Swann in love, p.1
Swann in Love, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Swann in Love
Notes
Copyright
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
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.
