Notes + Text - All About Love

Swanns’s Way

by Marcel Proust

It was after eleven when he reached her door, and as he made his apology for having been unable to come away earlier, she complained that it was indeed very late, that the storm had made her feel unwell and her head ached, and warned him that she would not let him stay more than half an hour, that at midnight she would send him away; a little while later she felt tired and wished to sleep.

“No cattleya, then, tonight?” he asked, “and I’ve been so looking forward to a nice little cattleya.”

She seemed peevish and on edge, and replied: “No, dear, no cattleya tonight. Can’t you see I’m not well?”

“It might have done you good, but I won’t bother you.”

She asked him to put out the light before he went; he drew the curtains round her bed and left.  But, when he was back in his own house, the idea suddenly struck him that perhaps Odette was expecting someone else that evening, the she had merely pretended to be tired, so that she had asked him to put the light out only so that he should suppose that she was going to sleep, that the moment he had left the house she had put it on again and had opened her door to the man who was to spend the night with her.  He looked at his watch. It was about an hour and a half since he had left her.  He went out, took a cab, and stopped it close to her house, in a little street running at right angles to that other street which lay at the back of her house and along which he used sometimes to go, to tap upon her bedroom window, for her to let him in.  He left his cab; the streets were deserted and dark; he walked a few yards and came out almost opposite her house.  Amid the glimmering blackness of the row of windows in which the lights had long since been put out, he saw one, and only one, from which percolated—between the slats of its shutters, closed like a wine-press over its mysterious golden juice—the light that filled the room within, a light which on so many other evening, as soon as he say it from afar as he turned into the street, had rejoiced his heart with its message: “She is there—expecting you,” and which now tortured him, saying: “She is there with the many she was expecting.”  He must know who; he tiptoed along the wall until he reached the window, but between the slanting bars of the shutters he could see nothing, could only hear, in the silence of the night, the murmur of conversation.

Certainly he suffered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stirred the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perfidy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger.  [And yet he was not sorry he had come; the torment which had forced him to leave his own house had become less acute now that it had become less vague, now that Odette’s other life, of which he had had, at that first moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was definitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light, almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which , when he chose, he would force his way to seize it unawares; or rather he would knock on the shutters, as he often did when he came very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had head the voices, and he himself who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing with the other at his illusions, now it was he who saw them. Confident in their error, tricked by none other than himself, whom they believed to be far away but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to knock on the shutter.  And perhaps the almost pleasurable sensation he felt at that moment was something more than the assuagement of a doubt, and of a pain: was an intellectual pleasure.  If, since he had fallen in love, things had recovered a little of the delightful interest that they had had for him long ago—though only in so far as they were illuminated by the though or memory of Odette—now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, the passion for truth, but for a truth which, too, was interposed between himself and his mistress, receiving its light from her alone, a private and personal truth the sole object of which (an infinitely precious object, and one almost disinterested in its beauty) was Odette’s life, her actions, her environment, her plans, her past.]   At every other period in his life, the little everyday activities of another person had always seemed meaningless to Swann; if gossip about such things was repeated to him, he would dismiss it as insignificant, and while he listened it was only the lowest, the most commonplace part of his mind that was engaged; these were the moments when he felt at his most inglorious.  But in this strange phase of love the personality of another person becomes so enlarged, so deepened, that the curiosity which he now felt stirring inside him with regard to the smallest details of a woman’s daily life, was the same thirst for knowledge with which he had once studied history.  And all manner of actions from which hitherto he would have recoiled in shame, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments—so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth.

On the point of knocking on the shutters, he felt a pang of shame at the thought that Odette would now know that he had suspected her, that he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window.  She had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who spied.  What he was about to do was singularly inept, and she would detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as he refrained from knocking, even in the act of infidelity, perhaps she loved him still.  How often the prospect of future happiness is thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification! [But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler, He knew that the reality of certain circumstances which he would have given his life to be able to reconstruct accurately and in full, was to be read behind that window, streaked with bars of light, as within the illuminated, golden boards of one of those precious manuscripts by whose artistic wealth itself the scholar who consults them cannot remain unmoved.  He felt a voluptuous pleasure in learning the truth which he passionately sought in that unique, ephemeral and precious transcript, on that translucent page, so warm, so beautiful.. And moreover, the advantage which he felt—which he so desperately wanted to feel—that he had over them lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being able to show that that he knew.]  He raised himself on tiptoe.  He knocked.  They had not heard; he knocked again, louder, and the conversation ceased.  A man’s voice—he strained his ears to distinguish whose, among such of Odette’s friends as he knew, it might be—asked:

“Who’s there?”

He could not be certain of the voice.  He knocked once again.  The window first, then the shutters were thrown open.  It was too late, now, to draw back, and since she was about to know all, in order not to seem too miserable, too jealous and inquisitive, he called out in a cheerful, casual tone of voice:

“Please don’t bother; I just happened to be passing, and saw the light.  I wanted to now if your were feeling better.”

He looked up.  Two old gentlemen stood facing him at the window, one of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into the room, a room that he had never seen before.  Having fallen into the habit, when he came late to Odette, of identifying her window by the fact that it was the only one still lit up in a row of windows otherwise all alike, he had been misled this time by the light, and had knocked at the window beyond hers, which belonged to the adjoining house.  He made what apology he could and hurried home, glad that the satisfaction of this curiosity had preserved their love intact, that, having feigned for so long a sort of indifference towards Odette, he had not now, by his jealousy, given her proof that he loved her too much, which, between a pair of lovers, for ever dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love enough.

Go back to notes...