In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [180]
But, just as the virtues which he had still attributed to the Verdurins an hour or so earlier would not have sufficed, even if the Verdurins had actually possessed them, if they had not also encouraged and protected his love, to excite Swann to that state of intoxication in which he waxed tender over their magnanimity—an intoxication which, even when disseminated through the medium of other persons, could have come to him from Odette alone—so the immorality (had it really existed) which he now found in the Verdurins would have been powerless, if they had not invited Odette with Forcheville and without him, to unleash his indignation and make him fulminate against their “infamy.” And doubtless Swann’s voice was more perspicacious than Swann himself when it refused to utter those words full of disgust with the Verdurins and their circle, and of joy at having shaken himself free of it, save in an artificial and rhetorical tone and as though they had been chosen rather to appease his anger than to express his thoughts. The latter, in fact, while he abandoned himself to his invective, were probably, though he did not realise it, occupied with a wholly different matter, for having reached home, no sooner had he closed the front-door behind him than he suddenly struck his forehead, and reopening it, dashed out again exclaiming, in a voice which, this time, was quite natural: “I think I’ve found a way of getting invited to the dinner at Chatou tomorrow!” But it must have been a bad way, for Swann was not invited. Dr Cottard, who, having been summoned to attend a serious case in the country, had not seen the Verdurins for some days and had been prevented from appearing at Chatou, said on the evening after this dinner, as he sat down to table at their house: “But aren’t we going to see M. Swann this evening? He’s quite what you might call a personal friend of …”
“I sincerely trust we shan’t!” cried Mme Verdurin. “Heaven preserve us from him; he’s too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor.”
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a scientific truth which contradicted everything that he had previously believed but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; and bowing his head over his plate with timorous emotion, he simply replied: “Oh—oh—oh—oh—oh!” traversing, in an orderly withdrawal of his forces into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole compass of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann at the Verdurins’.
And so that drawing-room which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle in the way of their meeting. She no longer said to him, as in the early days of their love: “We shall meet, anyhow, tomorrow evening; there’s a supper-party at the Verdurins’,” but “We shan’t be able to meet tomorrow evening; there’s a supper-party at the Verdurins’.” Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the Opéra-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cléopâtre, and Swann could read in her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go, which not long since he could not have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him. “Yet it’s not really anger,” he assured himself, “that I feel when I see how she longs to go and scratch around in that dunghill of music. It’s disappointment, not of course for myself but for her; I’m disappointed to find that, after living for