 Section 17 of Swan's Way. Swan's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief. Section 17 from Swan in Love. It would happen, as often as not, that he had stayed so long outside with his little girl, before going to the Verdurans, that, as soon as the little phrase had been rendered by the pianist, Swan would discover that it was almost time for Odette to go home. He used to take her back as far as the door of her little house in the Rue La Peruse, behind the Arc de Triomphe, and it was perhaps on this account, and so as not to demand the monopoly of her favors, that he sacrifice the pleasure, not so essential to his well-being, of seeing her earlier in the evening, of arriving with her at the Verdurans to the exercise of this other privilege, for which she was grateful, of their leaving together, a privilege which he valued all the more because, thanks to it, he had the feeling that no one else would see her, no one would thrust himself between them, no one could prevent him from remaining with her in spirit after he had left her for the night. And so, night after night, she would be taken home in Swan's carriage, and one night, after she had got down, and while he stood at the gate and murmured till tomorrow, then, she turned impulsively from him, plucked a last lingering chrysanthemum in the tiny garden which flanked the pathway from the street to her house, and as he went back to his carriage, thrust it into his hand. He held it pressed to his lips during the drive home, and when, in due course, the flower withered, locked it away like something very precious in a secret drawer of his desk. He would escort her to the gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone inside to take part in the ceremony of such vital importance in her life of afternoon tea. The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets, consisting almost entirely of low-roofed houses, self-contained, but not detached. Their monotony, interrupted here and there by the dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once an historical document, an assorted survival from the days when the district was still one of ill repute. The snow which had lain in the garden beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the careless disarray of the season, the assertion in this man-made city, of a state of nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside. Passing by, on his left-hand side, and on what, although raised some way above the street, was the ground floor of the house, passing by Odette's bedroom, which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel with her own. He had climbed a staircase that went straight up between dark painted walls, from which hung oriental draperies, strings of Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern, suspended by a silken cord from the ceiling, which last, however, so that her visitors should not have to complain of the want of any of the latest comforts of western civilization, was lighted by a gas jet inside. To the two drawing-rooms, large and small, these were entered through a narrow lobby, the wall of which, checkered with the lashings of a wooden trellis, such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from end to end by a long rectangular box in which bloomed, as though in a hot-house, a row of large chrysanthemums. At that time still uncommon, though by no means so large as the mammoth blossoms, which horticulturalists have since succeeded in making grow. Swan was irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been the rage in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this occasion, to see the gloom of the little lobby shot with rays of pink and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars which kindle their cold fires in the murky atmosphere of winter afternoons. Odette had received him in a teagall of pink silk, which left her arms and neck bare. She had made him sit down beside her in one of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palm trees, growing out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by screens upon which were fastened photographs and fans, and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, You're not comfortable there, wait a moment, I'll arrange things for you, and with a titter of laughter, the complacency of which implied that some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she had installed behind his head and beneath his feet great cushions of Japanese silk, which she pummeled and buffeted as though determined to lavish on him all her riches, and regardless of their value. But when her footmen began to come into the room, bringing one after another the innumerable lamps which contained mostly in porcelain vases burned singly or in pairs upon the different pieces of furniture as upon so many altars, rekindled in the twilight, already almost nocturnal, of this winter afternoon, the glow of a sunset more lasting, more rosy it, more human, filling perhaps with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight. She had kept an eye sharply fixed on the servant to see whether he set each of the lamps down in the place appointed it. She felt that if he were to put even one of them where it ought not to be, the general effect of her drawing room would be destroyed, and that her portrait, which rested upon a sloping easel draped with plush, would not catch the light. And so, with feverish impatience, she followed the man's clumsy movements, scolding him severely when he passed too close to a pair of bow-pots, which he had made a point of always tidying herself in case the plants should be knocked over, and went across to them now to make sure that he had not broken off any of the flowers. She found something quaint in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the cutlius especially, these being, with chrysanthemums, her favorite flowers, because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin. It looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak, she said to Swan, pointing to an orchid, with the shade of respect in her voice for so smart a flower, for this distinguished, unexpected sister whom nature had suddenly bestowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more worthy than many real ones. A woman of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued dragons painted upon a bowl, or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silver work with ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade. They pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters, or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling them darlings. That fictations were in sharp contrast to the sincerity of some of her attitudes, notably her devotion to our Lady of the Leghetto, who had once, when Odette was living at Nice, cured her of a mortal illness, and whose metal engulfed. She always carried on her person, attributing to it unlimited powers. He poured out Swan's tea, inquired lemon or cream, and on his answering cream, please, went on smiling a cloud. And as he pronounced it excellent, you see, I know just how you like it. This tea had indeed seemed to Swan, just as it seemed to her, something precious, and love is so far obliged to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration, in pleasures which, on the contrary, would have no existence, apart from love, and must cease with its passing, that when he left her at seven o'clock, to go and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in his broom, unable to repress the happiness with which the Atkinoon's adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself what fun it would be to have a little woman like that, in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one can never be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea. An hour or so later he received a note from Odette, and at once recognized that florid handwriting, of which an affectation of British stiffness imposed an apparent discipline upon its shapeless characters, significant perhaps to less intimate eyes than his of an untidiness of mind, a fragmentary education, a want of sincerity and decision. Swan had left his cigarette case at her house. Why, she wrote, did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back. More important, perhaps, was a second visit which he paid her a little later. On his way to the house, as always when he knew that they were to meet, he