“Ah, good, good; that’s quite all right then,” he said, in the tone of a customs official who has been suspicious up to now, but, after hearing your explanations, stamps your passport and lets you proceed on your journey without troubling to examine your luggage.
“I can well believe you don’t find them amusing, those parties; indeed, it’s very good of you to go to them!” said Mme. Verdurin, who regarded the President of the Republic only as a “bore” to be especially dreaded, since he had at his disposal means of seduction, and even of compulsion, which, if employed to captivate her “faithful,” might easily make them “fail.” “It seems, he’s as deaf as a post; and eats with his fingers.”
“Upon my word! Then it can’t be much fun for you, going there.” A note of pity sounded in the Doctor’s voice; and then struck by the number—only eight at table—“Are these luncheons what you would describe as ‘intimate’?” he inquired briskly, not so much out of idle curiosity as in his linguistic zeal.
But so great and glorious a figure was the President of the French Republic in the eyes of Dr. Cottard that neither the modesty of Swann nor the spite of Mme. Verdurin could ever wholly efface that first impression, and he never sat down to dinner with the Verdurins without asking anxiously, “D’you think we shall see M. Swann here this evening? He is a personal friend of M. Grévy’s. I suppose that means he’s what you’d call a ‘gentleman’?” He even went to the length of offering Swann a card of invitation to the Dental Exhibition.
“This will let you in, and anyone you take with you,” he explained, “but dogs are not admitted. I’m just warning you, you understand, because some friends of mine went there once, who hadn’t been told, and there was the devil to pay.”
As for M. Verdurin, he did not fail to observe the distressing effect upon his wife of the discovery that Swann had influential friends of whom he had never spoken.
If no arrangement had been made to “go anywhere,” it was at the Verdurins’ that Swann would find the “little nucleus” assembled, but he never appeared there except in the evenings, and would hardly ever accept their invitations to dinner, in spite of Odette’s entreaties.
“I could dine with you alone somewhere, if you’d rather,” she suggested.
“But what about Mme. Verdurin?”
“Oh, that’s quite simple. I need only say that my dress wasn’t ready, or that my cab came late. There is always some excuse.”
“How charming of you.”
But Swann said to himself that, if he could make Odette feel (by consenting to meet her only after dinner) that there were other pleasures which he preferred to that of her company, then the desire that she felt for his would be all the longer in reaching the point of satiety. Besides, as he infinitely preferred to Odette’s style of beauty that of a little working girl, as fresh and plump as a rose, with whom he happened to be simultaneously in love, he preferred to spend the first part of the evening with her, knowing that he was sure to see Odette later on. For the same reason, he would never allow Odette to call for him at his house, to take him on to the Verdurins’. The little girl used to wait, not far from his door, at a street corner; Rémi, his coachman, knew where to stop; she would jump in beside him, and hold him in her arms until the carriage drew up at the Verdurins’. He would enter the drawing-room; and there, while Mme. Verdurin, pointing to the roses which he had sent her that morning, said: “I am furious with you!” and sent him to the place kept for him, by the side of Odette, the pianist would play to them—for their two selves, and for no one else—that little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love. He began, always, with a sustained tremolo from the violin part, which, for several bars, was unaccompanied, and filled all the foreground; until suddenly it seemed to be drawn aside, and—just as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch, where the subject is set back a long way through the narrow framework of a half-opened door—infinitely remote, in colour quite different, velvety with the radiance of some intervening light, the little phrase appeared, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world. It passed, with simple and immortal movements, scattering on every side the bounties of its grace, smiling ineffably still; but Swann thought that he could now discern in it some disenchantment. It seemed to be aware how vain, how hollow was the happiness to which it showed the way. In its airy grace there was, indeed, something definitely achieved, and complete in itself, like the mood of philosophic detachment which follows an outburst of vain regret. But little did that matter to him; he looked upon the sonata less in its own light—as what it might express, had, in fact, expressed to a certain musician, ignorant that any Swann or Odette, anywhere in the world, existed, when he composed it, and would express to all those who should hear it played in centuries to come—than as a pledge, a token of his love, which made even the Verdurins and their little pianist think of Odette and, at the same time, of himself—which bound her to him by a lasting tie; and at that point he had (whimsically entreated by Odette) abandoned the idea of getting some “professional” to play over to him the whole sonata, of which he still knew no more than this one passage. “Why do you want the rest?” she had asked him.
