In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [188]
The very next day, he did. She wrote that the Verdurins and their friends had expressed a desire to attend these performances of Wagner, and that, if he would be so good as to send her the money, she would at last have the pleasure, after going so often to their house, of entertaining the Verdurins in hers. Of him she said not a word; it was to be taken for granted that their presence would be a bar to his.
Then he had the pleasure of sending round to her that annihilating answer, every word of which he had carefully rehearsed overnight without venturing to hope that it could ever be used. Alas! he felt only too certain that with the money she had, or could easily procure, she would be able all the same to take a house at Bayreuth, since she wished to do so, she who was incapable of distinguishing between Bach and Clapisson. Let her take it, then: at least she would have to live in it more frugally. No chance (as there would have been if he had replied by sending her several thousand-franc notes) of organising each evening in some castle those exquisite little suppers after which she might perhaps indulge the whim (which, it was possible, had never yet seized her) of falling into the arms of Forcheville. At any rate it would not be he, Swann, who paid for this loathsome expedition! Ah! if he could only manage to prevent it, if she could sprain her ankle before setting out, if the driver of the carriage which was to take her to the station would consent (at no matter what price) to smuggle her to some place where she could be kept for a time in seclusion—that perfidious woman, her eyes glittering with a smile of complicity for Forcheville, that Odette had become for Swann in the last forty-eight hours!
But she was never that for very long. After a few days the shining, crafty eyes lost their brightness and their duplicity, the picture of a hateful Odette saying to Forcheville “Look how furious he is!” began to fade and dissolve. Then gradually the face of the other Odette would reappear and rise before him, softly radiant—that Odette who also turned with a smile to Forcheville, but with a smile in which there was nothing but tenderness for Swann, when she said: “You mustn’t stay long, because this gentleman doesn’t much like my having visitors when he’s here. Oh! if you only knew the creature as I know him!”—that same smile with which she used to thank Swann for some instance of his courtesy which she prized so highly, for some advice for which she had asked him in one of those moments of crisis when she would turn to him alone.
And thinking of this other Odette, he would ask himself what could have induced him to write that outrageous letter, of which, probably, until then she would never have supposed him capable, a letter which must have brought him down from the high, from the supreme place which by his generosity, by his loyalty, he had won for himself in her esteem. He would become less dear to her, since it was for those qualities, which she found neither in Forcheville nor in any other, that she loved him. It was for them that Odette so often showed him a reciprocal warmth which counted for less than nothing in his moments of jealousy, because it was not a sign of reciprocal desire, was indeed a proof rather of affection than of love, but the importance of which he began once more to feel in proportion as the spontaneous relaxation of his suspicions, often accelerated by the distraction brought to him by reading about art or by the conversation of a friend, rendered his passion less exacting of reciprocities.
Now that, after this swing of the pendulum, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann’s jealousy had momentarily