formed a picture of her in his mind, and the necessity, if he was to find any beauty in her face, of fixing his eyes on the fresh and rosy protuberance of her cheekbones, and of shutting out all the rest of those cheeks, which were so often languorous and sallow, except when they were punctuated with little fiery spots, plunged him in acute depression as proving that one's ideal is always unattainable, and one's actual happiness mediocre. He was taking her an engraving which she had asked to see. She was not very well. She received him, wearing a wrapper of mauve creptochine, which draped her bosom, like a mantle, with a richly embroidered web. As she stood there beside him, brushing his cheek with the loosened tresses of her hair, bending one knee in what was almost a dancer's pose, so that she could lean, without tiring herself, over the picture at which she was gazing, with bended head, out of those great eyes, which seemed so weary and so sullen when there was nothing to animate her. Swan was struck by her resemblance to the figure of Zapora, Jethro's daughter, which is to be seen in one of the Sistine frescoes. He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing and the paintings of the old masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems less susceptible of generalization, the individual features of men and women whom he knew, as, for instance, in the bust of the Doge Loredin by Antonio Riso, the prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to his own coachman, Rémy, in the coloring of a guirlandayo, the nose of Monsieur de Palancy, in a portrait of Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Bourbon, perhaps because he had always regretted, in his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of life, had talked always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into the canon of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest possible certificate of reality and trueness to life, a modern, almost atopical saver. Perhaps also he had so far succumbed to the prevailing frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in an old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing illusion to a person about whom jokes could be made and repeated and enjoyed today. Perhaps, on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied in the abstract idea of similarity between an historical portrait and a modern original whom it was not intended to represent. However, that might be, and perhaps because the abundance of impressions which he, for some time past, had been receiving, though indeed they had come to him rather through the channel of his appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for painting as well. It was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct that Swan remarked Odette's resemblance to the Sephora of that Alessandro de Mariano, to whom one shrinks from giving his more popular surname, now that Botticelli suggests not so much the actual work of the master as that false and banal conception. He no longer based his estimate of the merit of Odette's face on the more or less good quality of her cheeks and the softness and sweetness as of carnation petals, which he supposed would greet his lips there should he ever hazard and embrace, but regarded it, rather, as a skein of subtle and lovely silken threads, which his gaze, gazing eyes collected and wound together, following the curving line from the skein of the ball where he mingled the cadence of her neck with the spring of her hair and the droop of her eyelids, as though from a portrait of herself in which her type was made clearly intelligible. He stood, gazing at her, traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly afterwards to recapture both when he was with Odette and when he was only thinking of her in her absence, and, albeit his admiration for the Florentine masterpiece was probably based on his discovery that it had been reproduced in her the similarity enhanced her beauty also and rendered her more precious in his sight. Swan reproached himself with his failure hitherto to estimate at her true worth a creature whom the great Sandro would have adored, and counted himself fortunate that his pleasure in the contemplation of Odette found a justification in his own system of aesthetic. He told himself that in choosing the thought of Odette as the inspiration of his dreams of ideal happiness, he was not, as he had until, supposed, falling back merely upon an expedient of doubtful and certainly inadequate value since she contained in herself what satisfied the utmost refinement of his taste in art. He failed to observe that this quality would not naturally avail to bring Odette into the category of women whom he found desirable, simply because his desires had always were encountered to his aesthetic taste. The words Florentine painting were invaluable to Swan. They enabled him, gave him, as it were, a legal title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form, and whereas the mere sight of her in the flesh, by perpetually reviving his misgivings as to the quality of her face, her figure, the whole of her beauty, used to cool the ardour of his love, these misgivings were swept away, and that love confirmed now that he could re- erect his estimate of her on the sure foundations of his aesthetic principles, while the kiss, the bodily surrender which would have seemed natural and, but moderately attractive, had they been granted him by a creature of somewhat withered flesh and sluggish blood, coming as they now came to crown his adoration of a masterpiece in a gallery, must, it seemed, prove as exquisite as they would be supernatural. And when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done nothing but visit Odette, he would assure himself that he was not unreasonable in giving up much of his time, to the study of an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, and especially charming, medal. In an unmatched exemplar which he would contemplate at one moment with the humble, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a collector, on his study table, at which he worked, he had placed, as it were, a photograph of Odette, a reproduction of Jethro's daughter. He would gaze an admiration at the large eyes, the delicate features in which the imperfection of her skin might be surmised, the marvellous locks of hair that fell along her tired cheeks, and adapting what he had already felt to be beautiful on aesthetic grounds to the idea of a living woman, he converted it with a series of physical merits which he congratulated himself on finding a son. Odette assembled in the person of one whom he might, ultimately, possess. The vague feeling of sympathy which attracts a spectator to a work of art, now that he knew the type, in warm flesh and blood of Jethro's daughter, became a desire which more than compensated thence forward, for that with which Odette's physical charms had at first failed to inspire him. When he had sat, for a long time, gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed all the lovelier in contrast, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah, he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart. It was not only Odette's indifference, however, that he must take pains to circumvent. It was also not infrequently his own. Feeling that since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have very much to say to him when they did meet. He was afraid lest the manner, at once, to reveal monotonous and seemingly unalterable, which she now adopted when they were together, should ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, that a day might come when she would make a vow of her passion, by which hope, alone, he had become and would remain her lover. And so, to alter, to give a fresh moral aspect to that Odette, of whose unchanging mood he was afraid of growing weary, he wrote, suddenly, a letter full of hinted discoveries and famed indignation, which he sent off so that it should reach her before dinner time. He knew that she would be frightened, and that she would reply, and he hoped that, with the fear of losing him, clutched at her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard her utter, and he was right. He was right. By repeating this device, he had won from her the most affectionate letters that she had, so far, written him. One of them, which she had sent to him at midday by a special