In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [199]
It sometimes happened, again, that when, after meeting Swann, she saw some man approaching whom he did not know, he could distinguish upon Odette’s face that look of dismay which she had worn on the day when he had come to her while Forcheville was there. But this was rare; for on the days when, in spite of all that she had to do, and of her dread of what people might think, she did actually manage to see Swann, what predominated in her attitude now was self-assurance; a striking contrast, perhaps an unconscious revenge for, or a natural reaction from, the timorous emotion which, in the early days of their friendship, she had felt in his presence, and even in his absence, when she began a letter to him with the words: “My dear, my hand trembles so that I can scarcely write” (so, at least, she pretended, and a little of that emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have wanted to feign more). She had been attracted to Swann then. We do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love. When our happiness is no longer in their hands, how calm, how relaxed, how bold we become in their presence! In speaking to him, in writing to him now, she no longer employed those words by which she had sought to give herself the illusion that he belonged to her, creating opportunities for saying “my” and “mine” when she referred to him—“You are my very own; it is the perfume of our friendship, I shall keep it”—for speaking to him of the future, of death itself, as of a single adventure which they would share. In those early days, whatever he might say to her she would answer admiringly: “You know, you’ll never be like other people!”—she would gaze at that long face and slightly bald head, of which people who knew of his successes with women used to think: “He’s not conventionally good-looking, if you like, but he has style: that toupee, that eyeglass, that smile!”—and, with more curiosity perhaps to know him as he really was than desire to become his mistress, she would sigh: “If only I knew what was in that head of yours!”
But now, whatever he said, she would answer in a tone that was sometimes irritable, sometimes indulgent: “Ah! won’t you ever be like other people!” And gazing at that face which was only a little aged by his recent anxieties (though people now thought of it, by the same mental process which enables one to discover the meaning of a piece of symphonic music of which one has read the programme, or the resemblance of a child whose family one knows: “He’s not positively ugly, if you like, but he’s really rather absurd: that eyeglass, that toupee, that smile!”—adumbrating in their suggestible imaginations the invisible boundary which separates, at a few months’ interval, the face of a successful lover from that of a cuckold), she would say: “Oh, I do wish I could change you, put some sense into that head of yours.”
Always ready to believe in the truth of what he hoped, if Odette’s way of behaving to him left the slightest room for doubt, he would fling himself greedily upon her words: “You can if you like,” he would say to her.
And he tried to explain to her that to comfort him, to guide him, to make him work, would be a noble task, to which numbers of other women asked for nothing better than to be allowed to devote themselves, though it is only fair to add that in those other women’s hands the noble task would have seemed to Swann a tactless and intolerable usurpation of his freedom. “If she didn’t love me just a little,” he told himself, “she wouldn’t want to change me. And to change me, she will have to see me more often.” Thus