Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [152]
With the result that she found Swann inferior, intellectually, to what she had supposed. “You’re always so reserved; I can’t make you out.” She was more impressed by his indifference to money, by his kindness to everyone, by his courtesy and tact. And indeed it happens, often enough, to greater men than Swann, to a scientist or an artist, when he is not misunderstood by the people among whom he lives, that the feeling on their part which proves that they have been convinced of the superiority of his intellect is not their admiration for his ideas—for these are beyond them—but their respect for his kindness. Swann’s position in society also inspired Odette with respect, but she had no desire that he should attempt to secure invitations for herself. Perhaps she felt that such attempts would be bound to fail; perhaps she even feared that, merely by speaking of her to his friends, he might provoke disclosures of an unwelcome kind. At all events she had made him promise never to mention her name. Her reason for not wishing to go into society was, she had told him, a quarrel she had once had with a friend who had avenged herself subsequently by speaking ill of her. “But surely,” Swann objected, “not everyone knew your friend.” “Yes, but don’t you see, it spreads like wildfire; people are so horrid.” Swann found this story frankly incomprehensible; on the other hand, he knew that such generalisations as “People are so horrid,” and “A word of scandal spreads like wildfire,” were generally accepted as true; there must be cases to which they were applicable. Could Odette’s be one of these? He teased himself with the question, though not for long, for he too was subject to that mental torpor that had so weighed upon his father, whenever he was faced by a difficult problem. In any event, that world of society which so frightened Odette did not, perhaps, inspire her with any great longings, since it was too far removed from the world she knew for her to be able to form any clear conception of it. At the same time, while in certain aspects she had retained a genuine simplicity (she had, for instance, kept up a friendship with a little dressmaker, now retired from business, up whose steep and dark and fetid staircase she clambered almost every day), she still thirsted to be in the fashion, though her idea of it was not altogether the same as that of society people. For the latter, it emanates from a comparatively small number of individuals, who project it to a considerable distance—more and more faintly the further one is from their intimate centre—within the circle of their friends and the friends of their friends, whose names form a sort of tabulated index. Society people know this index by heart; they are gifted in such matters with an erudition from which they have extracted a sort of taste, of tact, so automatic in its operation that Swann, for example, without needing to draw upon his knowledge of the world, if he read in a newspaper the names of the people who had been at a dinner-party, could tell at once its exact degree of smartness, just as a man of letters, simply by reading a sentence, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author. But Odette was one of those persons (an extremely numerous category, whatever the fashionable world may think, and to be found in every class of society) who do not share these notions, but imagine smartness to be something quite other, which assumes different aspects according to the circle to which they themselves belong, but has the special characteristic—common alike to the fashion of which Odette dreamed and to that before which Mme Cottard bowed—of being directly accessible