Swann in Love E-Book

Marcel Proust

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 414

Beschreibung

Stunning deluxe edition of the standalone novella from Proust's great masterpiece, in a new translation 'Surely the greatest novelist of the 20th century' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH When Charles Swann first lays eyes on Odette de Crécy, he is indifferent to her beauty. Their paths continue to cross in the drawing rooms and theatres of Parisian high society, and the seeds of desire in Swann begin to flourish. What follows is a journey through self-delusion, jealousy and delirious fantasy, which will take Swann far from the sedate comfort of his society life. A standalone novella from Proust's monumental masterpiece, Swann in Love is a sublimely witty and poignant story of the illusions of love and desire. Full of the rich social satire and penetrating insight that distinguish Proust's style, it is the perfect introduction to one of the world's great novelists.

Leseprobe

‘Lucy Raitz’s new translation for Pushkin Press is elegantly produced and a good amusebouche for those not ready for the full banquet’

WASHINGTON POST  

‘Proust was the greatest novelist of the 20th century, just as Tolstoy was in the 19th’

GRAHAM GREENE  

‘Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!’

VIRGINIA WOOLF

SWANN IN LOVE

MARCEL PROUST

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LUCY RAITZ

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

Contents

Title PageSwann in LoveNotesCopyright

SWANN IN LOVE

Swann in Love

In order to belong to the ‘inner circle’, ‘the little group’, ‘the little clan’ of the Verdurins, there was only one condition, but a vital one: to tacitly agree to a credo by which, among other tenets, the young pianist, who was Madame Verdurin’s protégé that year and who, in her words, ‘could play Wagner in a way that just shouldn’t be allowed’, was head and shoulders above Planté and Rubinstein1 and that Doctor Cottard was a better diagnostician than Potain.2 Any ‘new recruits’ who weren’t convinced when the Verdurins declared the evening parties given by people who didn’t come to theirs to be as dreary as a wet weekend found themselves immediately excluded. Since women were in this respect less inclined than men to put aside any interest in other social circles and any desire to decide for themselves how pleasant other salons might be, and since the Verdurins were fearful, too, that this spirit of enquiry and devilish frivolity could prove contagious and ultimately fatal for the right-thinking of their little church, they had found themselves obliged to reject all their female congregants, one by one.

That year, apart from the doctor’s young wife, and despite the fact that Madame Verdurin herself was a virtuous wife from a respectable and extremely rich bourgeois family whom nobody had ever heard of and with whom she had slowly but successfully ceased all contact, they were down to a young woman who was almost a demi-mondaine,3 Madame de Crécy, whom Madame Verdurin called by her Christian name, Odette, and professed to be ‘a darling’, and the pianist’s aunt, who had almost certainly been a concierge: two people who knew nothing of society and who were naive enough to accept without demur that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes had to pay unfortunate people to make up the numbers at their dinner parties, so much so that if they had been offered the chance of an invitation to visit either of these great ladies, the former concierge and the cocotte would have refused, disdainfully.

At the Verdurins’ you weren’t invited to dinner: your place was always laid. There was no programme for the evening. The young pianist would play, but only if he felt like it, because no one was forced to do anything and, as Monsieur Verdurin liked to say: ‘Friends first, good fellowship forever!’ If the pianist wanted to play the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ or the prelude from Tristan, Madame Verdurin would protest, not that she didn’t like the music, but that, on the contrary, she was too stirred by it. ‘So you really want me to have one of my migraines? You know that it’s the same every time he plays that. I know what’s in store for me! Tomorrow, when I want to get up, curtains! There will be no little me!’ If he didn’t play, then people chatted and one of their friends, most often their favourite painter of the day, would, to quote Monsieur Verdurin, ‘spin some yarn that sent everyone into hysterics’, Madame Verdurin especially, who—accustomed as she was to taking the imaginative descriptions of her emotions to their literal conclusion—had to appeal one day to Cottard (then an inexperienced young doctor) to put back the jaw which she had dislocated through excess of mirth.

Dinner jackets were taboo as everyone was a ‘pal’ and no one wanted to be like the ‘bores’ whom they avoided like the plague and who were only invited to the big formal parties, held as seldom as possible and only if they might amuse the painter or get the musician noticed. The rest of the time, people were happy to play charades or don fancy dress, but as an intimate group, with no strangers brought into the ‘inner circle’.

But, little by little, as the ‘pals’ had become ever more important in Madame Verdurin’s life, the bores, the pariahs became anyone or anything keeping these friends from her, whatever would sometimes stop them being free, whether it were for one their mother, for another their profession, or for a third their country house or ill health. If Doctor Cottard felt duty bound to leave as soon as dinner was over to return to an urgent case, Madame Verdurin would tell him: ‘Who knows, it might be much better for him if you didn’t disturb him this evening; he’ll have a good night’s sleep without you; tomorrow morning you’ll go over early and find him cured.’ From early December, she was beside herself at the thought of her flock crying off for Christmas Day or the New Year. The pianist’s aunt was adamant that he should come to dinner with the family that day at her mother’s.

