In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [125]
Odette de Crécy came again to see Swann; her visits grew more frequent, and doubtless each visit revived the sense of disappointment which he felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he spontaneously admired. It must be remarked that Odette’s face appeared thinner and sharper than it actually was, because the forehead and the upper part of the cheeks, that smooth and almost plane surface, were covered by the masses of hair which women wore at that period drawn forward in a fringe, raised in crimped waves and falling in stray locks over the ears; while as for her figure—and she was admirably built—it was impossible to make out its continuity (on account of the fashion then prevailing, and in spite of her being one of the best-dressed women in Paris) so much did the corsage, jutting out as though over an imaginary stomach and ending in a sharp point, beneath which bulged out the balloon of her double skirts, give a woman the appearance of being composed of different sections badly fitted together; to such an extent did the frills, the flounces, the inner bodice follow quite independently, according to the whim of their designer or the consistency of their material, the line which led them to the bows, the festoons of lace, the fringes of dangling jet beads, or carried them along the busk, but nowhere attached themselves to the living creature, who, according as the architecture of these fripperies drew them towards or away from her own, found herself either strait-laced to suffocation or else completely buried.
But, after Odette had left him, Swann would think with a smile of her telling how the time would drag until he allowed her to come again; he remembered the anxious, timid way in which she had once begged him that it might not be too long, and the way she had gazed at him then, with a look of shy entreaty which gave her a touching air beneath the bunches of artificial pansies fastened in the front of her round bonnet of white straw, tied with a ribbon of black velvet. “And won’t you,” she had ventured, “come just once and have tea with me?” He had pleaded pressure of work, an essay—which, in reality, he had abandoned years ago—on Vermeer of Delft. “I know that I’m quite useless,” she had replied, “a pitiful creature like me beside a learned great man like you. I should be like the frog in the fable! And yet I should so much like to learn, to know things, to be initiated. What fun it would be to become a regular bookworm, to bury my nose in a lot of old papers!” she had added, with the self-satisfied air which an elegant woman adopts when she insists that her one desire is to undertake, without fear of soiling her fingers, some grubby task, such as cooking the dinner, “really getting down to it” herself. “You’ll only laugh at me, but this painter who stops you from seeing me” (she meant Vermeer), “I’ve never even heard of him; is he alive still? Can I see any of his things in Paris, so as to have some idea of what’s going on behind that great brow which works so hard, that head which I feel sure is always puzzling away about things; to be able to say ‘There, that’s what he’s thinking about!’ What a joy it would be to be able to help you with your work.”
He had excused himself on the grounds of his fear of forming new friendships, which he gallantly described as his fear of being made unhappy. “You’re afraid of affection? How odd that is, when I go about seeking nothing else, and would give my soul to find it!” she had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had been genuinely touched. “Some woman must have made you suffer. And you think that the rest are all like her. She can’t have understood you: you’re such an exceptional