Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“Aren’t you going to do any work this evening, I say?” she screamed suddenly to the little pianist, seeing an opportunity for displaying, before a ‘newcomer’ of Forcheville’s importance, at once her unfailing wit and her despotic power over the ‘faithful.’

“M. de Forcheville was just going to say something dreadful about you,” Mme. Cottard warned her husband as he reappeared in the room. And he, still following up the idea of Forcheville’s noble birth, which had obsessed him all through dinner, began again with: “I am treating a Baroness just now, Baroness Putbus; weren’t there some Putbuses in the Crusades? Anyhow they’ve got a lake in Pomerania that’s ten times the size of the Place de la Concorde. I am treating her for dry arthritis; she’s a charming woman. Mme. Verdurin knows her too, I believe.”

Which enabled Forcheville, a moment later, finding himself alone with Mme. Cottard, to complete his favourable verdict on her husband with: “He’s an interesting man, too; you can see that he knows some good people. Gad! but they get to know a lot of things, those doctors.”

“D’you want me to play the phrase from the sonata for M. Swann?” asked the pianist.

“What the devil’s that? Not the sonata-snake, I hope!” shouted M. de Forcheville, hoping to create an effect. But Dr. Cottard, who had never heard this pun, missed the point of it, and imagined that M. de Forcheville had made a mistake. He dashed in boldly to correct it: “No, no. The word isn’t serpent-à-sonates , it’s serpent-à-sonnettes !” he explained in a tone at once zealous, impatient, and triumphant.

Forcheville explained the joke to him. The Doctor blushed.

“You’ll admit it’s not bad, eh, Doctor?”

“Oh! I’ve known it for ages.”

Then they were silenced; heralded by the waving tremolo of the violin-part, which formed a bristling bodyguard of sound two octaves above it—and as in a mountainous country, against the seeming immobility of a vertically falling torrent, one may distinguish, two hundred feet below, the tiny form of a woman walking in the valley—the little phrase had just appeared, distant but graceful, protected by the long, gradual unfurling of its transparent, incessant and sonorous curtain. And Swann, in his heart of hearts, turned to it, spoke to it as to a confidant in the secret of his love, as to a friend of Odette who would assure him that he need pay no attention to this Forcheville.

“Ah! you’ve come too late!” Mme. Verdurin greeted one of the ‘faithful,’ whose invitation had been only ‘to look in after dinner,’ “we’ve been having a simply incomparable Brichot! You never heard such eloquence! But he’s gone. Isn’t that so, M. Swann? I believe it’s the first time you’ve met him,” she went on, to emphasize the fact that it was to her that Swann owed the introduction. “Isn’t that so; wasn’t he delicious, our Brichot?”

Swann bowed politely.

“No? You weren’t interested?” she asked dryly.

“Oh, but I assure you, I was quite enthralled. He is perhaps a little too peremptory, a little too jovial for my taste. I should like to see him a little less confident at times, a little more tolerant, but one feels that he knows a great deal, and on the whole he seems a very sound fellow.”

The party broke up very late. Cottard’s first words to his wife were: “I have rarely seen Mme. Verdurin in such form as she was to-night.”

“What exactly is your Mme. Verdurin? A bit of a bad hat, eh?” said Forcheville to the painter, to whom he had offered a ‘lift.’ Odette watched his departure with regret; she dared not refuse to let Swann take her home, but she was moody and irritable in the carriage, and, when he asked whether he might come in, replied, “I suppose so,” with an impatient shrug of her shoulders. When they had all gone, Mme. Verdurin said to her husband: “Did you notice the way Swann laughed, such an idiotic laugh, when we spoke about Mme. La Trémoïlle?”

She had remarked, more than once, how Swann and Forcheville suppressed the particle ‘de’ before that lady’s name. Never doubting that it was done on purpose, to shew that they were not afraid of a title, she had made up her mind to imitate their arrogance, but had not quite grasped what grammatical form it ought to take. Moreover, the natural corruptness of her speech overcoming her implacable republicanism, she still said instinctively “the de La Trémoïlles,” or, rather (by an abbreviation sanctified by the usage of music-hall singers and the writers of the ‘captions’ beneath caricatures, who elide the ‘de’), “the d’La Trémoïlles,” but she corrected herself at once to “Madame La Trémoïlle.—The Duchess , as Swann calls her,” she added ironically, with a smile which proved that she was merely quoting, and would not, herself, accept the least responsibility for a classification so puerile and absurd.

“I don’t mind saying that I thought him extremely stupid.”

M. Verdurin took it up. “He’s not sincere. He’s a crafty customer, always hovering between one side and the other. He’s always trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. What a difference between him and Forcheville. There, at least, you have a man who tells you straight out what he thinks. Either you agree with him or you don’t. Not like the other fellow, who’s never definitely fish or fowl. Did you notice, by the way, that Odette seemed all out for Forcheville, and I don’t blame her, either. And then, after all, if Swann tries to come the man of fashion over us, the champion of distressed Duchesses, at any rate the other man has got a title; he’s always Comte de Forcheville!” he let the words slip delicately from his lips, as though, familiar with every page of the history of that dignity, he were making a scrupulously exact estimate of its value, in relation to others of the sort.

“I don’t mind saying,” Mme. Verdurin went on, “that he saw fit to utter some most venomous, and quite absurd insinuations against Brichot. Naturally, once he saw that Brichot was popular in this house, it was a way of hitting back at us, of spoiling our party. I know his sort, the dear, good friend of the family, who pulls you all to pieces on the stairs as he’s going away.”

“Didn’t I say so?” retorted her husband. “He’s simply a failure; a poor little wretch who goes through life mad with jealousy of anything that’s at all big.”

Had the truth been known, there was not one of the ‘faithful’ who was not infinitely more malicious than Swann; but the others would all take the precaution of tempering their malice with obvious pleasantries, with little sparks of emotion and cordiality; while the least indication of reserve on Swann’s part, undraped in any such conventional formula as “Of course, I don’t want to say anything—” to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery. There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least ‘freedom of speech’ is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin. In his case as in theirs it was the novelty of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his designs.

Swann was still unconscious of the disgrace that threatened him at the Verdurins’, and continued to regard all their absurdities in the most rosy light, through the admiring eyes of love.

As a rule he made no appointments with Odette except for the evenings; he was afraid of her growing tired of him if he visited her during the day as well; at the same time he was reluctant to forfeit, even for an hour, the place that he held in her thoughts, and so was constantly looking out for an opportunity of claiming her attention, in any way that would not be displeasing to her. If, in a florist’s or a jeweller’s window, a plant or an ornament caught his eye, he would at once think of sending them to Odette, imagining that the pleasure which the casual sight of them had given him would instinctively be felt, also, by her, and would increase her affection for himself; and he would order them to be taken at once to the Rue La pérouse, so as to accelerate the moment in which, as she received an offering from him, he might feel himself, in a sense, transported into her presence. He was particularly anxious, always, that she should receive these presents before she went out for the evening, so that her sense of gratitude towards him might give additional tenderness to her welcome when he arrived at the Verdurins’, might even—for all he knew—if the shopkeeper made haste, bring him a letter from her before dinner, or herself, in person, upon his doorstep, come on a little extraordinary visit of thanks. As in an earlier phase, when he had experimented with the reflex action of anger and contempt upon her character, he sought now by that of gratification to elicit from her fresh particles of her intimate feelings, which she had never yet revealed.