‘Will it really kill your mother,’ Madame Verdurin exclaimed, harshly, ‘if you don’t dine with her on New Year’s Day, like someone from the provinces!’

Her anxiety returned as Easter drew near:

‘You, Doctor, a scientist, a free-thinker, surely you’ll come on Good Friday, like any other day?’ she said to Cottard the first year, in a confident tone that brooked no refusal. But she trembled as she waited for him to reply, for had he not come, she might have found herself alone.

‘I’ll come on Good Friday… to make my farewells, as we’re spending the Easter holidays in Auvergne.’

‘In Auvergne? In some flea-ridden spot? Much good may it do you!’

And, after a pause:

‘If only you had told us, we could have organized something and made the trip together, in comfort.’

Similarly, if one of the flock had made a friend, or had begun a relationship that might make them ‘bail out’ sometimes, the Verdurins, who had nothing against a woman having a lover so long as she had him in their company, loved him as one of them and didn’t prefer him to them, would say: ‘Well, bring your friend along.’ And he was accepted, on probation, while they considered whether he were capable of having no secrets from Madame Verdurin, and were worthy of belonging to the ‘little clan’. If not, the clan member who had introduced him was taken to one side and kindly helped to fall out with his friend or mistress. Conversely, all being well, the ‘new one’ joined the flock too. And so, when that year the demi-mondaine told Monsieur Verdurin that she had made the acquaintance of a charming man, Monsieur Swann, and hinted that the latter would be very happy to be received by them, Monsieur Verdurin immediately relayed the request to his wife (whose opinions always dictated his own and whose wishes it was his duty to carry out with the greatest efficiency, along with those of the rest of the flock).

‘Madame de Crécy here has something to ask you. She would like to introduce one of her friends to you, Monsieur Swann. What do you think?’

‘Well really, how can one refuse anything to a little piece of perfection like that? No, don’t protest, no one’s asking you. I’m telling you, you’re perfect.’

‘If you say so,’ Odette replied, with affected playfulness, and she added: ‘You know I’m not fishing for compliments.’4

‘Well then, bring your friend along, if he’s pleasant company.’

Undoubtedly, the ‘inner circle’ was worlds away from Swann’s usual haunts, and consummate society people would certainly have felt that one who, like Swann, had his entrée to the most exclusive houses, hardly needed to go cap in hand to the Verdurins’. But Swann loved women so much that once he had got to know pretty much all those belonging to the aristocracy and had nothing more to learn from them, he had begun to view the honorary membership that the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed on him (a membership that amounted to a knighthood) only as something that might be exchanged, a kind of promissory note, having no value in itself, but allowing him to insinuate himself into some hidden spot in the provinces or some remote corner of Paris, where the daughter of the local squire or town clerk had struck him as pretty. For desire or love brought back to him a certain vanity which was now quite absent from his daily life (although it must once have been the driving force behind that success in society for which he had thrown away his intellect, wasted his talents on frivolous pleasures and used his knowledge of art to advise society ladies on what paintings to buy and how to furnish their drawing rooms), and made him want to shine for his latest flame, for her to be dazzled by his elegance, though his name, Swann, might mean nothing to her. He especially wanted this if the woman came from a humble background, just as an intelligent man doesn’t worry that another intelligent man may find him stupid, and an elegant man knows that a duke will do justice to his elegance, but fears a country bumpkin may not. Of all the witty words and lies prompted by vanity since the world began, so diminishing to those who uttered them, three quarters have been addressed to people deemed inferior. And Swann, who was unaffected and carefree with a duchess, was terrified of being despised and therefore became stiff and unnatural when he was with a lady’s maid.

He wasn’t like so many people, who, through laziness or a feeling that their social eminence obliges them to stay within their own circle, abstain from any other pleasures that life offers them beyond that social sphere where they remain in self-imposed confinement till the day they die, and are content, in the end, to consider as pleasures, for want of any better, once they’ve managed to get used to them, the mediocre diversions or bearable boredom that it affords them. Swann, though, didn’t try to find beauty in the women he spent time with, but to spend time with women whom he had first found beautiful. And it was often women whose beauty was quite coarse, since the physical qualities he unconsciously sought were the complete opposite of those that aroused his admiration in the sculptures and paintings of women by his preferred masters. An intense or melancholy expression froze his senses, which were however stirred by pink, plump, healthy flesh.

