0093 Ces nouvelles façons indifférentes, distraites, irritables

Ces nouvelles façons indifférentes, distraites, irritables, qui étaient maintenant celles d’Odette avec lui, certes Swann en souffrait; mais il ne connaissait pas sa souffrance; comme c’était progressivement, jour par jour, qu’Odette s’était refroidie à son égard, ce n’est qu’en mettant en regard de ce qu’elle était aujourd’hui ce qu’elle avait été au début, qu’il aurait pu sonder la profondeur du changement qui s’était accompli. Or ce changement c’était sa profonde, sa secrète blessure, qui lui faisait mal jour et nuit, et dès qu’il sentait que ses pensées allaient un peu trop près d’elle, vivement il les dirigeait d’un autre côté de peur de trop souffrir. Il se disait bien d’une façon abstraite: «Il fut un temps où Odette m’aimait davantage», mais jamais il ne revoyait ce temps. De même qu’il y avait dans son cabinet une commode qu’il s’arrangeait à ne pas regarder, qu’il faisait un crochet pour éviter en entrant et en sortant, parce que dans un tiroir étaient serrés le chrysanthème qu’elle lui avait donné le premier soir où il l’avait reconduite, les lettres où elle disait: «Que n’y avez-vous oublié aussi votre cœur, je ne vous aurais pas laissé le reprendre» et: «A quelque heure du jour et de la nuit que vous ayez besoin de moi, faites-moi signe et disposez de ma vie», de même il y avait en lui une place dont il ne laissait jamais approcher son esprit, lui faisant faire s’il le fallait le détour d’un long raisonnement pour qu’il n’eût pas à passer devant elle: c’était celle où vivait le souvenir des jours heureux.


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0093 These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable

Submitted by PROUST on Sat, 08/23/2008 - 19:02.

Marcel Proust

"Remembrance of Things Past" (In Search of Lost Time),

translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930)

These new manners, indifferent, listless, irritable, which Odette now adopted with Swann, undoubtedly made him suffer; but he did not realise how much he suffered; since it had been with a regular progression, day after day, that Odette had chilled towards him, it was only by directly contrasting what she was to-day with what she had been at first that he could have measured the extent of the change that had taken place. Now this change was his deep, his secret wound, which pained him day and night, and whenever he felt that his thoughts were straying too near it, he would quickly turn them into another channel for fear of being made to suffer too keenly. He might say to himself in a vague way: “There was a time when Odette loved me more,” but he never formed any definite picture of that time. Just as he had in his study a cupboard at which he contrived never to look, which he turned aside to avoid passing whenever he entered or left the room, because in one of its drawers he had locked away the chrysanthemum which she had given him on one of those first evenings when he had taken her home in his carriage, and the letters in which she said: “Why did you not forget your heart also? I should never have let you have that back,” and “At whatever hour of the day or night you may need me, just send me a word, and dispose of me as you please,” so there was a place in his heart to which he would never allow his thoughts to trespass too near, forcing them, if need be, to evade it by a long course of reasoning so that they should not have to pass within reach of it; the place in which lingered his memories of happy days.

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