messenger from the Maison-Duray, it was the day of the Paris-Mercier Fête, given for the victims of the recent floods in Mercia. Beginning, my dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write. And these letters he had kept in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she had not had time to write, when he arrived at the Verderans, she would come running up to him with an, have something to say to you, and he would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart. Even as he drew near to the Verderans door, and caught sight of the great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming creature whom he would see as he entered the room, basking in that golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out, sharp and black, between lamp and window, shutting off the light, like those little pictures which one sees, sometimes pasted here and there upon a glass screen, whose other pains are mere transparencies. He would try to make out Odette, and then, when he was once inside, without thinking, his eyes sparkled suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verderans said to the painter, Seems to be getting warm. Indeed, her presence gave the house what none of the other houses that he visited seemed to possess, a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart. And so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism, namely the little clan, were transformed for Swan into a series of daily encounters with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her, in doing which he incurred no very great risk, since, even although he had written to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening, and accompany her home. But one evening, when, irritated by the thought of that inevitable dark drive together, he had taken his other little girl all the way around to the bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at the Verderans. He was so late in reaching them that Odette, supposing that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare of her, Swan felt his heart rung by sudden anguish. He shook with the sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that certainty of finding it whenever he would, which, as in the case of all our pleasures, reduced, if it did not altogether, blind him to its dimensions. Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn't here? Mr. Verderan asked his wife. I think we may say that he's hooked. The face he pulled exploded Dr. Katard, who, having left the house for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife, and did not know whom they were discussing. Do you mean to say that you didn't meet him on the doorstep? The loveliest of swans? No. Mr. Swan has been here just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a swan tremendously agitated, in a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left. You mean to say that she has gone the whole hog with him? That she has burned her boats? Inquired the doctor cautiously, testing the meaning of his phrases. Why, of course not. There's absolutely nothing in it. In fact, between you and me, I think she's making a great mistake in behaving like a silly little fool, which she is, incidentally. Come, come, come, said Mr. Verduran. How on earth do you know that there's nothing in it? We haven't been there to see have we now. She would have told me, answered Madame Verduran with dignity. I may say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I told her that she ought to live with him. She makes out that she can't. She admits she was immensely attracted by him at first, but he's always shy with her. And that makes her shy with him. Besides, she doesn't care for him in that way, she says. It's an ideal love. Platonic, you know. She's afraid of rubbing the bloom off. Oh, I don't know half the things, she says. How should I? And yet he's exactly the sort of man she wants. I beg to differ from you, Mr. Verduran, courteously interrupted. I am only half satisfied with the gentleman. I feel that he poses. Madame Verduran'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 Ventus, 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 say nasty things about Odette, broken Madame Verduran, 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, Swan had run into the Verduran's butler who had been somewhere else a moment earlier when he arrived, and who had been asked by Odette to tell Swan, but that was at least an hour ago, that she would probably stop to drink a cup of chocolate at Prevost's on her way home. Swan set off at once for Prevost's, but every few yards his carriage was held up by others, whereby 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 notebook, 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 be, actually, of his arriving at Prevost'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 then, Swan 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 verdurans 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 tomorrow, exactly what he had been hoping not an hour before as he drove toward Madame Verdurans. He was obliged to admit that now, as he sat in the same carriage and drove to Prevost'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 Prevost'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 he 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 Verderaise. Pretexts, that is to say, which would enable him to prolong 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 prevosts. 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, Rémy, Rizos d'Orgeloridon, for whom he presently, after a fruitless search, found himself waiting at the spot where the carriage was to meet him. He did not appear, and Swan tantalized himself with alternate pictures of the approaching moment as one in which Rémy would say to him, Sir, the lady is there, or as one in which Rémy would say to him, Sir, the lady was not in any of the cafes, and so he saw himself faced by the clothes of his evening, a thin 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, Swan asked, Not, did you find the lady, but remind me, to order in some more firewood, I'm sure we must be running short. Perhaps he had persuaded himself that, if Rémy had at last found Odette in some cafe where she was waiting for him still, then his night of misery was already obliterated by the realization, begun already in his mind of a night of joy, and that there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of 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 thralldom 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 error of indifference, which Swan could so lightly assume when Remy uttered his final, unalterable response, fell from him like a cast-off cloak, when he saw Remy 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 Remy, since it was she that went away without waiting for you, sir, and said she was going to prevoce, 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 Swan, murmured a few words in his ears, asked him to take her home, and left him shuddering. Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost euridice. Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided. That is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive, and that condition is fulfilled so soon as, in the moment when she has failed to meet us, for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company, is abruptly substituted, an anxious torturing desire whose object is the creature herself, an irrational absurd desire which the laws of civilized society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to ass wage, the insensate agonizing desire to possess her. Swan made Rémy drive him to such restaurants as were still open. It was the sole hypothesis now of that happiness which he had contemplated so calmly. He no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon their meeting, and promised, in case of success, to reward his coachman as though, by inspiring in him a will to triumph which would reinforce his own, he could bring it to pass by a miracle that Odette, assuming that she had long since gone home to bed, might yet be found seated in some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the quest as far as the Maison d'Oré, burst twice into tortonnes, and still, without catching sight of her, was emerging from the café anglais, striding with haggard gaze towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of the boulevard des