If on his travels he met a family whose acquaintance it might have been more correct not to seek, but which included a woman who arrested his gaze with a hitherto unfamiliar charm, the idea of keeping himself to himself and belittling the desire she had awoken, or choosing to replace with a different pleasure the one he might have known with her, by writing to a former mistress to come and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication from life, as stupid a renunciation of a new happiness as if, instead of visiting the countryside, he had stayed shut up in his room looking at pictures of Paris. He didn’t confine himself within the palace of his brilliant connections but instead, in order to be able to reconstruct it from scratch wherever a woman had appealed to him, he had turned it into one of those collapsible tents that explorers take with them. Any part that couldn’t be carried about or exchanged for a new pleasure became worthless to him, however desirable it might appear to others. How many times had his credit with a duchess, made up of the wishes of doing him some kindness which she had nurtured for years without ever having the opportunity of carrying them out, been lost all in one go by his sending an importunate telegram asking that, by return of post, she put him in touch, immediately, with one of her stewards, whose daughter had caught his fancy in the countryside, just as a starving man might swap a diamond for a crust of bread. And, the deed done, he would laugh about it, for, despite the exceptional fineness of his nature that made up for any number of little faults, there remained traces too of coarseness. And then, he was one of those intelligent men who have lived an idle life and who look for consolation and maybe justification in the idea that this idleness gives their imagination objects as worthy of interest as art or study might give, and that ‘life’ contains more interesting and romantic situations than any novel. He claimed this, anyway, and easily persuaded his most particular society friends that it was so, notably the Baron de Charlus, whom he enjoyed entertaining with accounts of the tantalizing adventures that befell him, such as the one concerning a woman he met on a train who, once she had accompanied him home, turned out to be the sister of a ruler who currently had a finger in the pie of all sorts of European political intrigues, thus allowing him to keep up with these in the most agreeable way, or the one involving a complex set of circumstances which, depending on how the dice fell, would mean that he would, or would not, be able to become the lover of someone’s cook.

It wasn’t only the illustrious host of virtuous dowagers, generals and members of the Academy, to whom he was particularly close, whom Swann obliged so cynically to act as intermediaries. All his friends were used to receiving the occasional letter from him asking them for an introduction or a recommendation, letters showing a talent for diplomacy which, persisting as it did through successive affairs and different strategies, made plain, more than any less tactful approach would have done, his immutable character and unswerving aims. When, years later, I began to be interested in his character because of the way it resembled my own, though in different domains, I often asked for the story of how he used to write to my grandfather (who was not yet my grandfather, since it was around the time of my birth that Swann’s great love affair began and interrupted his usual habits for a while) and how my grandfather, recognizing his friend’s handwriting on the envelope, would exclaim: ‘It’s Swann wanting a favour again! Watch out!’ And whether through wariness, or that unwitting perversity that makes us offer something only to those who don’t want it, my grandparents put up a blanket refusal to all his requests for favours, however easy they would have been to grant, for instance introducing him to a young girl who dined with them every Sunday, and whom, every time Swann mentioned her, they were obliged to pretend they no longer saw, while they had in fact spent the whole week wondering whom to invite with her, often not coming up with anyone, though they might have called on him, who would have been only too happy to accept.

Sometimes a couple of my grandparents’ acquaintance, who up till then had complained of never seeing Swann, would announce with some satisfaction and perhaps a slight desire to arouse envy that he had become extremely solicitous of their company and couldn’t do enough for them. My grandfather didn’t want to spoil their pleasure, but would give my grandmother a look and hum:

What is this mystery?

I do not understand it.

or:

Fleeting vision…

or:

In affairs such as these

’tis best to see nothing.

A few months later, if my grandfather asked Swann’s new friend: ‘So, what about Swann, are you still seeing a lot of him?’, he would be met with a long face and a ‘Never mention him to me again!’

‘But I thought you were so close…’ my grandfather would say. This situation had occurred with some cousins of my grandmother’s, with whom Swann had been on close terms for a few months, dining with them nearly every day. Suddenly, with no warning, he stopped coming. They thought he must be ill and my grandmother’s cousin was just about to send for news of him, when, going into the servants’ hall, she found a letter from him which had inadvertently been left in the cook’s account book; in it, he told her that he was leaving Paris and wouldn’t be able to come any more. She was his mistress, and, since he was parting from her, she was the only person he had bothered to take leave of.

When his current mistress was a society woman, or at least a lady whose origins were not too lowly nor position too shaky for her to be received in society, then, for her sake, he went back to it, but only to the particular circle she moved in, or that he had introduced her to. ‘No point expecting Swann this evening,’ people would say. ‘You know it’s the day his American goes to the opera.’ He would get her invited into the most exclusive salons where he was an habitué, dining weekly, playing poker; every evening, with his auburn hair en brosse and lightly crimped, a style that softened the brightness of his green eyes, he would choose a flower for his buttonhole and go off to meet his mistress at the dinner table of one or other of the women of his set; and then, thinking of how the fashionable people whom he would see there and who were in thrall to him, would express their admiration and friendship in front of his beloved, he would find a new charm in the social life which he had taken for granted but whose substance, infused with the colour and warm glow of a flame now flickering within it, seemed to him precious and beautiful, since he had embedded in it a new love affair.

But, while each of these liaisons or flirtations had been the more or less complete realization of a dream, stemming from the sight of a face or body that Swann had spontaneously, and without forcing himself, found charming, when, however, he was introduced one day at the theatre to Odette de Crécy by one of his old friends, who had spoken of her as a ravishing woman with whom he might get somewhere, describing her as more difficult than she really was in order to increase the kindness of his own action in helping Swann to make her acquaintance, she had seemed to Swann not unbeautiful, certainly, but as having a type of beauty to which he was indifferent, which left him cold, which he even found rather repellent, since he was no different from others in finding a certain type of beauty, different each time according to the beholder, to be the opposite of the type which appeals to the senses. For his taste, her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheekbones too high, her features too drawn. She had beautiful eyes, but so big that they seemed to sag with their own mass, making the rest of her face appear tired and always giving her a look of being out of sorts or in a bad mood. Shortly after they were introduced at the theatre, she had written to him, asking if she might see his art collection, since she ‘who knew nothing about art, still loved pretty things’, telling him too that she would feel she knew him better when she had seen him in his ‘home’,5 where she pictured him ‘so cosy with his tea and his books’, although she had not concealed her surprise that he should live in a district which must be so gloomy and ‘which was just not smart enough for someone like him.’ When he had allowed her to come, she had told him as she left how sorry she was to have spent so little time in this place that she had been so happy to enter, speaking of him as though he meant more to her than the other people she knew, and as though the two of them were linked in some mysterious storybook way; it had made him smile. Swann was getting close to the age when, having lost some illusions, one can enjoy being in love for its own sake without counting too much on reciprocity, but when, nevertheless, the feeling of two hearts coming together, though no longer as in youth the essential aim of love, still remains an inherent part of love through an association of ideas so strong that it can become its cause, if it is first to appear. Once, one dreamt of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, feeling that one already possesses the heart of a woman can be enough to make one fall in love. So, at the age when the pleasure one looks for in love is primarily subjective and therefore one would expect that a woman’s beauty being to one’s taste would be particularly important, love can arise, the most physical love, without there having been an initial desire to trigger it. At that stage in life, one has already experienced love several times; it no longer follows its own course according to its own unfathomable and fateful laws, before which our heart is dumbfounded and helpless. We come to its aid, we falsify it with the suggestive power of memory. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we remember the others and bring them to life again. Since we have its whole song engraved within us, we don’t need a woman to tell us the way it begins—full of the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to know how it continues. And if the song begins in the middle—in the place where hearts draw close, where lovers say they live only for each other—we know enough about the music to chime in directly with our partner at the place where she is waiting for us.

Odette de Crécy went back to see Swann, then made her visits more frequent; and probably, each time, he felt the same disappointment confronted with that face whose traits he had forgotten a bit in the meantime and which he remembered as neither so expressive, nor, despite its youth, so worn. As she talked to him, he felt sorry that the great beauty she possessed wasn’t the kind he would spontaneously have preferred. It was true that Odette’s face seemed thinner and more beaky because its smoother and flatter plains—her forehead and the upper part of her cheeks—were covered by a mass of hair which at that time was worn in clusters, puffed up and crimped, then flowing in long locks along the ears; and as for her figure, which was excellent, it was hard to see the shape of her body (owing to the fashions of the time and despite her being one of the best-dressed women in Paris), since the bodice jutting out at the top and ending in a sharp angle above the billowing double skirts gave a woman the air of being made up of separate and ill-assorted pieces, while the ruching, flounces and waistcoat, each in their own sweet way, according to the whim of the design or the thickness of the cloth, followed a line which led them to the knots of ribbons, swirls of lace and criss-crossed rows of jet or guided them along the whalebone, but made no contact with the human body, which, depending on how closely or waywardly the architecture of these frills and furbelows mirrored its natural forms, found itself either bundled up or floating in them.

But, when Odette had left, Swann smiled as he thought of her telling him how time would drag till he allowed her to come again; he recalled the diffident, anxious way in which she had asked him once not to let it be too long, and the way she had looked at him at that moment, her eyes gazing at him in timorous appeal, so that there was something touching about her, under the posy of artificial pansies fixed to the round white straw hat, with its black velvet bows. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come to tea with me for once?’ she had asked. He had cited work to be done, a study of Vermeer, which in reality he had abandoned years before. ‘I understand that there’s nothing I can do, a silly little thing like me, compared to scholars like you and your friends,’ she had replied. ‘I would be like the frog in the fable. And yet I would so like to learn, to know things, to be taught.’

