In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [126]
“And then, besides, you too,” he had said to her, “I know what women are; you must have a whole heap of things to do, and never any time to spare.”
“I? Why, I never have anything to do. I’m always free, and I always will be free if you want me. At whatever hour of the day or night it may suit you to see me, just send for me, and I shall be only too delighted to come. Will you do that? Do you know what would be nice—if I were to introduce you to Mme Verdurin, where I go every evening. Just fancy our meeting there, and my thinking that it was a little for my sake that you had come.”
And doubtless, in thus remembering their conversations, in thinking about her thus when he was alone, he was simply turning over her image among those of countless other women in his romantic day-dreams; but if, thanks to some accidental circumstance (or even perhaps without that assistance, for the circumstance which presents itself at the moment when a mental state, hitherto latent, makes itself felt, may well have had no influence whatsoever upon that state), the image of Odette de Crécy came to absorb the whole of these day-dreams, if the memory of her could no longer be eliminated from them, then her bodily imperfections would no longer be of the least importance, nor would the conformity of her body, more or less than any other, to the requirements of Swann’s taste, since, having become the body of the woman he loved, it must henceforth be the only one capable of causing him joy or anguish.
It so happened that my grandfather had known—which was more than could be said of any of their actual acquaintance—the family of these Verdurins. But he had entirely severed his connexion with the “young Verdurin,” as he called him, considering him more or less to have fallen—though without losing hold of his millions—among the riff-raff of Bohemia. One day he received a letter from Swann asking whether he could put him in touch with the Verdurins: “On guard! on guard!” my grandfather exclaimed as he read it, “I’m not at all surprised; Swann was bound to finish up like this. A nice lot of people! I cannot do what he asks, because in the first place I no longer know the gentleman in question. Be sides, there must be a woman in it somewhere, and I never get mixed up in such matters. Ah, well, we shall see some fun if Swann begins running after the young Verdurins.”
And on my grandfather’s refusal to act as sponsor, it was Odette herself who had taken Swann to the house.
The Verdurins had had dining with them, on the day when Swann made his first appearance, Dr and Mme Cottard, the young pianist and his aunt, and the painter then in favour, and these were joined, in the course of the evening, by a few more of the “faithful.”
Dr Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so by way of precaution he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional, a provisional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he dared not allow this smile to assert itself positively on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which could be deciphered the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?” He was no more confident of the manner in which he ought to conduct himself in the street, or indeed in life generally, than he was in a drawing-room; and he might be seen greeting passers-by, carriages, and anything that occurred with a knowing smile which absolved his subsequent behaviour of all impropriety, since it proved, if it should turn out unsuited to the occasion, that he was well aware of that, and that if he had assumed a smile, the jest was a secret of his own.
On all those points, however, where a plain question