Swann in Love by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

So the salon that had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle to their meeting. Instead of saying to him, as she used to in the early days of their love: ‘In any case, we’ll see each other tomorrow evening, there’s a supper party at the Verdurins’,’ she said: ‘We won’t be able to see each other tomorrow evening, there’s a supper party at the Verdurins’.’ Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the Opéra-Comique to see A Night with Cleopatra and Swann could read in Odette’s eyes that fear that he might ask her not to go, which would once have filled him with an irresistible desire to kiss it away, and which now infuriated him. ‘It’s not that I’m angry with her, though,’ he told himself, ‘when I see her wanting to peck at that detestable music, like some dung beetle. I just feel sorry, not for myself, but for her, sorry to see that after having lived in close contact with me, seeing me every day for more than six months, she hasn’t managed to change enough to eliminate Victor Massé of her own accord! And especially, that she still isn’t able to understand that there are some evenings when anyone with finer feelings should be able to give up a pleasure when someone asks them to. She ought to be able to say: ‘I won’t go,’ if only because it would be the intelligent thing to say, since her reply will be the criterion by which the quality of her soul will be judged once and for all.’ And having persuaded himself that if he wanted Odette to stay with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, it was really just so that he could think more highly of her spiritual qualities, he sought to persuade her likewise, with the same degree of insincerity as he applied to himself, and even a bit more, for he hoped to appeal to her self-esteem.

‘I swear to you,’ he said, a few moments before she left for the theatre, ‘that when I ask you not to go out, all my own wishes, if I were being selfish, would be for you to refuse, because I have a thousand things to do this evening and I would be making a rod for my own back if against all expectation you were to tell me you weren’t going. But I can’t think only of my own problems and pleasures, I have to think of you. There may come a day when, seeing me estranged from you for ever, you will have the right to reproach me for not having warned you at one of those decisive moments when I felt that I was going to be judging you in too severe a manner for love to withstand for long. You see, A Night with Cleopatra (what a title!) is nothing in itself. The important thing is to know whether you really do belong to the lowest of

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