‘What fun it must be to spend time with books, looking through all those old papers!’ she had added, with the self-satisfied expression an elegant woman might wear to declare that there is nothing she likes better than doing some really messy job without worrying about getting her hands dirty, like cooking and ‘kneading the dough herself’. ‘You’ll laugh at me, but you know, that painter who’s stopping you from seeing me (she meant Vermeer), I’d never actually heard of him; is he still alive? Can one see his paintings in Paris? That way I could have an idea of what you like, I could guess a bit what goes on behind that forehead that’s always so preoccupied, in that head that always seems to be thinking about something; I could say to myself: that’s what he’s thinking about right now. What happiness to be involved in your work!’ He had excused himself, saying he was fearful of new friendships, of what, out of chivalry, he termed the fear that he might suffer. ‘You’re frightened of affection? How odd, when that’s the only thing I really want, the thing I would give my life to find,’ she had said in such a natural, such a forthright tone, that it had moved him. ‘You must have been made unhappy by a woman. And you think others are like her. She didn’t understand you; you’re so different from everyone else. That was the first thing I liked about you, I could feel how unlike other people you were.’

‘But you must have heaps of things to do too,’ he had said, ‘I know what it’s like for women, you can’t often be free.’

‘Me! I never have anything to do! I’m always free, I’ll always be free for you. Any time, night or day, that you might need to see me, send for me, and I’ll come running. Will you do that? Do you know what would be nice, for you to get an introduction to Madame Verdurin, where I go in the evening. Imagine! We would meet there and I’d be able to think it was partly for me that you had come!’

And no doubt, in recalling their conversations, in thinking about her like this when he was alone, he was only conjuring up her image in romantic daydreams, along with that of many other women; but if, thanks to some circumstance (or even independently of it, since the circumstance in which a condition, hitherto latent, suddenly flares up, may have no actual influence over it), if the image of Odette de Crécy were to preside over all his daydreams, if the latter became inseparable from his memory of her, then the imperfections of her body would no longer have any importance, and nor would whether it were to his taste or not, any more or less than any other body, since, having become the body of the one he loved, it would henceforth be the only one capable of bringing him joy or torment.

My grandfather had actually known the family of these Verdurins, which was more than could be said for any of their current friends. But he had lost touch completely with the one he called ‘the Verdurin boy’, considering, with some exaggeration, that—despite the immense fortune he still commanded—he had gone down in the world, consorting with all sorts of riff-raff. Then one day, he received a letter from Swann, asking whether he might give him an introduction to the Verdurins: ‘Watch out! Watch out!’ my grandfather exclaimed, ‘Nothing surprising here, that was obviously where Swann was headed. What a set! First, I can’t do what he wants, because I don’t know the man. And then, there must be a woman behind this, I don’t get mixed up in that kind of business. Ah well! We’re in for fun and games, if Swann takes on the little Verdurins.’

And, with my grandfather’s refusal, it was Odette herself who took Swann to the Verdurins’.

That day, the day of his first appearance there, the Verdurins had invited to dinner Doctor Cottard and his wife, the young pianist and his aunt, and the painter who then enjoyed their patronage, with some few others of the flock joining them later in the evening.

Doctor Cottard never knew quite what tone to take in his replies to people, never being certain whether they were joking or not. And to be doubly sure, he would see that all his facial expressions contained the germ of a tentative and fleeting smile, whose subtle forbearance would absolve him of any suspicion of naivety if the words spoken to him turned out to be facetious. But since he didn’t dare to let this smile settle too comfortably onto his features, for fear the opposite hypothesis were the true one, what hovered over his face was a perpetual air of uncertainty, in which could be read the question he dared not ask aloud: ‘Do you mean what you say?’ He was no more confident about the right way to behave in the street, or even in life, than in a drawing room, and he met every passer-by, every conveyance, every occurrence with an arch smile, designed to erase any suggestion of impropriety from his manner, since it proved that, should the smile turn out to be inappropriate to the situation, he was aware of it and, in that case, had adopted it in a spirit of humour.

On all subjects, though, where a forthright question seemed allowable, the doctor would invariably do his best to keep his doubts reined in and find out as much as he could, for, acting on the advice given him by a shrewd mother when he left the provinces, he never let an unfamiliar figure of speech or proper name slip by, without trying to inform himself of their significance.

He was insatiable when it came to figures of speech, as, endowing them sometimes with a more precise meaning than they actually had, he would have liked to know what exactly was meant by those he heard most often—a devilish beauty, blue blood, a rackety life, Rabelais’s reckoning, swanning around, giving carte blanche, being at sixes and sevens, and so on—and how he might introduce them into his own conversation. When he couldn’t, he filled in with puns he had previously memorized. And when any new names came up in the course of conversation, he would simply repeat them in a tone of enquiry, judging that this would bring him the additional information he wouldn’t appear to be requesting.

