In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (6 page)

“In short,” M. de Norpois went on, addressing my father, “Vaugoubert has brought off a considerable triumph, and one that even surpassed his expectations. He expected, you understand, a formal toast (which, after the storm-clouds of recent years, would have been already an achievement) but nothing more. Several persons who had the honour to be present have assured me that it is impossible merely from reading the speech to form any conception of the effect that it produced when articulated with marvellous clearness of diction by the King, who is a master of the art of public speaking and underlined in passing every delicate intention, every subtle courtesy. In this connection, one of my informants told me a little anecdote which brings out once again that frank, boyish charm by which King Theodosius has won so many hearts. I am assured that, precisely at that word ‘affinities,’ which was, on the whole, the great innovation of the speech, and one that, you will see, will be the talk of the chancelleries for years to come, His Majesty, anticipating the delight of our ambassador, who would see it as the just consummation of his efforts—of his dreams, one might almost say—and, in a word, his marshal’s baton, made a half turn towards Vaugoubert and fixing upon him the arresting gaze so characteristic of the Oettingens, brought out that admirably chosen word ‘affinities,’ a veritable brain-wave, in a tone which made it plain to all his hearers that it was employed of set purpose and with full knowledge of its implications. It appears that Vaugoubert found some difficulty in mastering his emotion, and I must confess that, to a certain extent, I can well understand it. Indeed, a person worthy of absolute credence confided to me that the King came up to Vaugoubert after the dinner, when His Majesty was holding informal court, and was heard to say, ‘Are you satisfied with your pupil, my dear Marquis?’ ”

“One thing, however,” M. de Norpois concluded, “is certain; and that is that a speech of such a nature has done more than twenty years of negotiation towards bringing the two countries together, uniting their ‘affinities,’ to borrow the picturesque expression of Theodosius II. It is no more than a word, if you like, but look what success it has had, how the whole of the European press is repeating it, what interest it has aroused, what a new note it has struck. Besides, it is entirely in keeping with the young sovereign’s style. I will not go so far as to say that he lights upon a diamond of that water every day. But it is very seldom, that, in his prepared speeches, or better still in the spontaneous flow of his conversation, he does not reveal his character—I was on the point of saying ‘does not affix his signature’—by the use of some incisive word. I myself am quite free from any suspicion of partiality in this respect since I am opposed to all innovations in terminology. Nine times out of ten they are most dangerous.”

“Yes, I was thinking only the other day that the recent telegram from the Emperor of Germany could not be much to your liking,” said my father.

M. de Norpois raised his eyes to heaven, as who should say, “Oh, that fellow!” before he replied: “In the first place, it is an act of ingratitude. It is more than a crime, it’s a blunder, and one of a crassness which I can describe only as pyramidal! Indeed, unless someone puts a check on his activities, the man who got rid of Bismarck is quite capable of repudiating by degrees the whole of the Bismarckian policy; after which it will be a leap in the dark.”

“My husband tells me, Monsieur, that you may perhaps take him to Spain one summer. I’m delighted for his sake.”

“Why yes, it’s an idea that greatly appeals to me. I should very much like to make this journey with you, my dear fellow. And you, Madame, have you decided yet how you are going to spend your holidays?”

“I shall perhaps go with my son to Balbec, but I’m not certain.”

“Ah! Balbec is quite charming. I was down that way a few years ago. They are beginning to build some very attractive little villas there; I think you’ll like the place. But may I ask what made you choose Balbec?”

“My son is very anxious to visit some of the churches in that neighbourhood, and Balbec church in particular. I was a little afraid that the tiring journey there and the discomfort of staying in the place might be too much for his health. But I hear that they have just opened an excellent hotel, in which he will be able to get all the comfort that he requires.”

“Indeed! I must make a note of that for a certain person who will not turn up her nose at a comfortable hotel.”

“The church at Balbec is very beautiful, is it not, Monsieur?” I inquired, repressing my sorrow at learning that one of the attractions of Balbec consisted in its pretty little villas.

“No, it’s not bad; but it cannot be compared for a moment with such positive jewels in stone as the cathedrals of Rheims and Chartres, or with what is to my mind the pearl among them all, the Sainte-Chapelle here in Paris.”

“But Balbec church is partly Romanesque, is it not?”

“Why, yes, it is in the Romanesque style, which is to say very cold and lifeless, with not the slightest hint of the grace, the fantasy of the later Gothic builders, who worked their stone as if it had been so much lace. Balbec church is well worth a visit if one is in the neighbourhood; it is decidedly quaint. On a wet day, when you have nothing better to do, you might look inside; you’ll see the tomb of Tourville.”
³

“Tell me, were you at the Foreign Ministry dinner last night?” asked my father. “I couldn’t go.”

“No,” M. de Norpois smiled, “I must confess that I renounced it for a party of a very different sort. I was dining with a lady of whom you may possibly have heard, the beautiful Mme Swann.”

My mother repressed a shudder of apprehension, for, being more rapid in perception than my father, she grew alarmed on his account over things which only began to vex him a moment later. Whatever might cause him annoyance was first noticed by her, just as bad news of France is always known abroad sooner than among ourselves. But being curious to know what sort of people the Swanns might entertain, she inquired of M. de Norpois as to whom he had met there.

“Why, my dear lady, it is a house which (or so it struck me) is especially attractive to . . . gentlemen. There were several married men there last night, but their wives were all, as it happened, unwell, and so had not come with them,” replied the Ambassador with a slyness veiled by good-humour, casting round the table a glance the gentleness and discretion of which appeared to be tempering while in reality intensifying its malice.

“In all fairness,” he went on, “I must add that women do go to the house, but women who . . . belong rather—what shall I say—to the Republican world than to Swann’s” (he pronounced it “Svann’s”) “circle. Who knows? Perhaps it will turn into a political or a literary salon some day. Anyhow, they appear to be quite content as they are. Indeed, I feel that Swann advertises his contentment just a trifle too blatantly. He told us the names of all the people who had asked him and his wife out for the next week, people whose friendship there is no reason to be proud of, with a want of reserve, of taste, almost of tact, which I was astonished to remark in so refined a man. He kept on repeating, ‘We haven’t a free evening!’ as though that was a thing to boast of, positively like a parvenu, and he is certainly not that. For Swann had always plenty of friends, women as well as men, and without seeming over-bold, without the least wish to appear indiscreet, I think I may safely say that not all of them, of course, nor even the majority of them, but one at least, who is a lady of the very highest rank, would perhaps not have shown herself inexorably averse from the idea of entering into relations with Mme Swann, in which case it is safe to assume that more than one sheep of the social flock would have followed her lead. But it seems that there has been no indication of any approach on Swann’s part in that direction . . . What do I see? A Nesselrode pudding! As well! I declare I shall need a course at Carlsbad after such a Lucullan feast as this . . . Possibly Swann felt that there would be too much resistance to overcome. The marriage—so much is certain—was not well received. There has been some talk of his wife’s having money, but that’s the grossest fallacy. At all events, the whole affair has been looked upon with disfavour. And then, Swann has an aunt who is excessively rich and in an admirable position socially, married to a man who, financially speaking, is a power in the land. Not only did she refuse to meet Mme Swann, she conducted an out-and-out campaign to force her friends and acquaintances to do the same. I don’t mean to say that any well-bred Parisian has shown actual incivility to Mme Swann . . . No! A hundred times no! Quite apart from her husband’s being eminently a man to take up the gauntlet. At all events, the odd thing is to see the alacrity with which Swann, who knows so many of the most select people, cultivates a society of which the best that can be said is that it is extremely mixed. I myself, who knew him in the old days, must admit that I felt more astonished than amused at seeing a man so well-bred as he, so much at home in the most exclusive circles, effusively thanking the Principal Private Secretary to the Minister of Posts for coming to their house, and asking him whether Mme Swann might
take the liberty
of calling upon his wife. He must feel like a fish out of water, don’t you know; obviously, it’s quite a different world. All the same, I don’t think Swann is unhappy. It’s true that for some years before the marriage she was always trying to blackmail him in a rather disgraceful way; she would take the child away whenever Swann refused her anything. Poor Swann, who is as ingenuous as he is in other ways discerning, believed every time that the child’s disappearance was a coincidence, and declined to face the facts. Apart from that, she made such continual scenes that everyone expected that, as soon as she achieved her object and was safely married, nothing could possibly restrain her and that their life would be a hell on earth. Instead of which, just the opposite has happened. People are inclined to laugh at the way Swann speaks of his wife; it’s become a standing joke. Of course one hardly expected that, more or less aware of being . . . (you know Molière’s word),
⁴
he would go and proclaim it
urbi et orbi
; all the same, people find it a little excessive when he says that she’s an excellent wife. And yet that is not so far from the truth as people imagine. In her own way—which is not, perhaps, what all husbands would choose, but then, between you and me, I find it difficult to believe that Swann, who has known her for a long time and is far from being an utter fool, did not know what to expect—there can be no denying that she does seem to have a certain regard for him. I don’t say she isn’t flighty, and Swann himself is not noted for his constancy, if one is to believe the charitable tongues which, as you may suppose, continue to wag. But she is grateful to him for what he has done for her, and, contrary to the fears that were generally expressed, her temper seems to have become angelic.”

This alteration was perhaps not so extraordinary as M. de Norpois professed to find it. Odette had not believed that Swann would ever consent to marry her; each time she made the tendentious announcement that some man about town had just married his mistress she had seen him stiffen into a glacial silence, or at the most, if she challenged him directly by asking: “Don’t you think it’s very good and very right, what he’s done for a woman who sacrificed all her youth to him?” had heard him answer dryly: “But I don’t say that there’s anything wrong in it. Everyone does as he thinks fit.” She came very near, indeed, to believing that (as he used to threaten in moments of anger) he would leave her altogether, for she had heard it said, not long since, by a woman sculptor, that “You can’t be surprised at anything men do, they’re such cads,” and impressed by the profundity of this pessimistic maxim she had appropriated it for herself, and repeated it on every possible occasion with a despondent air that seemed to imply: “After all, it’s not at all impossible; it would be just my luck.” Meanwhile all the virtue had gone from the optimistic maxim which had hitherto guided Odette through life: “You can do anything with men when they’re in love with you, they’re such idiots!”, a doctrine which was expressed on her face by the same flicker of the eyelids that might have accompanied such words as: “Don’t be frightened; he won’t break anything.” While she waited, Odette was tormented by the thought of what such and such a friend of hers, who had been married by a man who had not lived with her for nearly so long as she herself had lived with Swann, and had no child by him, and who was now relatively esteemed, invited to balls at the Elysée and so forth, must think of Swann’s behaviour. A consultant more discerning than M. de Norpois would doubtless have been able to diagnose that it was this feeling of shame and humiliation that had embittered Odette, that the infernal temper she displayed was not an essential part of her nature, was not an incurable disease, and so would easily have foretold what had indeed come to pass, namely that a new regimen, that of matrimony, would put an end with almost magic swiftness to those painful incidents, of daily occurrence but in no sense organic. Almost everyone was surprised at the marriage, and that in itself is surprising. No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a person comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the person that they see. It would seem, none the less, that so far as Odette was concerned people could have taken into account the fact that if, indeed, she had never entirely understood Swann’s mentality, at least she was acquainted with the titles and with all the details of his studies, so much so that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as that of her own dressmaker; while as for Swann himself, she knew intimately those traits of character of which the rest of the world is ignorant or which it scoffs at, and of which only a mistress or a sister possesses the true and cherished image; and so strongly are we attached to such idiosyncrasies, even to those of them which we are most anxious to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity with them, such as we ourselves or our relatives have, that love affairs of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection. The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections. And among these special traits there were others, besides, which belonged as much to Swann’s intellect as to his character, but which nevertheless, because they had their roots in the latter, Odette had been able more easily to discern. She complained that when Swann turned author, when he published his essays, these characteristics were not to be found in them to the same extent as in his letters or in his conversation, where they abounded. She urged him to give them a more prominent place. She wanted this because it was these things that she herself most liked in him, but since she liked them because they were the things most typical of him, she was perhaps not wrong in wishing that they might be found in his writings. Perhaps also she thought that his work, if endowed with more vitality, so that it ultimately brought him success, might enable her also to form what at the Verdurins’ she had been taught to value above everything else in the world—a salon.