Italiennes, when he collided with the person coming in the opposite direction. It was Odette. She explained later that there had been no room at prevosts that she had gone instead to supp at the Maison d'Oré, and had been sitting there in an alcove where he must have overlooked her, and that she was now looking for her carriage. She had so little expected to see him that she started back in alarm. As for him, he had ransacked the streets of Paris, not that he supposed possible that he should find her, but because he would have suffered even more cruelly by abandoning the attempt. But now the joy, which his reason had never ceased to assure him, was not that evening, at least, to be realized. But now the joy was suddenly apparent and more real than ever before, for he himself had contributed nothing to it by anticipating probabilities. It remained integral and external to himself. There was no need for him to draw on his own resources to endow it with truth. It was from itself that there emanated, it was itself, that projected towards him that truth whose glorious rays melted and scattered like the cloud of a dream, the sense of loneliness which had lowered over him, that truth upon which he had supported, nay, founded, albeit unconsciously, his vision of bliss. So will a traveller who has come down on a day of glorious weather to the Mediterranean shore, and is doubtful whether they still exist, those lands which he has left, let his eyes be dazzled rather than cast a backward glance by the radiance streaming towards him from the luminous and unfading azure at his feet. He climbed after her into the carriage which she had kept and ordered his own to follow. She had in her hand a bunch of catleges, and swan could see beneath the film of lace that covered her head more of the same flowers fastened to a swan's down plume. She was wearing under her cloak a flowing gown of black velvet cut up on one side so as to reveal a large triangular patch of her white silk skirt with an insertion also of white silk in the cleft of her low-necked bodice in which were fastened a few more cutleges. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of swan had given her when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats. She uttered a cry and fell back quivering and breathless. It's all right, he assured her. Don't be frightened. And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own. Then went on, Whatever you do, don't utter a word. Just make a sign, yes or no, or you'll be out of breath again. You won't mind if I put the flowers straight on your bodice. The jolt has loosened them. I'm afraid of their dropping out. I'm just going to fasten them a little more securely. She was not used to being treated with such formality by men, and smiled as she answered, No, not at all. I don't mind, at least. But he chilled a little by her answer, perhaps, also to bear out the pretense that he had been sincere in adopting the jolt, or even because he was already beginning to believe that he had been, exclaimed, No, no, you mustn't speak. You will be out of breath again. You can easily answer in signs. I shall understand, really and truly now. You don't mind my doing this? Look, there is a little—I think it must be pollen spilt over your dress. May I brush it off with my hand? That's not too hard. I'm not hurting you, am I? I'm tickling you, perhaps, a little, but I don't want to touch the velvet in case I rub it the wrong way. But don't you see, I really had to fasten the flowers. They would have fallen out if I hadn't. Like that, now. If I just push them a little farther down—seriously, I'm not annoying you, am I? But I just sniff them to see whether they've really lost their scent. I don't believe I ever smelt any before, may I? Tell the truth now. Still smiling, she shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly, as who should say, You're quite mad. You know very well that I like it. He slipped his other hand upwards along Odette's cheek. She fixed her eyes on him with that languishing and solemn air which marks the women of the old Florentine's paintings, in whose faces he had found the type of hers, swimming at the brink of her fringed lids, her brilliant eyes, large and finally drawn as theirs, seemed on the verge of breaking from her face and rolling down her cheeks like two great tears. She bent her neck as all their necks may be seen to bend in the pagan scenes as well as in the scriptural. And although her attitude was, doubtless, habitual and instinctive, one which she knew to be appropriate to such moments, and was careful not to forget to assume, she seemed to need all her strength to hold her face back, as though some invisible force were drawing it down toward swans. And Swanet was who, before she allowed her face, as though despite her efforts to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, a little distance between his hands. He had intended to leave time for her mind to overtake her body's movements, to recognize the dream which she so long cherished and to assist at its realization. Like a mother invited as a spectator, when a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps, moreover, Swan himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now, for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveler strives to bear away with him in memory, the view of a country to which he may never return. End of Section 17. Section 18 of Swan's Way. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Denny Sayers. Swan's Way. By Marcel Proust. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief. Section 18. But he was so shy in approaching her that after this evening, which had begun, by his arranging her cutleias, and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of chilling her from the reluctance to appear even retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this, which could always be repeated since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion, he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had any cutleias pinned to her bodice, he would say, It is most unfortunate. The cutleias don't need tucking in this evening. They've not been disturbed as they were the other night. I think, though, that this one isn't quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others? Or else, if she had none? Oh, no cutleias this evening. Then there's nothing for me to arrange. So that for some time there was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first evening, when he had started by touching her throat with his fingers first, and then with his lips. But their caresses began invariably with this modest exploration, and long afterwards, when the arrangement, or rather the ritual pretense of an arrangement of her cutleias, had quite fallen into destitute, the metaphor, do a cutleia, transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its original meaning, when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession, in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing, survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. And yet, possibly, this particular manner of saying to make love had not the precise significance of its synonyms. However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be described in advance. It still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned be, or be thought to be, so difficult as to oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as was originally for Swan, the arrangement of the cutleias. He trembled as he hoped that evening, but Odette, he told himself, if she were deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his intention, that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge for him from their large and richly colored petals, and the pleasure which he already felt and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps only because she was not yet aware of it herself, seemed to him for that reason as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid the flowers of the earthly paradise, a pleasure which had never before existed, which he was now striving to create, a pleasure and the special name which he was to give it preserved its identity entirely individual and new. The ice once broken every evening when he had taken her home he must follow her into the house, and often she would come out again in her dressing gown and escort him to his carriage and would kiss him before the