Since the critical gaze he turned on everything was completely devoid of good judgement, that excessive courtesy which consists of declaring, without really wanting to be believed, that it is we who are indebted to those on whom we are in fact bestowing a favour, was a waste of time in the doctor’s case, as he took everything literally. However blind to his faults Madame Verdurin might be, and though she continued to consider him very witty, it had finally become exasperating for her to find that when she offered him a seat in a stage box to hear Sarah Bernhardt, adding graciously that it was too kind of him to come, particularly as she was sure that he must have heard Sarah Bernhardt many times before and, moreover, they were perhaps a bit too near the stage, Doctor Cottard, who had come into the box with a smile hovering on his lips ready to spread or fade once someone in authority had let him know the nature of the performance, replied: ‘It’s true, we are much too close and Sarah Bernhardt is becoming a bit tedious. But you wished me to come, and your wish is my command. I’m only too happy to do you this little favour. What would one not do for you, who are so kind!’ and he added: ‘Sarah Bernhardt, they call her the Golden Voice, don’t they? And people often write that she sets the stage on fire; that’s an odd expression, don’t you think?’ hoping for comments that were unforthcoming.

‘You know,’ Madame Verdurin had said to her husband, ‘I think we’re on the wrong track when we’re self-deprecating about our presents to the doctor. He’s a man of science who is quite impractical, he doesn’t understand himself what things are worth and he takes what we tell him at face value.’

‘I didn’t want to tell you, but I had noticed it too,’ replied Monsieur Verdurin. And, that New Year’s Day, instead of sending Cottard a ruby worth three thousand francs and telling him it was a mere trifle, Monsieur Verdurin bought a paste stone for three hundred and hinted that it would be hard to find another as fine.

When Madame Verdurin had announced that Monsieur Swann would be joining them later that evening, the doctor had exclaimed: ‘Swann?’ in a tone harsh with surprise, for, while considering himself perpetually ready for whatever might occur, he was always more taken aback than anyone by the most trivial news, and when no one answered him, he yelled: ‘Swann? Who is this Swann?’ in the grip of an anxiety that melted away when Madame Verdurin said:

‘But he’s Odette’s friend, the one she told us about.’

‘Oh well, that’s all right, then,’ the doctor answered, pacified. As for the painter, he was delighted that Swann should be introduced at Madame Verdurin’s, since he imagined him in love with Odette and enjoyed intrigues. ‘There’s nothing I find more fun than matchmaking,’ he confided in a whisper to Cottard, ‘I’ve brought off lots, even between women!’

Odette’s telling the Verdurins that Swann was very smart had made them anxious that he might be a ‘bore’. In fact, he made an excellent impression on them, which, though they did not know it, was an indirect consequence of his high-society connections. For he was one of those urbane men who have an advantage over others, even intelligent ones, who have never moved in those circles, in that, having spent some time in them, they are no longer in thrall to the desire or disgust those circles conjure in the imagination, but simply take them for granted. Devoid of any snobbishness or any fear of appearing over-amiable, they display a straightforward friendliness which shares the ease and grace of movement of those whose supple limbs obey their owner’s wishes, without any clumsy or inappropriate interference from the rest of the body. The simple, basic gesture by which the man of the world greets the unknown young man being introduced to him with a hearty handshake, while acknowledging his own introduction to an ambassador with a shallow bow, had grown to be, without his realizing it, Swann’s natural social demeanour, so that, finding himself with people of a lower social background, such as the Verdurins and their friends, he instinctively responded with a lack of reserve and an eagerness to please, which, in their view, a bore would not have shown. The only person Swann treated coldly for a moment was Cottard, whose greeting him with a wink and an equivocal smile before they had even spoken (a pantomime he called ‘holding back’), made him think that the doctor recognized him from their having met in some house of ill repute, although he frequented such places very little, having never gone in much for that kind of frolic. He considered Cottard’s supposed allusion to it in bad taste, especially since it occurred in the presence of Odette, who might have formed a bad impression of him as a result, and he countered it with a frosty stare. But when he learnt that a lady sitting nearby was Madame Cottard, he thought that such a young husband would not have wanted to allude to that sort of high jinks in front of his wife, and he ceased to give the doctor’s knowing air the meaning he had feared. The painter invited Swann straight away to come to his studio with Odette, and Swann thought him very likeable.

