In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [143]
“Did you notice the face he pulled when he saw that she wasn’t here?” M. Verdurin asked his wife. “I think we may say that he’s hooked.”
“The face he pulled?” exploded Dr Cottard who, having left the house for a moment to visit a patient, had just returned to fetch his wife and did not know whom they were discussing.
“D’you mean to say you didn’t meet him on the doorstep—the loveliest of Swanns?”
“No. M. Swann has been here?”
“Just for a moment. We had a glimpse of a Swann tremendously agitated. In a state of nerves. You see, Odette had left.”
“You mean to say that she is ‘on a friendly footing’ with him, that she has ‘given the go-ahead’?” inquired the doctor, cautiously trying out the meaning of these phrases.
“Why, of course not, there’s absolutely nothing in it: in fact, between you and me, I think she’s making a great mistake, and behaving like a silly little fool, which is what she is, in fact.”
“Come, come, come!” said M. Verdurin, “How on earth do you know that there’s nothing in it? We haven’t been there to see, have we now?”
“She would have told me,” answered Mme Verdurin with dignity. “I may say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present, I told her that she ought to sleep with him. She makes out that she can’t, that she did in fact have a crush on him at first, but he’s always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she doesn’t care for him in that way, she says; it’s an ideal love, she’s afraid of rubbing the bloom off—but how should I know? And yet it’s just what she needs.”
“I beg to differ from you,” M. Verdurin courteously interrupted. “I don’t entirely care for the gentleman. I feel he puts on airs.”
Mme Verdurin’s whole body stiffened, and her eyes stared blankly as though she had suddenly been turned into a statue; a device which enabled her to appear not to have caught the sound of that unutterable phrase which seemed to imply that it was possible for people to “put on airs” in their house, in other words consider themselves “superior” to them.
“Anyhow, if there’s nothing in it, I don’t suppose it’s because our friend believes she’s virtuous,” M. Verdurin went on sarcastically. “And yet, you never know; he seems to think she’s intelligent. I don’t know whether you heard the way he lectured her the other evening about Vinteuil’s sonata. I’m devoted to Odette, but really—to expound theories of aesthetics to her—the man must be a prize idiot.”
“Look here, I won’t have you saying nasty things about Odette,” broke in Mme Verdurin in her “little girl” manner. “She’s sweet.”
“But that doesn’t prevent her from being sweet. We’re not saying anything nasty about her, only that she isn’t exactly the embodiment of virtue or intellect. After all,” he turned to the painter, “does it matter so very much whether she’s virtuous or not? She might be a great deal less charming if she were.”
On the landing Swann had run into the Verdurins’ butler, who had been somewhere else a moment earlier when he arrived, and who had been asked by Odette to tell Swann in case he still turned up (but that was at least an hour ago) that she would probably stop for a cup of chocolate at Prévost’s on her way home. Swann set off at once for Prévost’s, but every few yards his carriage was held up by others, or by people crossing the street, loathsome obstacles that he would gladly have crushed beneath his wheels, were it not that a policeman fumbling with a note-book would delay him even longer than the actual passage of the pedestrian. He counted the minutes feverishly, adding a few seconds to each so as to be quite certain that he had not given himself short measure and so, possibly, exaggerated whatever chance there might actually be of his arriving at Prévost’s in time, and of finding her still there. And then, in a moment of illumination, like a man in a fever who awakes from sleep and is conscious of the absurdity of