eyes of his coachmen, saying, what on earth does it matter what people see? And on evenings when he did not go to the verdurans, which happened occasionally, now that he had opportunities of meeting Odette elsewhere, when, more and more rarely, he went into society she would beg him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. The season was spring, the nights clear and frosty. He would come away from an evening party, jump into his Victoria, spread a rug over his knees, tell the friends who were leaving at the same time and who insisted on his going home with them that he could not, that he was not going in their direction. Then the coachmen would start off at a fast trot without further orders, knowing quite well where he had to go. His friends would be left marvelling, and as a matter of fact, Swan was no longer the same man. No one ever received a letter from him now demanding an introduction to a woman. He had ceased to pay any attention to women and kept away from the places in which they were ordinarily to be met. In a restaurant or in the country his manner was deliberately and directly the opposite of that by which only a few days earlier his friends would have recognized him, that manner which had seemed permanently and unalterably his own. To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character which not only takes the place of our normal character, but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible. On the other hand, there was one thing that was now invariable, namely that wherever Swan might be spending the evening he never failed to go on afterwards to a debt. The interval of space separating her from him was one which he must as inevitably traverse as he must descend by an irresistible gravitation, the steep slope of life itself. To be frank, as often as not, when he had stayed late at a party he would have preferred to return home at once without going so far out of his way and to postpone their meeting until tomorrow. But the very fact of his putting himself to such an inconvenience at an abnormal hour in order to visit her, while he guessed that his friends, as he left them, were saying to one another, he is tied hand and foot. There must certainly be a woman somewhere who insists on his going to her at all hours. Made him feel that he was leading the life of the class of men whose existence is colored by a love affair and in whom the perpetual sacrifice which they are making of their comfort and of their practical interests has engendered a spiritual charm. Then, though he may not consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she was waiting for him, that she was not anywhere or with anyone else, that he would see her before he went home drew the sting from that anguish, forgotten, it is true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened when he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verderans before his arrival and anguish, the actual cessation of which was so agreeable that it might even be called a state of happiness. Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever, more or less, in contact. Swan could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him in the years that were to come. Sometimes as he looked up from his Victoria on those fine and frosty nights of early spring and saw the dazzling moon-beams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly rosy it, like the moons which had one day risen on the horizon of his mind since then, had shed upon the world that mysterious light in which he saw it bathed. If he arrived after the hour at which Odette sent her servants to bed, before ringing the bell at the gate of her little garden, he would go round first into the other street, over which, at the ground level, among the windows, all exactly alike, but darkened, of the adjoining houses, shone the solitary, lightened window of her room. He would rap upon the pain, and she would hear the signal and answer before running to meet him at the gate. He would find, lying open on the piano, some of her favorite music, the Valls de Rose, the pauvre fou of Tagliafico, which according to the instructions embodied in her will was to be played at her funeral. But he would ask her instead to give him the little phrase from Venturia's Sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favorite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskillful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase was associated still, in Swan's mind, with his love for Odette. He felt clearly that his love was something to which there were no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by any but himself. He realized to that Odette's qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value of the hours he spent in her company, and often when the cold government of reason stood unchallenged, he would readily have ceased to sacrifice so many of his intellectual and social interests to this imaginary pleasure. But the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate in him the room that was needed to contain it. The proportions of Swan's soul were altered. A margin was left for a form of enjoyment which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior to that of other concrete things. This thirst for an untasted charm, the little phrase would stimulate it anew in him, but without bringing him any definite gratification to assuage it, with the result that those parts of Swan's soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all care for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men alike, were left bare by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to describe the name of Odette. Moreover, where Odette's affection might seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence. Watching Swan's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an aesthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply, and the pleasure which the music gave him, which was shortly to create in him a real longing, was, in fact, closely akin, at such moments, to the pleasure which he would have derived from experimenting with perfumes, from entering into contract with a world for which we men were not created, which appears to lack form, because our eyes cannot perceive it, to lack significance because it escapes our intelligence, to which we may attain by way of one sense only. Deep repose, mysterious refreshment for Swan, for him whose eyes, although delicate, interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear forever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life, to feel himself transformed into a creature foreign to humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimera-like creature conscious of the world through his two ears alone. And as, notwithstanding, he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication must he strip bear his innermost soul of the whole armor of reason, and make it pass unattended through the straining vessel down into the dark filter of sound. He began to reckon up how much that was painful, perhaps even how much secret and unappeased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase, and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter that, though the phrase repeated that love is frail and fleeting when his love was so strong? He played with the melancholy which the phrase diffused. He felt it stealing over him, but like a caress which only deepened and sweetened his own sense of his own happiness. He would make Odette play him the phrase again ten, twenty times on end, insisting that while she played she must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life, how closely in their abundance are they pressed one against another, until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop, saying, how do you expect me to play when you keep on holding me? I can't do everything at once. Make up your mind what you want. Am I to play the phrase or do you want to play with me? Then he would become annoyed and she would burst out with a laugh which was transformed as it left her lips and descended upon him in a shower of kisses. Or else she would look at him sulkily and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in Botticelli's life of Moses. He would place it there, giving to Odette's neck the necessary inclination and when he had finished her portrait in Distemper in the fifteenth century on the wall of the Sistine, the idea that she was, nonetheless, in the room with him still, by the piano, at that very moment ready to be kissed and won. The idea of her material existence, of her being alive, would sweep over him with so violent and intoxication, with eyes starting from his head and jaws that parted as though to devour her. He would fling himself upon this Botticelli maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks. And then, as soon as he had left the house, not without returning to kiss her once again, because he had forgotten to take away with him in memory some detail of her fragrance or of her features. While he drove home in his Victoria, blessing the name of Odette who allowed him to pay her these daily visits, which, although they could not, he felt, bring any great happiness to her, still by keeping him immune from the fever of jealousy, by removing from him every possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness which had manifested itself in him that evening, when he had failed to find her at the verdurage, might help him to arrive without any recurrence of those crises of which the first had been so distressing that it must also be the last. At the termination of the strange series of hours in his life, hours almost enchanted in the same manner as these other following hours in which he drove through a deserted Paris by the light of the moon, noticing as he drove home that the satellite had now changed its position relatively to his own and was almost touching the horizon, feeling that his love also was obedient to these immutable laws of nature. He asked himself whether this period upon which he had entered was to last much longer, whether presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that dear countenance save as occupying a distant and diminished position and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm. For Swan was finding in things once more since he had fallen in love the charm that he had found when in his adolescence he had fancied himself an artist, with this difference that what charm lay in them now was conferred by Odette alone. He could feel, reawakening in himself, the inspirations of his boyhood had been dissipated among the frivolities of his later life but they all bore now the reflection, the stamp of a particular being and during the long hours which he now found a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit he became gradually himself again but himself enthralled him to another. He went to her only in the evenings and knew nothing of how she spent her time during the day any more than he knew of her past. So little indeed that he had not even the tiny initial clue which by allowing us to imagine what we do not know stimulates a desire for knowledge and so he never asked himself what she might be doing or what her life had been only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how some years earlier when he still did not know her someone had spoken to him of a woman who, if he remembered rightly must certainly have been Odette as of a tart a kept woman one of those women to whom he still attributed having lived but little in their company characteristics fundamentally perverse with which they had been for many years endowed by the imagination of certain novelists he would say to himself that one has as often as not only to take the exact counterpart of the reputation created by the world in order to judge a person fairly when with such a character he contrasted that of Odette so good so simple so enthusiastic and the pursuit of ideals so clearly incapable of not telling the truth that when he had once to beg her so that they might dine together alone to write to Madame Verduran saying that she was unwell the next day he had seen her face to face with Madame Verduran who asked whether she had recovered the pain, stammering and in spite of herself revealing in every feature how painful what a torture it was to her to act a lie and while in her answer she multiplied the fictitious details of an imaginary illness seeming to ask pardon by her suppliant look and her stricken accents for the obvious falsehood of her words in certain days however though these came seldom she would call upon him in the afternoon to interrupt his musings or the essay on Vermeer to which he had laterally returned his servant would come in to say that Madame du Crécy was in the small drawing room he would go in search of her and when he opened the door on Odette's blushing countenance as soon as she saw sight of Swan would appear changing the curve of her lips the look in her eyes the molding of her cheeks and all absorbing smile once he was left alone he would see again that smile and her smile of the day before another with which she had greeted him some time else the smile which had been her answer in the carriage that night he had asked her whether she objected to his rearranging her cutlius and the life of Odette at all other times since he knew nothing of it appeared to him upon a neutral and colorless background like those sheets of sketches by Watteau upon which one sees in every corner and in all directions traced in three colors upon the buff paper innumerable smiles but once in a while illuminating a chink of that existence which Swan still saw as a complete blank even if his mind assured him that it was not so because he was unable to imagine anything that might occupy it some friend who knew them both and suspecting that they were in love had not dared to tell him anything about her that was of the least importance would describe Odette's figure as he had seen her that very morning going on foot up through Abitucci in a cape trimmed with skunks wearing a Rembrandt hat and a bunch of violets in her bosom this simple outline reduced Swan to utter confusion by enabling him suddenly to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not wholly subordinated to his own he burned to know whom she had been seeking to fascinate by this costume in which he had never seen her he registered a vow to insist upon her telling him where she had been going at that intercepted moment as though in all the colorless life a life almost nonexistent since she was then invisible to him of his mistress there had been but a single incident apart from all those smiles directed towards himself namely her walking abroad beneath a Rembrandt hat with a bunch of violets in her bosom except when he asked her for Venturia's little phrase instead of the Vals de Rose Swan made no effort to induce her to play the things that he himself preferred nor in literature any more than in music to correct the manifold errors of her taste he fully realized that she was not intelligent when she said how much she would like him to tell her about the great poets she had imagined that she would suddenly get to know a romantic and heroic verse in the style of the Vican de Brurelli only even more moving as for Vermeer or Delft she asked whether he had been made to suffer by a woman if it was a woman that had inspired him and once Swan had told her that no one knew she had lost all interest in that painter for sure poetry well of course there'd be nothing like it if it was all true if the poets really believed the things they said but as often as not you'll find there's no one so mean and calculating as those fellows I know something about poetry I had a friend once who was in love with the poet of sorts and heaven and the stars oh she was properly taken in he had more than 300,000 francs out of her before he'd finished if then Swan tried to show her in what artistic beauty consisted how one ought to appreciate poetry or painting after a minute or two she would cease to listen yes I never thought it would be like that and he felt that her disappointment was so great that he preferred to lie to her assuring her that what he had said was nothing that he had only touched the surface that he had not time to go into it all properly that there was more in it than that then she would interrupt him with a brisk more in it what do tell me but he did not tell her before he realized how petty it would appear to her and how different from what she had expected less sensational and less touching he was afraid to less disillusioned in the matter of art she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love but the result that she found swan inferior intellectually to what she had supposed you're always so reserved I can't make you out she marveled increasingly at his indifference to money at his courtesy to everyone alike at the delicacy of his mind and indeed it happens often enough to a greater man than swan to a scientist or artist when he is not wholly misunderstood by the people among whom he lives that the feeling in them which proves that they have been convinced of the superiority of his intellect is created not by any admiration for his ideas for those are entirely beyond them but by their respect for what they term equalities there was also the respect with which Odette was inspired by the thought of swan's social position although she had no desire that he should attempt to secure invitations for herself perhaps she felt that such attempts would be bound to fail perhaps indeed she feared less merely by speaking of her to his friends he should invoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind the fact remains that she had consistently held him to his promise never to mention her name her reason for not wishing to go into society was she had told him a quarrel which she had had long ago with another girl who had avenged herself by saying nasty things about her but swan objected surely people don't all know your friend yes don't you see it's like a spot of oil people are so horrid swan was unable frankly to appreciate this point on the other hand he knew that such generalizations as people are so horrid and a word of scandal spreads like a spot of oil were generally accepted as true there must therefore be cases to which they were literally applicable could Odette's case be one of these he teased himself with the question not for long for he was too subject to that mental oppression which had so weighed upon his father whenever he was faced by a difficult problem the event that world of society which concealed such terrors for Odette inspired her probably with no very great longing to enter it since it was too far removed from the world which she already knew for her to be able to form any clear conception of it at the same time while in certain respects she had retained a genuine simplicity and persistence kept up a friendship with a little dress maker now retired from business up whose steep and dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day she still thirsted to be in the fashion though her idea of it was not altogether that held by fashionable people for the latter fashion is a thing that emanates from a comparatively very small number of leaders who project it to a considerable distance with more or less strength according as one is nearer to or farther from their intimate center over the widening circle of their friends and the friends of their friends whose names form a sort of tabulated index people in society know this index by heart they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they have extracted a sort of taste of tact so automatic in its operation that swan for example without needing to draw upon his knowledge of the world if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been guests at a dinner could tell at once who he had been just as a man of letters merely by reading a phrase can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author but Odette was one of those persons an extremely numerous class whatever the fashionable world may think and to be found in every section of society who do not share this knowledge but imagine fashion to be something of quite another kind which assumes different aspects according to the circle to which they themselves belong but has the special characteristic common alike to the fashion of which Odette used to dream and to that before which Madame Cotard bowed of being directly accessible to all the other kind the fashion of fashionable people is it must be admitted accessible also but there are inevitable delays Odette would say of someone he never goes to any place that isn't really smart and if Swan were to ask her what she meant by that she would answer with a touch of contempt smart places what good heavens just fancy at your age having to be told what the smart places are in Paris what do you expect me to say well, on Sunday mornings there's the avenue de la Paris and round the lake at 5 o'clock and on Thursdays the Édène de Atra and the Hippodrome on Fridays then there are the balls what balls why silly the balls people give in Paris smart ones, I mean wait now you know who I mean the fellow who's in one of the jobbers offices yes, of course, you must know him he's one of the best known men in Paris that great big fair hair boy who wears such swagger clothes he always has a flower in his buttonhole and a light colored overcoat with a fold down the back he goes about with that old image takes her to all the first nights very well he gave a ball the other night and all the smart people in Paris were there I should have loved to go but you had to show your invitations at the door and I couldn't get one anywhere after all, I'm just as glad now that I didn't go I should have been killed in the crush and seen nothing just to be able to say one had been to Hebringer's ball you know how vain I am however you may be quite certain that half the people who tell you they were there are telling stories but I am surprised that you weren't there a regular tip-topper like you Swan made no attempt however to modify this conception of fashion feeling that his own came no nearer to the truth was just as fatuous devoid of all importance he saw no advantage to be gained by imparting it to his mistress with the result that after a few months she ceased to take any interest in the people to whose houses he went except when they were the means of his obtaining tickets for the paddock at race meetings or first nights at the theatre she hoped that he would continue to cultivate such profitable acquaintances but she had come to regard them as less smart since the day when she had passed the Marquis de Viparici in the street wearing a black surge dress and a bonnet with strings but she looks like a pew opener like an old charwoman darling that a Marquis goodness knows I'm not a Marquis but you'd have to pay me a lot of money before you'd get me to go about Paris rigged out like that nor could she understand Swan's continuing to live in his house on the Quai d'Orléans which though she dared not tell him so she considered unworthy of him it was true that she claimed to be fond of antiques and used to assume a rapturous and knowing heir when she confessed how she'd love to spend the whole day rummaging in secondhand shops hunting for bric-a-brac and things of the right date although it was a point of honour to which she obstinately clung as though obeying some old family custom that she should never answer any questions nor give any account of what she did during the daytime she spoke to Swan once about a friend to whose house she had been invited and had found that everything in it was of the period Swan could not get her to tell him what period it was only after thinking the matter over she replied that it was by which she meant that the walls were paneled sometime later she spoke to him again of her friend and added in the hesitating but confident tone in which one refers to a person whom one has met somewhere at dinner the night before of whom one had never heard until then but whom one's hosts seem to regard as someone so celebrated and important that Swan hopes that one's listener will know quite well who is meant and will be duly impressed her dining room is 18th century incidentally she had thought it hideous all bare as though the house were still unfinished women looked frightful in it and it would never become the fashion she mentioned it again a third time when she showed Swan a card with the name and address of the man who had designed the dining room and whom she wanted to send for when she had enough money to see whether he could not do one for her too not one like that of course but one of the sort she used to dream of one which unfortunately her little house would not be large enough to contain essence furniture and fireplaces like the chateau at Blois it was on this occasion that she let out to Swan what she really thought of his abode on the Quai d'Orléans he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged not in the Louis the 16th style for he went on although that was not of course done still it might be made charming but in the sham antique you wouldn't have her live like you among a lot of broken down chairs and threadbare carpets she exclaimed the innate respectability of the middle class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilatantism of the light woman people who enjoyed the up things who admired poetry despised sorted calculations of profit and loss and nourished ideals of honor and love she placed in a class by themselves superior to the rest of humanity there was no need actually to have those tastes provided one talked enough about them when a man had told her at dinner about and get his hands all covered with dust in the old furniture shops that he would never be really appreciated in this commercial age since he was not concerned about the things that interested it and that he belonged to another generation altogether she would come home saying why he's an adorable creature so sensitive I had no idea and she would conceive for him a strong and sudden friendship but on the other hand men who like Swan had these tastes but did not speak of them left her cold she was obliged of course to admit that Swan was most generous with his money but she would add pouting it's not the same thing you see with him and as a matter of fact what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness but it's vocabulary feeling that often he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion which all the same he loved as he could not help loving everything that came from her which even fascinated him for were they not so many more of those characteristic features by virtue of which the essential qualities of the woman emerged and were made visible and so when she was in a happy mood because she was going to see the Ren Topaz or when her eyes grew serious troubled, petulant if she was afraid of missing the flower show or merely of not being in time for tea with muffins and toast at the Rue Royal Tea Rooms where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable and set the seal upon a woman's outfit of smartness swan enraptured as all of us are at times by the natural behavior of a child or by the likeness of a portrait which appears to be on the point of speaking would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to fill the outlines of her face that he could not refrain from going across his lips oh, then so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower show, does she? she wants to be admired does she? very well we will take her there we can but obey her wishes as swan's sight was beginning to fail he had to resign himself to a pair of spectacles which he wore at home when working in the world he adopted a single eyeglass as being less disfiguring the first time that she saw it in his eye she could not contain herself for joy I really do think for a man that is to say it is tremendously smart how nice you look with it every inch a gentleman all you want now is a title and a regret in her voice he liked Odette to say these things just as if he had been in love with the Breton girl he would have enjoyed seeing her in her quaff and hearing her say that she believed in ghosts always until then as is common among men whose taste for the fine arts develops independently of their sensuality a grotesque disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to either taste simultaneously yielding to the seduction of works of art which grew more and more subtle as the women in whose company he enjoyed them grew more illiterate and common he would take a little servant girl to a screened box in a theater where there was some decadent piece which he had wished to see performed or to an exhibition of impressionist painting with the conviction, moreover that an educated society woman would have understood them no better but would not have managed to keep quiet about them so prettily but now that he was in love with Odette all this was changed to share her sympathies to strive to be one with her in spirit was a task so attractive that he tried to find satisfaction in the things that she liked and did find a pleasure not only in copying her habits but in adopting her opinions which was all the deeper because as those habits and opinions sprang from no roots in her intelligence trusted to him nothing except that love for the sake of which he had preferred them to his own if he went again to Serge Panin if he looked for opportunities of going to watch Olivier Metra conducting it was for the pleasure of being initiated into every one of the ideas in Odette's mind a feeling that he had an equal share in all her tastes this charm of drawing him closer to her which her favorite plays and pictures in places possessed struck him as being more mysterious than the intrinsic charm of more beautiful things and places which appeal to him by their beauty but without recalling her besides having allowed the intellectual beliefs of his youth to grow faint until his skepticism as a finished man of the world had gradually penetrated them unawares he held or at least he had held for so long that he had fallen into the habit of saying that the objects which we admire have no absolute value in themselves that the whole thing is a matter of dates and casts and consists in a series of fashions the most vulgar of which are worth just as much as those which are regarded as the most refined and as he had decided that the importance which Odette attached to receiving cards to a private view was not in itself any more ridiculous than the pleasure which he himself had at one time felt in going to luncheon with the Prince of Wales so he did not think that the admiration which she professed for Monte Carlo or for the riggy was any more unreasonable than his liking for Holland which she imagined as ugly and for Versailles which bored her to tears and so he denied himself the pleasure of visiting those places consoling himself with the reflection that it was for her sake that he wished to feel to like nothing that was not equally felt and liked by her like everything else that formed part of Odette's environment and was no more in a sense than the means whereby he might see and talk to her more often he enjoyed the society of the verdurant with them since at the heart of all their entertainments musical evenings games suppers and fancy dress excursions to the country theater parties even the infrequent big evenings when they entertained boars there were the presence of Odette the sight of Odette conversation with Odette and an estimable boon which the verdurant asking him to their house bestowed on swan he was happier in the little nucleus than anywhere else and tried to find some genuine merit in each of its members imagining that his tastes would lead him to frequent their society for the rest of his life never daring to whisper to himself lest he should doubt the truth of the suggestion of being in love with Odette at least when he tried to suppose that he would always go to the verdurant a proposition which priori raised fewer fundamental objections on the part of his intelligence he saw himself for the future continuing to meet Odette every evening that did not perhaps come quite to the same thing as his being permanently in love with her but for the moment while he was in love with her to feel that he would not one day cease to see her was all that he could ask what a charming atmosphere he said to himself how entirely genuine life is to these people they are far more intelligent far more artistic surely than the people one knows Madame Verdurant in spite of a few trifling exaggerations which are rather absurd has a sincere love of painting and music what a passion for works of art what anxiety to give pleasure to artists her ideas about some of the people one knows are not quite right but then their ideas about artistic circles are all together wrong possibly I make no great intellectual demands upon conversation but I am perfectly happy talking to Qatar although he does trot out those idiotic puns and as for the painter if he is rather unpleasantly affected when he tries to be paradoxical still he has one of the finest that I have ever come across besides what is most important one feels quite free there one does what one likes without constraint or fuss what a flow of humor there is every day in that drawing room certainly with a few rare exceptions I never want to go anywhere else again it will become more and more of a habit and I shall spend the rest of my life among them end of section 18