In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [186]
It was true that on one occasion Forcheville had asked to be driven home at the same time, but when, on reaching Odette’s door, he had begged to be allowed to come in too, she had replied, pointing to Swann: “Ah! That depends on this gentleman. You must ask him. Very well, you may come in just for a minute, if you insist, but you mustn’t stay long, because I warn you, he likes to sit and talk quietly with me, and he’s not at all pleased if I have visitors when he’s here. Oh, if you only knew the creature as I know him! Isn’t that so, my love, no one really knows you well except me?”
And Swann was perhaps even more touched by the spectacle of her addressing to him thus, in front of Forcheville, not only these tender words of predilection, but also certain criticisms, such as: “I feel sure you haven’t written yet to your friends about dining with them on Sunday. You needn’t go if you don’t want to, but you might at least be polite,” or, “Now, have you left your essay on Vermeer here so that you can do a little more of it tomorrow? What a lazy-bones! I’m going to make you work, I can tell you,” which proved that Odette kept herself in touch with his social engagements and his literary work, that they had indeed a life in common. And as she spoke she gave him a smile that told him she was entirely his.
At such moments as these, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as when an ill-adjusted reflector begins by casting huge, fantastic shadows on an object on the wall which then contract and merge into it, all the terrible and shifting ideas which he had formed about Odette melted away and vanished into the charming creature who stood there before his eyes. He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in Odette’s house, in the lamp-light, was perhaps, after all, not an artificial hour, invented for his special use (with the object of concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without his ever being able to form a satisfactory impression of it, an hour of Odette’s real life, of her life when he was not there), with theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits, but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette’s life; that if he himself had not been there she would have pulled forward the same armchair for Forcheville, would have poured out for him, not some unknown brew, but precisely this same orangeade; that the world inhabited by Odette was not that other fearful and supernatural world in which he spent his time placing her—and which existed, perhaps, only in his imagination—but the real world, exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which he might sit down presently and write, this drink which he was now being permitted to taste, all these objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude—for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from them, they themselves in return had been enriched by them, they showed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they impressed themselves upon his mind, took shape and grew solid before his eyes, at the same time as they soothed his troubled heart. Ah, if fate had allowed him to share a single dwelling with Odette, so that in her house he should be in his own, if, when asking the servant what there was for lunch, it had been Odette’s menu that he had been given in reply, if, when Odette wished to go for a morning walk in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carrying her overcoat when she was too warm, and in the evening, after dinner, if she wished to stay at home in deshabille, if he had been