In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [330]
the judge’s wife, which of course is of little consequence; what is of slightly more consequence is the fact that Odette is in Swann’s eyes a difficult woman to conquer, whence he builds up a whole romance which becomes all the more painful when he discovers his error; what is of even more consequence still, the French are thinking only of revenge in the eyes of the Germans. We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions. I should therefore have had no reason to be surprised when I heard the name Forcheville (and I was already wondering whether she was related to the Forcheville of whom I had so often heard) had not the fair girl said to me at once, anxious no doubt to forestall, tactfully, questions which would have been disagreeable to her: “Don’t you remember that you knew me well long ago … you used to come to our house … your friend Gilberte. I could see that you didn’t recognise me. I recognised you at once.” (She said this as if she had recognised me at once in the drawing-room, but the truth is that she had recognised me in the street and had greeted me, and later Mme de Guermantes informed me that she had told her, as something very comic and extraordinary, that I had followed her and brushed against her, mistaking her for a tart.) I did not discover until after her departure why she was called Mlle de Forcheville. After Swann’s death, Odette, who astonished everyone by her profound, prolonged and sincere grief, found herself an extremely rich widow. Forcheville married her, after making a long round of country houses and ascertaining that his family would acknowledge his wife. (The family raised some difficulties at first, but yielded to the material advantage of no longer having to provide for the expenses of a needy relative who was about to pass from comparative penury to opulence.) Shortly after this, an uncle of Swann’s, in whose hands the successive demise of innumerable relatives had accumulated an enormous inheritance, died, leaving the whole of his fortune to Gilberte who thus became one of the richest heiresses in France. But this was a time when in the aftermath of the Dreyfus case an anti-Semitic trend had arisen parallel to a growing trend towards the penetration of society by Jews. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking that the discovery of the judicial error would be a severe blow to anti-semitism. But, temporarily at least, a form of social anti-semitism was on the contrary enhanced and exacerbated thereby. Forcheville, who, like every petty nobleman, had derived from conversations in the family circle the certainty that his name was more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld, considered that, in marrying the widow of a Jew, he had performed a similar act of charity to that of a millionaire who picks up a prostitute in the street and rescues her from poverty and squalor. He was prepared to extend his bounty to Gilberte, whose prospects of marriage would be assisted by all her millions but hindered by that absurd name “Swann.” He declared that he would adopt her. We know that Mme de Guermantes, to the astonishment of her friends—which she enjoyed and was in the habit of provoking—had refused, after Swann’s marriage, to meet his daughter as well as his wife. This refusal had appeared all the more cruel inasmuch as what the possibility of marriage to Odette had long represented to Swann was the prospect of introducing his daughter to Mme de Guermantes. And doubtless he ought to have known, he who had already had so long an experience of life, that these scenes which we picture to ourselves are never realised for a diversity of reasons, among which there is one which meant that he seldom regretted his inability to effect that introduction. This reason is that, whatever the image may be—from the prospect of eating a trout at sunset, which makes a sedentary man decide to take the train, to the desire to be able to astonish the proud lady at a cash desk one evening by stopping outside her door