Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [179]
He could hear the jokes that Mme Verdurin would make after dinner, jokes which, whoever the “bore” might be at whom they were aimed, had always amused him because he could watch Odette laughing at them, laughing with him, her laughter almost a part of his. Now he felt that it was possibly at him that they would make Odette laugh. “What fetid humour!” he exclaimed, twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar. “How in God’s name can a creature made in his image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms? The least sensitive nose must turn away in horror from such stale exhalations. It’s really impossible to believe that a human being can fail to understand that, in allowing herself to smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is sinking into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I inhabit a plane so infinitely far above the sewers in which these filthy vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!” he shouted, tossing up his head and proudly throwing back his shoulders. “God knows I’ve honestly tried to pull Odette out of that quagmire, and to teach her to breathe a nobler and a purer air. But human patience has its limits, and mine is at an end,” he concluded, as though this sacred mission to tear Odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago, as though he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasms might perhaps be directed at himself, and might have the effect of detaching Odette from him.
He could see the pianist sitting down to play the Moonlight Sonata, and the grimaces of Mme Verdurin in terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by Beethoven’s music. “Idiot, liar!” he shouted, “and a creature like that imagines that she loves Art!” She would say to Odette, after deftly insinuating a few words of praise for Forcheville, as she had so often done for him: “You can make room for M. de Forcheville, there, can’t you, Odette?” … “ ‘In the dark!’ ” (he remembered the painter’s words) “filthy old procuress!” “Procuress” was the name he applied also to the music which would invite them to sit in silence, to dream together, to gaze into each other’s eyes, to feel for each other’s hands. He felt that there was much to be said, after all, for a sternly censorious attitude towards the arts, such as Plato adopted, and Bossuet, and the old school of education in France.
In a word, the life they led at the Verdurins’, which he had so often described as “the true life,” seemed to him now the worst of all, and their “little nucleus” the lowest of the low. “It really is,” he said, “beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder, the nethermost circle of Dante. No doubt about it, the august words of the Florentine refer to the Verdurins! When you come to think of it, surely people ‘in society’ (with whom one may find fault now and then but who are after all a very different matter from that riff-raff) show a profound sagacity in refusing to know them, or even to soil the tips of their fingers with them. What a sound intuition there is in that ‘Noli me tangere’ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”
He had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the Bois, had almost reached his own house, and still, having not yet shaken off the intoxication of his misery and pain and the inspired insincerity which the counterfeit tones and artificial sonority of his own voice raised to ever more exhilarating heights, he continued to perorate aloud in the silence of the night: “Society people have their failings, as no one knows better than