“I beg to differ from you,” M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. “I am only half satisfied with the gentleman. I feel that he ‘poses.’”
Mme. Verdurin’s whole body stiffened, her eyes stared blankly as though she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device by means of which she might be supposed not to have caught the sound of that unutterable word which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to ‘pose’ in her house, and, therefore, that there were people in the world who ‘mattered more’ than herself.
“Anyhow, if there is nothing in it, I don’t suppose it’s because our friend believes in her virtue. And yet, you never know; he seems to believe in her intelligence. I don’t know whether you heard the way he lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil’s sonata. I am devoted to Odette, but really—to expound theories of aesthetic to her—the man must be a prize idiot.”
“Look here, I won’t have you saying nasty things about Odette,” broke in Mme. Verdurin in her ‘spoiled child’ manner. “She is charming.”
“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be charming; we are not saying anything nasty about her, only that she is not the embodiment of either virtue or intellect. After all,” he turned to the painter, “does it matter so very much whether she is virtuous or not? You can’t tell; she might be a great deal less charming if she were.”
On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins’ butler, who had been somewhere else a moment earlier, when he arrived, and who had been asked by Odette to tell Swann (but that was at least an hour ago) that she would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prévost’s on her way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost’s, but every few yards his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles each of which he would gladly have crushed beneath his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure, and so, possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his arriving at Prévost’s in time, and of finding her still there. And then, in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious of the absurdity of the dream-shapes among which his mind has been wandering without any clear distinction between himself and them, Swann suddenly perceived how foreign to his nature were the thoughts which he had been revolving in his mind ever since he had heard at the Verdurins’ that Odette had left, how novel the heartache from which he was suffering, but of which he was only now conscious, as though he had just woken up. What! all this disturbance simply because he would not see Odette, now, till to-morrow, exactly what he had been hoping, not an hour before, as he drove toward Mme. Verdurin’s. He was obliged to admit also that now, as he sat in the same carriage and drove to Prévost’s, he was no longer the same man, was no longer alone even—but that a new personality was there beside him, adhering to him, amalgamated with him, a creature from whom he might, perhaps, be unable to liberate himself, towards whom he might have to adopt some such stratagem as one uses to outwit a master or a malady. And yet, during this last moment in which he had felt that another, a fresh personality was thus conjoined with his own, life had seemed, somehow, more interesting.
It was in vain that he assured himself that this possible meeting at Prévost’s (the tension of waiting for which so ravished, stripped so bare the intervening moments that he could find nothing, not one idea, not one memory in his mind beneath which his troubled spirit might take shelter and repose) would probably, after all, should it take place, be much the same as all their meetings, of no great importance. As on every other evening, once he was in Odette’s company, once he had begun to cast furtive glances at her changing countenance, and instantly to withdraw his eyes lest she should read in them the first symbols of desire and believe no more in his indifference, he would cease to be able even to think of her, so busy would he be in the search for pretexts which would enable him not to leave her immediately, and to assure himself, without betraying his concern, that he would find her again, next evening, at the Verdurins’; pretexts, that is to say, which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.
She was not at Prevost’s; he must search for her, then, in every restaurant upon the boulevards. To save time, while he went in one direction, he sent in the other his coachman Rémi (Rizzo’s Doge Loredan) for whom he presently—after a fruitless search—found himself waiting at the spot where the carriage was to meet him. It did not appear, and Swann tantalised himself with alternate pictures of the approaching moment, as one in which Rémi would say to him: “Sir, the lady is there,” or as one in which Rémi would say to him: “Sir, the lady was not in any of the cafés.” And so he saw himself faced by the close of his evening—a thing uniform, and yet bifurcated by the intervening accident which would either put an end to his agony by discovering Odette, or would oblige him to abandon any hope of finding her that night, to accept the necessity of returning home without having seen her.
The coachman returned; but, as he drew up opposite him, Swann asked, not “Did you find the lady?” but “Remind me, to-morrow, to order in some more firewood. I am sure we must be running short.” Perhaps he had persuaded himself that, if Rémi had at last found Odette in some café, where she was waiting for him still, then his night of misery was already obliterated by the realisation, begun already in his mind, of a night of joy, and that there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again. But it was also by the force of inertia; there was in his soul that want of adaptability which can be seen in the bodies of certain people who, when the moment comes to avoid a collision, to snatch their clothes out of reach of a flame, or to perform any other such necessary movement, take their time (as the saying is), begin by remaining for a moment in their original position, as though seeking to find in it a starting-point, a source of strength and motion. And probably, if the coachman had interrupted him with, “I have found the lady,” he would have answered, “Oh, yes, of course; that’s what I told you to do. I had quite forgotten,” and would have continued to discuss his supply of firewood, so as to hide from his servant the emotion that he had felt, and to give himself time to break away from the thraldom of his anxieties and abandon himself to pleasure.
The coachman came back, however, with the report that he could not find her anywhere, and added the advice, as an old and privileged servant, “I think, sir, that all we can do now is to go home.”
But the air of indifference which Swann could so lightly assume when Rémi uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a cast-off cloak when he saw Rémi attempt to make him abandon hope and retire from the quest.
“Certainly not!” he exclaimed. “We must find the lady. It is most important. She would be extremely put out—it’s a business matter—and vexed with me if she didn’t see me.”
“But I do not see how the lady can be vexed, sir,” answered Rémi, “since it was she that went away without waiting for you, sir, and said she was going to Prévost’s, and then wasn’t there.”
Meanwhile the restaurants were closing, and their lights began to go out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness. Now and then the ghost of a woman glided up to Swann, murmured a few words in his ear, asked him to take her home, and left him shuddering. Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as