Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [147]
But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of offending her, or from reluctance to appear retrospectively to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days. If she had cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: “It’s most unfortunate; the cattleyas don’t need tucking in this evening; they’ve not been disturbed as they were the other night. I think, though, that this one isn’t quite straight. May I see if they have more scent than the others?” Or else, if she had none: “Oh! no cattleyas this evening; then there’s no chance of my indulging in my little rearrangements.” So that for some time there was no change in the procedure which he had followed on that first evening, starting with fumblings with fingers and lips at Odette’s bosom, and it was thus that his caresses still began. And long afterwards, when the rearrangement (or, rather, the ritual pretence of a rearrangement) of her cattleyas had quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor “Do a cattleya,” transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without thinking when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. And perhaps this particular manner of saying “to make love” did not mean exactly the same thing as its synonyms. However jaded we may be about women, however much we may regard the possession of the most divergent types as a repetitive and predictable experience, it none the less becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned are—or are thought by us to be—so difficult as to oblige us to make it spring from some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as had originally been for Swann the arrangement of the cattleyas. He tremblingly hoped, that evening (but Odette, he told himself, if she was deceived by his stratagem, could not guess his intention), that it was the possession of this woman that would emerge for him from their large mauve petals; and the pleasure which he had already felt and which Odette tolerated, he thought, perhaps only because she had not recognised it, seemed to him for that reason—as it might have seemed to the first man when he enjoyed it amid the flowers of the earthly paradise—a pleasure which had never before existed, which he was striving now to create, a pleasure—as the special name he gave it was to certify—entirely individual and new.
Now, every evening, when he had taken her home, he had to go in with her; and often she would come out again in her dressing-gown and escort him to his carriage, and would kiss him in front of his coachman, saying: “What do I care what other people think?” And on evenings when he did not go to the Verdurins’ (which happened occasionally now that he had opportunities of seeing Odette elsewhere), when—more and more rarely—he went into society, she would ask him to come to her on his way home, however late he might be. It was spring, and the nights were clear and frosty. Coming away from a party, he would climb into his victoria, spread a rug over his knees, tell the friends who were leaving at the same time and who wanted him to join them, that he couldn’t, that he wasn’t going in their direction; and the coachman