist, and be eventually content to see the mediocre entertainments it offers, and its not intolerable tedium, as real pleasures, once they have become accustomed to them and realised they are all it has to offer) Swann never tried to convince himself that the women with whom he spent his days were pretty, but contrived instead to spend his days with women he knew were pretty. The latter were often women whose beauty was of a somewhat vulgar stamp, since the physical attributes unwittingly sought after by Swann were the antithesis of those which he admired in the women painted or sculptured by his favourite artists. His sensuality, which could be dampened by a soulful expression of melancholy or gravity, was aroused by women whose beauty was lustier, more robust and voluptuous.
If he was travelling and happened to meet a family which should have been unworthy of a gentleman’s attention, but which numbered among its members a woman whose unfamiliar beauty charmed his eye, it would have seemed to him that to adopt an attitude of dignified reserve and deny the desire she inspired in him, to replace the pleasure he might have enjoyed with her by a different sort of pleasure, by writing to a former mistress to come and join him, would have been as callow an abdication in the face of life, as senseless a reluctance to experience untasted joys, as if, instead of looking at the new scenery all about him, he were to closet himself in his hotel room and look at postcards of Paris. The edifice of his social contacts was not a closed house, but, so that he could set it up on a new ad hoc basis wherever he found an attractive woman, was more like one of those collapsible tents that explorers have in their travelling baggage. As for anything in that edifice that was not portable or negotiable in exchange for new forms of pleasure, he would have given it away, however valuable it might have seemed to other people. Many a time, as a starving man might swap a diamond for a crust of bread, he had thrown away the high esteem in which he was held by a duchess (who might have longed for years to do him a favour but had never found the right opportunity) by asking her in a tactless telegram from the country for a recommendation, by return cable, which he could use to make the immediate acquaintance of one of her stewards whose daughter had just taken his fancy. Looking back on this sort of escapade, he would even find it amusing, for there was in him, albeit redeemed by rare instances of consideration for others, a fund of boorishness. In addition to which, he was one of those men of intelligence who, having spent their days in total idleness, seek comfort and possibly an excuse for themselves in the notion that such a state of idleness presents their intelligence with food for thought every bit as nourishing as that to be found in the arts or scholarship, and that “Life” offers situations that are more interesting and more novel-like than any novel. At any rate, so he said; and he was easily believed by the most refined men in his social circle, in particular by the Baron de Charlus, whom he enjoyed regaling with racy selections from his amorous adventures—such as the occasion in a train when he had struck up acquaintance with a woman who, having gone back with him to his house, turned out to be none other than the sister of the monarch who at that moment held the tangled threads of European politics in his grasp, on which Swann was thus afforded the most delightful source of inside information; or the other time when the complication of circumstance was such that it depended on the choice about to be made by the Sacred College whether he would succeed in sleeping with somebody’s cook.
Nor was it only the brilliant company of virtuous dowagers, generals and academicians with whom he was intimately acquainted that Swann so cynically forced to act as his pimps. Every single one of his friends was accustomed to receiving periodic letters in which a recommendation or a word of introduction was begged by Swann with refinements of diplomacy which, by their persistence through a succession of different amours and pretexts, bore witness better than any flagrant faux pas of the pen to a permanent characteristic of his and to the constancy of his aims. Many years after these events, when I began to take an interest in his character, because of certain similarities, of a completely different variety, that it had with my own, I was often told that whenever he wrote to my grandfather (who at that time, actually, was not yet my grandfather, Swann’s great liaison, which was to interrupt such goings-on for a long time, only beginning about the time of my own birth) his handwriting on the envelope would be recognised and the cry would go up: “What do you bet this is Swann asking a favour? On guard!” And my grandparents, acting either on suspicion of his motives or on the unwittingly diabolical impulse which makes one offer something only to those who have no desire for it, would turn a stone-deaf ear to any of Swann’s entreaties, even to the ones which it would have been a simple matter to satisfy, such as his request to be introduced to a certain girl who dined with them on Sundays, which meant that whenever Swann broached the subject they had to pretend to have lost touch with her, although they would wonder from one week’s end to the next who on earth they could invite to dinner with her and, rather than ask the one person who would have been delighted to come, often did not manage to think of anyone.
