Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [154]
“You wouldn’t have her live like you among a lot of broken-down chairs and threadbare carpets!” she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the bourgeois housewife getting the better of the acquired dilettantism of the cocotte.
People who enjoyed picking up antiques, who liked poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. There was no need actually to have those tastes, as long as one proclaimed them; when a man had told her at dinner that he loved to wander about and get his hands covered with dust in old furniture shops, that he would never be really appreciated in this commercial age since he was not interested in its concerns, and that he belonged to another generation altogether, she would come home saying: “Why, he’s an adorable creature, so sensitive, I had no idea,” and she would conceive for him an immediate bond of friendship. But on the other hand, men who, like Swann, had these tastes but did not speak of them, left her cold. She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: “It’s not the same thing, you see, with him,” and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.
Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to counteract those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, and which in fact he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which enchanted him even, for were they not so many characteristic features by virtue of which the essence of this woman revealed itself to him? And so, when she was in a happy mood because she was going to see the Reine Topaze,10 or when her expression grew serious, worried, petulant because she was afraid of missing the flower-show, or merely of not being in time for tea, with muffins and toast, at the Rue Royale tea-rooms, where she believed that regular attendance was indispensable in order to set the seal upon a woman’s certificate of elegance, Swann, enraptured as we all are at times by the naturalness of a child or the verisimilitude of a portrait which appears to be on the point of speaking, would feel so distinctly the soul of his mistress rising to the surface of her face that he could not refrain from touching it with his lips. “Ah, so little Odette wants us to take her to the flower-show, does she? She wants to be admired, does she? Very well, we’ll take her there, we can but obey.” As Swann was a little short-sighted, he had to resign himself to wearing spectacles at home when working, while to face the world he adopted a monocle as being less disfiguring. The first time that she saw it in his eye, she could not contain her joy: “I really do think—for a man, that is to say—it’s tremendously smart! How nice you look with it! Every inch a gentleman. All you want now is a title!” she concluded with a tinge of regret. He liked Odette to say these things, just as if he had been in love with a Breton girl, he would have enjoyed seeing her in her coif and hearing her say that she believed in ghosts. Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops