In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [30]
“Oh, Monsieur,” I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, “if you would do that, if you would speak of me to Mme Swann my whole life would not be long enough to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her.”
I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But as I uttered them I sensed that they were already superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and displeasure, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible interlocutor whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is telling him something that one’s other interlocutor, the person to whom one has been talking up till then—myself, in this instance—is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that the words I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could have been chosen with diabolical malice by persons anxious to do me harm) the only ones that could result in his abandoning his intention. Indeed, on hearing them, in the same way as when a stranger with whom we have been pleasantly exchanging impressions which we might have supposed to be similar about passers-by whom we agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly as he feels his pocket: “What a pity I haven’t got my revolver with me; I could have picked off the lot of them,” M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more simple than to be commended to Mme Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and must consequently be very difficult to obtain, thought that the desire I had expressed, though ostensibly normal, must cloak some different motive, some suspect intention, some prior transgression, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme Swann, no one had hitherto been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I realised that this mission was one he would never discharge, that he might see Mme Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me. But he had not thought fit to tell her on whose behalf he was inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and that I so longed to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a lesser misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to the efficacy of the first, which was in any event dubious: for Odette, the idea of her own life and of her own home awakened no mysterious uneasiness, and a person who knew her, who came to her house, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone through