In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [142]
It was not only Odette’s lassitude, however, that he must take pains to circumvent; it was also, not infrequently, his own. Feeling that, since Odette had had every facility for seeing him, she seemed no longer to have very much to say to him, he was afraid lest the manner—at once trivial, monotonous, and seemingly unalterable—which she now adopted when they were together should ultimately destroy in him that romantic hope, which alone had aroused and sustained his love, that a day might come when she would declare her passion. And so, in an attempt to revitalise Odette’s too fixed and unvarying attitude towards him, of which he was afraid of growing weary, he would write to her, suddenly, a letter full of feigned disappointment and simulated anger, which he sent off so that it should reach her before dinner. He knew that she would be alarmed, and that she would reply, and he hoped that, when the fear of losing him clutched at her heart, it would force from her words such as he had never yet heard her utter; and indeed, it was by this device that he had won from her the most affectionate letters she had so far written him. One of them, which she had sent round to him at midday from the Maison Dorée (it was the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête given for the victims of the recent floods in Murcia) began: “My dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write,” and had been put in the same drawer as the withered chrysanthemum. Or else, if she had not had time to write to him, when he arrived at the Verdurins’ she would come running up to him with an “I’ve something to say to you!” and he would gaze curiously at the revelation in her face and speech of what she had hitherto kept concealed from him of her heart.
Even before he reached the Verdurins’ door, when he caught sight of the great lamp-lit spaces of the drawing-room windows, whose shutters were never closed, he would begin to melt at the thought of the charming creature he would see as he entered the room, basking in that golden light. Here and there the figures of the guests stood out in silhouette, slender and black, between lamp and window, like those little pictures which one sees at regular intervals round a translucent lampshade, the other panels of which are simply naked light. He would try to distinguish Odette’s silhouette. And then, when he was once inside, without his being aware of it, his eyes would sparkle suddenly with such radiant happiness that M. Verdurin said to the painter: “Hm. Seems to be warming up.” And indeed her presence gave the house what none of the other houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort of nervous system, a sensory network which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart.
Thus the simple and regular manifestations of this social organism, the “little clan,” automatically provided Swann with a daily rendezvous with Odette, and enabled him to feign indifference to the prospect of seeing her, or even a desire not to see her; in doing which he incurred no very great risk since, even though he had written to her during the day, he would of necessity see her in the evening and accompany her home.
But one evening, when, depressed by the thought of that inevitable dark drive together, he had taken his young seamstress all the way to the Bois, so as to delay as long as possible the moment of his appearance at the Verdurins’, he arrived at the house so late that Odette, supposing that he did not intend to come, had already left. Seeing the room bare of her, Swann felt a sudden stab at the heart; he trembled at the thought of being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he was able for the first time to gauge, having always,