‘Maybe you’ll be luckier than me,’ said Madame Verdurin, in a tone of mock vexation, ‘and you’ll be allowed to see the portrait of Cottard’ (a portrait she had commissioned). ‘Don’t forget, “Monsieur” Biche,’ she reminded the painter, whose being given this title was a standing joke, ‘be sure to catch his delightful gaze, that subtle, amusing look in his eyes. You know that what I really want is his smile; that’s what I asked you for, the likeness of his smile.’ And finding this a striking expression, she repeated it very loudly to make sure that various guests had heard it and even found a way to draw some of them closer. Swann asked to be introduced to everyone, even an old friend of the Verdurins, Saniette, whose shyness, lack of affectation and good heart had been the cause of his forfeiting, everywhere, the regard to which he was entitled for his knowledge as an archivist, his considerable wealth and distinguished family background. When he spoke, it was with the most endearing lisp, which seemed to be less a speech impediment and more a part of his soul, carrying something of the innocence of early childhood, which he had never lost, so that every consonant he couldn’t pronounce suggested an unkindness of which he was incapable. Swann’s asking to be introduced to Monsieur Saniette made Madame Verdurin feel that he was reversing the rules of precedence (so much so that she responded with an emphatic emendation, saying: ‘Monsieur Swann, please be so kind as to allow me to introduce our friend Saniette to you’), but filled Saniette himself with the warmest regard for Swann, which the Verdurins never revealed to him, since they found Saniette rather irritating and had no wish to secure friendships for him. Conversely, they were extremely touched by Swann’s making a point of desiring the immediate acquaintance of the pianist’s aunt. She was, as usual, dressed in black, because she believed that black never looks wrong and is the last word in elegance, and was excessively red in the face, which was always the case when she had just eaten. She bowed respectfully to Swann but straightened up with an air of majesty. Since she was quite without education and was afraid of making grammatical mistakes, she took care to mangle her words so that any gross error she fell into would be absorbed by the mumbling and not easily or reliably detectable; thus her conversation consisted only of slurred meanderings, from which there occasionally emerged the odd syllable that she felt sure of. Speaking to Monsieur Verdurin, Swann imagined that he might poke gentle fun at her, which, however, vexed that gentleman:

‘She’s such an excellent woman,’ said he, ‘I grant you that she’s not dazzling, but I assure you that on her own she’s very pleasant to talk to.’

‘I’m sure she is,’ Swann hastened to assent, ‘I simply meant that she didn’t appear to me to be “remarkable”’—putting a comic emphasis on the word—‘and that’s a compliment really!’

‘Do you know,’ said Monsieur Verdurin, ‘and this may surprise you, she writes charmingly. Have you ever heard her nephew play? It’s wonderful, isn’t it, Doctor? Would you like me to ask him to play you something, Monsieur Swann?’

‘I would be very happy—’ Swann began, but the doctor interrupted him mockingly, for, having got the idea that any emphasis or formal expression in conversation was old-fashioned, as soon as he heard a serious word said in earnest, as had just occurred with the word ‘happy’, he felt that its speaker was being pompous, and if, moreover, the word formed part of what he termed some old saw, however current it were elsewhere, he imagined that the phrase just begun must be ridiculous and completed it himself, ironically, with the very cliché he seemed to be accusing the other of wanting to employ, although that other had no thought of doing so.

‘As happy as God in France!’ he exclaimed teasingly, throwing out his hands to make his point.

Monsieur Verdurin couldn’t help laughing.

‘What are all those good people laughing about, I’d like to know,’ exclaimed Madame Verdurin. ‘That’s a merry little corner you’ve got there! And here’s poor little me, all alone and in disgrace!’ She put on a hurt expression, like a child.

Madame Verdurin was sitting on a high seat of waxed Swedish pine, which a young violinist from that country had given her and which she had kept, despite its looking like a scaffold and clashing with her beautiful old furniture, because she liked to have on show the gifts made to her from time to time by her flock in order that the givers might have the pleasure of seeing them when they called. To this end, she tried to persuade them to stick to flowers and sweets, which did at least have a limited lifespan, but to no avail, and consequently the house was full of foot warmers, cushions, clocks, screens, barometers and vases, in generous, repetitive and ill-assorted profusion.

From her high perch she took a lively part in the conversation of the flock and laughed at their ‘sallies’, but since the accident with her jaw, she had given up producing real bursts of laughter and instead went through a pantomime which, without any fatigue or risk for her, conveyed the impression of laughing till she cried. At the least word that one of the circle let drop against a bore, or against an ex-member of the circle banished to the bores’ camp—and to the despair of Monsieur Verdurin who had long hoped to equal his wife in camaraderie but who got quickly out of breath when he laughed and had been overtaken and defeated by her trick of perpetual pretend hilarity—she would give a little cry, screw shut the bird-like eyes that were beginning to be clouded by cataracts, and suddenly, as though she had only just had time to conceal an indecent sight or parry a fatal blow, burying her face entirely in her hands, would appear to be doing her utmost to repress, to stifle laughter which, had she given in to it, would have thrown her into a fainting fit. And so, dizzy with the flock’s fun, drunk with conviviality, scandal-mongering and back-slapping, did Madame Verdurin, high on her perch, like a bird whose beak has been dipped in mulled wine, sob with amicability.

Meanwhile, Monsieur Verdurin, after requesting Swann’s permission to light his pipe (‘we’re all pals here, we don’t stand on ceremony’), asked the young musician to sit down at the piano.

‘Now leave him in peace, he didn’t come here to be tormented,’ exclaimed Madame Verdurin. ‘I don’t want him tormented, do you hear?’

‘But why would he mind?’ said Monsieur Verdurin, ‘Monsieur Swann may not be familiar with the sonata in F sharp that we’ve discovered; he’ll play us the arrangement for piano.’

‘Oh, no! Not my sonata!’ shrieked Madame Verdurin, ‘I don’t want another head cold and neuralgia, like the last time he made me cry with that sonata; thank you for the kind thought, I don’t want another go of that, you’re a nice lot, you are, you can see that it won’t be you ill in a bed for a week!’

This little scene, which was replayed every time the pianist sat down at the instrument, delighted the friends as much as if they were witnessing it for the first time, as proof of the charming originality and feel for music of the ‘lady of the house’. Those who were near her signalled to the smokers and card players who were a little further off to come closer, that something was going to happen, saying, as they do in the Reichstag at interesting moments: ‘Listen, listen.’ And the next day those who hadn’t been there were condoled with and told that the scene had been even more amusing than usual.

‘Well then, let’s agree that he’ll only play the andante,’ said Monsieur Verdurin.

‘Only the andante! You’re a fine one!’ exclaimed Madame Verdurin. ‘It’s the andante that really breaks me up. His Lordship really is the limit! It’s as though for the Ninth he said we’ll just hear the finale, or just the overture for the Meistersinger.’

The doctor, though, urged Madame Verdurin to let the pianist play, not that he saw the disturbance that music caused her as a pretence—he recognized it as a particular form of neurasthenia—but through that habit that many doctors have of bending their own strict rules as soon as they find them affecting something they consider more important, such as a society gathering to which they are invited and which cannot go forward without the person whom they are advising to make an exception and forget their dyspepsia or influenza.

‘You won’t be ill this time, you’ll see,’ he said, seeking to hypnotize her with his gaze, ‘and if you are ill, we will take care of you.’

‘Truly?’ replied Madame Verdurin, as though the hope of such a favour left her nothing to do but give in. Maybe too, from having so often said she would be ill, there were times when she no longer remembered that it was a lie and actually took on the soul of a sick woman. For the sick, tired of always having to be careful lest they have an attack, like to give themselves free rein to believe they may do with impunity the things which they crave and which normally make them ill, so long as they can have recourse to some powerful being, who, without any trouble to themselves, will put them on their feet again with a word, or a pill.

Odette had gone to sit on an embroidered sofa near to the piano. ‘You know, this is my favourite little seat,’ she said to Madame Verdurin.

The latter, seeing that Swann had taken a chair, brought him to his feet again.

‘You’re not comfortable there, do go and sit next to Odette. Odette, you won’t mind making a place for Monsieur Swann?’

‘What a pretty piece of Beauvais,’ said Swann, with a wish to be courteous before he sat down.

‘Ah, I’m glad you appreciate my sofa,’ replied Madame Verdurin, ‘and I warn you that if you want to get something of the same sort, you may as well give up straight away. They never made anything like it again. The little chairs are marvels too. You can have a look at them in a moment. The detail in each bronze corresponds to the motif of the seat; you’ll see, there’s a lot to amuse you if you want to look, I promise you won’t be bored. Even just the little friezes on the surrounds, look, that little vine on a red background in the Bear and the Grapes. Isn’t that well drawn? They really knew how to draw, didn’t they? My husband claims that I don’t like fruit because I eat less than he does; not at all: I’m greedier than any of you, but I don’t need to put them in my mouth because I enjoy them with my eyes. What are you all laughing about? Ask the doctor, he’ll tell you that those grapes act like a purgative for me. Other people take the waters at Fontainebleau, I take mine with Beauvais. Now, Monsieur Swann, I won’t let you go till you’ve touched the little bronzes on the chair backs. What a soft patina! No, not just your fingertips, touch them properly.’

‘If Madame Verdurin starts fondling the bronzes, we won’t be hearing any music this evening,’ said the painter.

‘Be quiet, you’re a naughty boy. But really,’ she said, turning to Swann, ‘we women are forbidden things that are a lot less sensuous than that. There’s no flesh to equal it! When Monsieur Verdurin did me the honour of being jealous—come, be polite at least, don’t tell me you never were…’

‘But I haven’t said a word. Doctor, you are my witness: did I say anything?’

Swann continued to touch the bronzes, courtesy preventing him from stopping too soon.

‘Well, well, you may stroke them later; now it’s you who are going to be stroked, your ears will be stroked. I imagine that’s something you like; and here’s a nice young man who is going to do the honours.’

And when the pianist had played, Swann was even more amiable with him than he had been with the others there that evening. And this was why: