0065 Maintenant, tous les soirs, quand il l’avait ramenée chez elle, il fallait qu’il entrât
Maintenant, tous les soirs, quand il l’avait ramenée chez elle, il fallait qu’il entrât et souvent elle ressortait en robe de chambre et le conduisait jusqu’à sa voiture, l’embrassait aux yeux du cocher, disant: «Qu’est-ce que cela peut me faire, que me font les autres?» Les soirs où il n’allait pas chez les Verdurin (ce qui arrivait parfois depuis qu’il pouvait la voir autrement), les soirs de plus en plus rares où il allait dans le monde, elle lui demandait de venir chez elle avant de rentrer, quelque heure qu’il fût. C’était le printemps, un printemps pur et glacé. En sortant de soirée, il montait dans sa victoria, étendait une couverture sur ses jambes, répondait aux amis qui s’en allaient en même temps que lui et lui demandaient de revenir avec eux qu’il ne pouvait pas, qu’il n’allait pas du même côté, et le cocher partait au grand trot sachant où on allait. Eux s’étonnaient, et de fait, Swann n’était plus le même. On ne recevait plus jamais de lettre de lui où il demandât à connaître une femme. Il ne faisait plus attention à aucune, s’abstenait d’aller dans les endroits où on en rencontre. Dans un restaurant, à la campagne, il avait l’attitude inversée de celle à quoi, hier encore, on l’eût reconnu et qui avait semblé devoir toujours être la sienne. Tant une passion est en nous comme un caractère momentané et différent qui se substitue à l’autre et abolit les signes jusque-là invariables par lesquels il s’exprimait! En revanche ce qui était invariable maintenant, c’était que où que Swann se trouvât, il ne manquât pas d’aller rejoindre Odette. Le trajet qui le séparait d’elle était celui qu’il parcourait inévitablement et comme la pente même irrésistible et rapide de sa vie. A vrai dire, souvent resté tard dans le monde, il aurait mieux aimé rentrer directement chez lui sans faire cette longue course et ne la voir que le lendemain; mais le fait même de se déranger à une heure anormale pour aller chez elle, de deviner que les amis qui le quittaient se disaient: «Il est très tenu, il y a certainement une femme qui le force à aller chez elle à n’importe quelle heure», lui faisait sentir qu’il menait la vie des hommes qui ont une affaire amoureuse dans leur existence, et en qui le sacrifice qu’ils font de leur repos et de leurs intérêts à une rêverie voluptueuse fait naître un charme intérieur. Puis sans qu’il s’en rendît compte, cette certitude qu’elle l’attendait, qu’elle n’était pas ailleurs avec d’autres, qu’il ne reviendrait pas sans l’avoir vue, neutralisait cette angoisse oubliée mais toujours prête à renaître qu’il avait éprouvée le soir où Odette n’était plus chez les Verdurin et dont l’apaisement actuel était si doux que cela pouvait s’appeler du bonheur. Peut-être était-ce à cette angoisse qu’il était redevable de l’importance qu’Odette avait prise pour lui. Les êtres nous sont d’habitude si indifférents, que quand nous avons mis dans l’un d’eux de telles possibilités de souffrance et de joie, pour nous il nous semble appartenir à un autre univers, il s’entoure de poésie, il fait de notre vie comme une étendue émouvante où il sera plus ou moins rapproché de nous. Swann ne pouvait se demander sans trouble ce qu’Odette deviendrait pour lui dans les années qui allaient venir. Parfois, en voyant, de sa victoria, dans ces belles nuits froides, la lune brillante qui répandait sa clarté entre ses yeux et les rues désertes, il pensait à cette autre figure claire et légèrement rosée comme celle de la lune, qui, un jour, avait surgi dans sa pensée et, depuis projetait sur le monde la lumière mystérieuse dans laquelle il le voyait. S’il arrivait après l’heure où Odette envoyait ses domestiques se coucher, avant de sonner à la porte du petit jardin, il allait d’abord dans la rue, où donnait au rez-de-chaussée, entre les fenêtres toutes pareilles, mais obscures, des hôtels contigus, la fenêtre, seule éclairée, de sa chambre. Il frappait au carreau, et elle, avertie, répondait et allait l’attendre de l’autre côté, à la porte d’entrée. Il trouvait ouverts sur son piano quelques-uns des morceaux qu’elle préférait: la Valse des Roses ou Pauvre fou de Tagliafico (qu’on devait, selon sa volonté écrite, faire exécuter à son enterrement), il lui demandait de jouer à la place la petite phrase de la sonate de Vinteuil, bien qu’Odette jouât fort mal, mais la vision la plus belle qui nous reste d’une œuvre est souvent celle qui s’éleva au-dessus des sons faux tirés par des doigts malhabiles, d’un piano désaccordé. La petite phrase continuait à s’associer pour Swann à l’amour qu’il avait pour Odette. Il sentait bien que cet amour, c’était quelque chose qui ne correspondait à rien d’extérieur, de constatable par d’autres que lui; il se rendait compte que les qualités d’Odette ne justifiaient pas qu’il attachât tant de prix aux moments passés auprès d’elle. Et souvent, quand c’était l’intelligence positive qui régnait seule en Swann, il voulait cesser de sacrifier tant d’intérêts intellectuels et sociaux à ce plaisir imaginaire. Mais la petite phrase, dès qu’il l’entendait, savait rendre libre en lui l’espace qui pour elle était nécessaire, les proportions de l’âme de Swann s’en trouvaient changées; une marge y était réservée à une jouissance qui elle non plus ne correspondait à aucun objet extérieur et qui pourtant au lieu d’être purement individuelle comme celle de l’amour, s’imposait à Swann comme une réalité supérieure aux choses concrètes. Cette soif d’un charme inconnu, la petite phrase l’éveillait en lui, mais ne lui apportait rien de précis pour l’assouvir. De sorte que ces parties de l’âme de Swann où la petite phrase avait effacé le souci des intérêts matériels, les considérations humaines et valables pour tous, elle les avait laissées vacantes et en blanc, et il était libre d’y inscrire le nom d’Odette. Puis à ce que l’affection d’Odette pouvait avoir d’un peu court et décevant, la petite phrase venait ajouter, amalgamer son essence mystérieuse. A voir le visage de Swann pendant qu’il écoutait la phrase, on aurait dit qu’il était en train d’absorber un anesthésique qui donnait plus d’amplitude à sa respiration. Et le plaisir que lui donnait la musique et qui allait bientôt créer chez lui un véritable besoin, ressemblait en effet, à ces moments-là, au plaisir qu’il aurait eu à expérimenter des parfums, à entrer en contact avec un monde pour lequel nous ne sommes pas faits, qui nous semble sans forme parce que nos yeux ne le perçoivent pas, sans signification parce qu’il échappe à notre intelligence, que nous n’atteignons que par un seul sens. Grand repos, mystérieuse rénovation pour Swann,—pour lui dont les yeux quoique délicats amateurs de peinture, dont l’esprit quoique fin observateur de mœurs, portaient à jamais la trace indélébile de la sécheresse de sa vie—de se sentir transformé en une créature étrangère à l’humanité, aveugle, dépourvue de facultés logiques, presque une fantastique licorne, une créature chimérique ne percevant le monde que par l’ouïe. Et comme dans la petite phrase il cherchait cependant un sens où son intelligence ne pouvait descendre, quelle étrange ivresse il avait à dépouiller son âme la plus intérieure de tous les secours du raisonnement et à la faire passer seule dans le couloir, dans le filtre obscur du son. Il commençait à se rendre compte de tout ce qu’il y avait de douloureux, peut-être même de secrètement inapaisé au fond de la douceur de cette phrase, mais il ne pouvait pas en souffrir. Qu’importait qu’elle lui dît que l’amour est fragile, le sien était si fort! Il jouait avec la tristesse qu’elle répandait, il la sentait passer sur lui, mais comme une caresse qui rendait plus profond et plus doux le sentiment qu’il avait de son bonheur. Il la faisait rejouer dix fois, vingt fois à Odette, exigeant qu’en même temps elle ne cessât pas de l’embrasser. Chaque baiser appelle un autre baiser. Ah! dans ces premiers temps où l’on aime, les baisers naissent si naturellement! Ils foisonnent si pressés les uns contre les autres; et l’on aurait autant de peine à compter les baisers qu’on s’est donnés pendant une heure que les fleurs d’un champ au mois de mai. Alors elle faisait mine de s’arrêter, disant: «Comment veux-tu que je joue comme cela si tu me tiens, je ne peux tout faire à la fois, sache au moins ce que tu veux, est-ce que je dois jouer la phrase ou faire des petites caresses», lui se fâchait et elle éclatait d’un rire qui se changeait et retombait sur lui, en une pluie de baisers. Ou bien elle le regardait d’un air maussade, il revoyait un visage digne de figurer dans la Vie de Moïse de Botticelli, il l’y situait, il donnait au cou d’Odette l’inclinaison nécessaire; et quand il l’avait bien peinte à la détrempe, au XVe siècle, sur la muraille de la Sixtine, l’idée qu’elle était cependant restée là, près du piano, dans le moment actuel, prête à être embrassée et possédée, l’idée de sa matérialité et de sa vie venait l’enivrer avec une telle force que, l’œil égaré, les mâchoires tendues comme pour dévorer, il se précipitait sur cette vierge de Botticelli et se mettait à lui pincer les joues. Puis, une fois qu’il l’avait quittée, non sans être rentré pour l’embrasser encore parce qu’il avait oublié d’emporter dans son souvenir quelque particularité de son odeur ou de ses traits, tandis qu’il revenait dans sa victoria, bénissant Odette de lui permettre ces visites quotidiennes, dont il sentait qu’elles ne devaient pas lui causer à elle une bien grande joie, mais qui en le preservant de devenir jaloux,—en lui ôtant l’occasion de souffrir de nouveau du mal qui s’était déclaré en lui le soir où il ne l’avait pas trouvée chez les Verdurin—l’aideraient à arriver, sans avoir plus d’autres de ces crises dont la première avait été si douloureuse et resterait la seule, au bout de ces heures singulières de sa vie, heures presque enchantées, à la façon de celles où il traversait Paris au clair de lune. Et, remarquant, pendant ce retour, que l’astre était maintenant déplacé par rapport à lui, et presque au bout de l’horizon, sentant que son amour obéissait, lui aussi, à des lois immuables et naturelles, il se demandait si cette période où il était entré durerait encore longtemps, si bientôt sa pensée ne verrait plus le cher visage qu’occupant une position lointaine et diminuée, et près de cesser de répandre du charme. Car Swann en trouvait aux choses, depuis qu’il était amoureux, comme au temps où, adolescent, il se croyait artiste; mais ce n’était plus le même charme, celui-ci c’est Odette seule qui le leur conférait. Il sentait renaître en lui les inspirations de sa jeunesse qu’une vie frivole avait dissipées, mais elles portaient toutes le reflet, la marque d’un être particulier; et, dans les longues heures qu’il prenait maintenant un plaisir délicat à passer chez lui, seul avec son âme en convalescence, il redevenait peu à peu lui-même, mais à une autre.
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0065 The ice once broken, every evening, when he had taken her
Marcel Proust
"Remembrance of Things Past" (In Search of Lost Time),
translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930)
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 coachman, saying: “What on earth does it matter what people see?” And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins’ (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 coachman 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, Swann 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 recognised 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 Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on afterwards to Odette. 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 the morrow; but the very fact of his putting himself to such 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 coloured 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, which he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’ before his arrival, an 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. Swann 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 moonbeams fall between his eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other face, gleaming and faintly roseate like the moon’s, which had, one day, risen on the horizon of his mind and 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 lighted window of her room. He would rap upon the pane, 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 favourite music, the Valse des Roses, 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 Vinteuil’s sonata. It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the fairest impression that remains in our minds of a favourite air is one which has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. The little phrase was associated still, in Swann’s mind, with his love for Odette. He felt clearly that this love was something to which there were no corresponding external signs, whose meaning could not be proved by any but himself; he realised, too, that Odette’s qualities were not such as to justify his setting so high a value on 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 Swann’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 Swann’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 inscribe 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 Swann’s face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic 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 Swann,—for him whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever 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 chimaera-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 bare his innermost soul of the whole armour 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 unap-peased sorrow underlay the sweetness of the phrase; and yet to him it brought no suffering. What matter 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 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 Sixtine, the idea that she was, none the less, 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 an intoxication that, 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 Verdurins’—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 this 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 Swann 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, which 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 in thraldom to another.