There would be times when some married couple, friends of my grandparents, after having complained for a long time that they never saw anything of Swann, would announce with a satisfied air and just possibly the aim of inspiring envy of their good fortune, that he had of late been behaving with great charm towards them and never tired of their company. My grandfather had no desire to spoil their enjoyment; but he would glance at his wife and hum:
“What mystery is this?
I understand it not,”
or:
“Fleeting vision . . .”
or else:
“’Tis best, in matters so sly,
To turn a blind eye.”
Then, several months later, if my grandfather happened to ask Swann’s new-found friend: “Well, are you and Swann still as thick as thieves?” the other person’s face would fall: “Oh, please, don’t mention that man’s name!”
“But I thought you were such good friends.”
Swann had been intimate in this way with a married cousin of my grandmother, turning up to dine with her and her husband almost every day of the week. Then suddenly, without sending any apology, he stopped coming. They thought he must have been taken ill, and my grandmother’s cousin was about to send round to ask after his health when one day in the pantry she happened on a letter from him that had been inadvertently left inside her cook’s account-book—it was Swann’s announcement to the servant that he was leaving Paris and could not see her again. She had been his mistress and when the time came for him to jilt her he had not seen fit to inform anyone else of his movements.
If, however, his current mistress happened to be a lady, or at least a woman who was not prevented from appearing with him in public by humble status or dubious reputation, then for her sake he would go back into society, but only into the restricted sphere in which she herself moved or into which he had introduced her. People would say, “It’s pointless to expect Swann to drop in tonight. It’s his American girl-friend’s day for the Opera, don’t you know.” He would have her invited to the exclusive salons whose doors were always open to him, where he dined weekly or was a regular player of poker; each evening, the bright green glint of his eyes attenuated by the slight curl put into his ginger bristle of hair, he would select a flower for his buttonhole and go out to meet his mistress at the dinner-table of one or other of the women who belonged to his set; and at the thought of the admiration and friendliness soon to be lavished on him, in the presence of the woman he loved, by all these fashionable people for whom he could do no wrong, he could see once again the old charm of the social round to which he had become indifferent but which, now that it contained his latest love, seemed to be made of some material of priceless beauty, shot through with the cosy flickering glow of a secret flame.
However, in contrast to these major affairs, or even to his briefer dalliances, each of which had been the more or less complete fulfilment of a dream inspired by the sight of a certain face or body which Swann, quite spontaneously and without having to make any effort, had found attractive, the fact was that when he was introduced to Odette de Crécy one day at the theatre by an old friend of his who had referred to her as a lovely creature who might not be averse to his advances, managing to imply that she was more virtuous than she in fact was (so as to appear to be doing Swann a great favour by introducing him to her), she had struck Swann not as lacking in beauty but rather as having a style of beauty that left him indifferent, that gave him no pang of desire for her but actually inspired in him something verging on physical repulsion. The category of women to which she belonged will be familiar to all men, each of whom could no doubt put a different name to the individuals of his own acquaintance who have in common the fact that they are the opposite of the type which appeals to his sensuality. Her profile was too pronounced for Swann’s taste, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too prominent, her features too drawn. She had fine eyes, but they were so large that they drooped with their own bulk, tiring out the rest of her face and giving her the constant appearance of being out of sorts or in a bad mood. Some time after their introduction at the theatre, she had written to him asking to see his art collections, which fascinated her because “although just an ignorant woman, she was fond of pretty things,” and saying that she felt she would get to know him better once she had seen him “at home” where she imagined him “all cosy, with his cup of tea and his books,” although she did not conceal her surprise at learning he lived in the old Quai d’Orléans quarter, which she felt must be so dismal and was “so un-chic for a man who was so very chic.” Then, after her first visit to his house, she told him as she took her leave how sorry she was to have spent such a short time in a house that she had been so glad to enter, and referred to Swann himself in a way that suggested he meant more to her than the other people she knew, making him smile at the implication of some romantic bond between their two selves. Swann was already approaching that age of disenchantment when one has learned to enjoy being in love for the sake of being in love and not to expect too much in return, when the feeling of closeness to someone else, though it may no longer be, as it was in early youth, the one essential aim of love, nevertheless remains linked to love through an association of ideas that is so strong that this feeling of closeness may even become the cause of one’s love, if it arises before love. In early life, a man yearns to win the heart of the woman with whom he has fallen in love; later in life, the knowledge that he has won a woman’s heart can be enough to make him fall in love with her. Thus, at an age when it would appear (since what one seeks above all in love is a subjective pleasure) that one’s taste for a certain woman’s beauty should motivate in large measure the love one feels for her, that same love can arise, and exist at the most carnal level, without ever having been preceded by any desire for her. At that stage of life, one has already experienced several bouts of love; it no longer goes through its spontaneous evolution, in accordance with its own fateful mysterious laws, in the presence of one’s astonished and passive heart. One helps it along, tampering with its progress through memory or suggestion; one recognises a single symptom of it, and remembers or recreates the rest. It is a melody we know by heart, imprinted in us in its entirety, and one has no need to be reminded by a woman of its opening notes—with their admiration for her beauty—in order to recall how it goes on. And if she starts in the middle of it, at the point where two hearts are feeling closer, where one begins to speak of being unable to go on existing without each other, then the tune is familiar enough for us to be able to join in with her at the right bar.
