• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1582 0

rather than give up art and cleanliness, and that the burning of the “Gioconda” would distress her infinitely more than the destruction, by the same element, of the “fulltitudes” of people she knew. Theories which seemed paradoxical to her friends, but made them regard her as a superior woman, and earned her a weekly visit from the Belgian Minister, so that in the little world of which she was the sun everyone would have been greatly astonished to learn that elsewhere—at the Verdurins’, for instance—she was reckoned a fool. It was this vivacity of mind that made Mme Swann prefer men’s society to women’s. But when she criticised the latter it was always from the courtesan’s standpoint, singling out the blemishes that might lower them in the esteem of men, thick ankles, a bad complexion, inability to spell, hairy legs, foul breath, pencilled eyebrows. But towards a woman who had shown her kindness or indulgence in the past she was more lenient, especially if this woman was now in trouble. She would defend her warmly, saying: “People are not fair to her. I assure you, she’s quite a nice woman really.”

It was not only the furniture of Odette’s drawing-room, it was Odette herself whom Mme Cottard and all those who had frequented the society of Mme de Crécy would have found it difficult, if they had not seen her for some little time, to recognise. She seemed to be so much younger. No doubt this was partly because she had put on a little weight, was in better health, seemed at once calmer, cooler, more restful, and also because the new way in which she braided her hair gave more breadth to a face which was animated by an application of pink powder, and into which her eyes and profile, formerly too prominent, seemed now to have been reabsorbed. But another reason for this change lay in the fact that, having reached the turning-point of life, Odette had at length discovered, or invented, a physiognomy of her own, an unalterable “character,” a “style of beauty,” and on her uncoordinated features—which for so long, exposed to the dangerous and futile vagaries of the flesh, putting on momentarily years, a sort of fleeting old age, as a result of the slightest fatigue, had composed for her somehow or other, according to her mood and her state of health, a dishevelled, changeable, formless, charming face—had now set this fixed type, as it were an immortal youthfulness.

Swann had in his room, instead of the handsome photographs that were now taken of his wife, in all of which the same enigmatic and winning expression enabled one to recognise, whatever dress and hat she was wearing, her triumphant face and figure, a little daguerreotype of her, quite plain, taken long before the appearance of this new type, from which the youthfulness and beauty of Odette, which she had not yet discovered when it was taken, appeared to be missing. But doubtless Swann, having remained constant, or having reverted, to a different conception of her, enjoyed in the frail young woman with pensive eyes and tired features, caught in a pose between stillness and motion, a more Botticellian charm. For he still liked to see his wife as a Botticelli figure. Odette, who on the contrary sought not to bring out but to compensate for, to cover and conceal the points about her looks that did not please her, what might perhaps to an artist express her “character” but in her woman’s eyes were blemishes, would not have that painter mentioned in her presence. Swann had a wonderful scarf of oriental silk, blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly that worn by the Virgin in the Magnificat. But Mme Swann refused to wear it. Once only she allowed her husband to order her a dress covered all over with daisies, cornflowers, forget-me-nots and bluebells, like that of the Primavera. And sometimes in the evening, when she was tired, he would quietly draw my attention to the way in which she was giving, quite unconsciously, to her pensive hands the uncontrolled, almost distraught movement of the Virgin who dips her pen into the inkpot that the angel holds out to her,