Odette de Crécy went back to Swann’s house, then took to visiting him more frequently; no doubt each of these visits revived his disappointment at seeing this face, the special features of which he had slightly misremembered over the intervening days and which surprised him by being so expressive and yet, for all its youthfulness, so lacklustre; and as she sat there chatting with him he regretted that her great beauty was not of the sort he would have instinctively preferred. It must be added that Odette’s face seemed thinner and more prominent of feature than it was, because the usually clear open surfaces of the forehead and the upper parts of her cheeks were hidden under the masses of hair which were popular then, bunched forward in “frizettes,” swept up into waves or cascading in loose ringlets about the ears; and as for her figure, which was pleasing and shapely, it was difficult to see it as a coherent entity because of the fashions in vogue at that time—and despite the fact that she was one of the best dressed women in Paris—the cuirasse bodice jutting out, as though above an imaginary abdomen, then tapering down to a sudden point, and those double skirts and bustles swelling like a balloon underneath, all giving women the appearance of being assembled out of different pieces that had been badly fitted together; while the gathered ruches, the flounces and vest bodice, depending on the vagaries of the design or the texture of the different materials, followed lines which led to the bows, the froth of a lace ruff and the perpendicular fringes of jet, or else traced down the contours of the stays, but never related to the living body inside, which, depending on whether the architecture of all these frills and furbelows coincided with its own shape or departed from it, was either strait-jacketed by them or irretrievably lost from sight.
But whenever Odette had taken her leave, Swann would smile at the memory of how she had said the days would pass slowly until he asked her back again; and he remembered how she had once begged him to let it be soon, the shy worried air she had and the awed supplication in her stare as she spoke to him, which made her look so touching under the posy of artificial pansies on the front of her round white straw-hat with its black velvet strings.
“And what about you?” she had asked. “Couldn’t you come and have tea with me one day?”
He had pleaded pressure of work, a study of Vermeer of Delft (actually abandoned years before) and she had replied, “I daresay I’d be quite useless, a puny creature like me, alongside an eminent scholar like you. It’d be like that fable of the frog and the wise men! But I really would love to learn, to acquire knowledge, to be initiated. How jolly it must be to spend your time swotting things up, with your nose always in musty old papers!” (This last she had added with the self-satisfied air of the elegant lady maintaining that she likes nothing better than getting her hands dirty doing the messy jobs about the house, like “lending a hand in the kitchen.”) “You’ll probably tease me about this. But I’ve never heard of this painter chap that keeps you away from me”—she meant Vermeer—“Is he still alive? Are there any of his things to be seen in Paris, I wonder? Because I’d like to get an idea of what it is you’re fond of and work out what’s going on behind that great wide brow of yours that’s always so preoccupied. All those cogitations that are always going on inside that head! Just to be able to think: ‘Yes, that’s what he must be thinking about right now!’ How marvellous it would be to be able to share in your work!” He had pleaded a reluctance to form new relationships and what he called, out of flirtatious politeness, his fear of being hurt.
“What! You’re afraid of forming an affection! Oh, that’s funny! Here am I, looking for nothing else in life. Why, I’d give my life to find a true one!” she said in a tone of such unaffected conviction that he had been touched by it. “You must have had your heart broken by a woman. And now you assume they’re all the same. But she can’t have understood you. Because you’re so different. That’s what I liked about you from the beginning—I sensed straight away that you weren’t like everybody else.”
