Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 by Marcel Proust
Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-11-14T05:00:00+00:00
“I sincerely hope that we won’t!” cried Mme Verdurin. “Heaven preserve us from him; he’s too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor.”
On hearing these words Cottard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission, as though in the face of a truth that contradicted everything that he had previously believed, but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence; with timorous emotion he lowered his nose over his plate, and merely replied: “Oh—oh—oh—oh—oh!” traversing, in an orderly retirement of his forces, into the depths of his being, along a descending scale, the whole register of his voice. After which there was no more talk of Swann at the Verdurins’.
And so that drawing room, which had brought Swann and Odette together, became an obstacle to their meeting. She no longer said to him, as she had said in the early days of their love: “We will meet, anyhow, tomorrow evening; there’s a supper party at the Verdurins’,” but “We won’t be able to meet tomorrow evening; there’s a supper party at the Verdurins’.” Or else the Verdurins were taking her to the Opéra-Comique, to see Une Nuit de Cléopâtre,125 and Swann could read in her eyes the fear that he might ask her not to go, which, but a little time before, he could not have refrained from greeting with a kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress, but which now exasperated him. “Yet I’m not really angry,” he assured himself, “when I see how she longs to run away and peck about in that stercoraceous music. I’m disappointed; not for myself, but for her; disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in daily contact with myself, she has not been capable of improving her mind even to the point of spontaneously eliminating Victor Massé! More than that, to find that she has not come to understand that there are evenings on which anyone with the least shade of refinement should be willing to forgo an amusement when she is asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to say: ‘I will not go,’ if only from prudence, since it is by what she answers now that the quality of her soul will be determined once and for all.” And having persuaded himself that it was solely, after all, in order that he might arrive at a favorable estimate of Odette’s spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he adopted the same line of reasoning with her, with the same degree of insincerity that he had used with himself, or even with a degree more, for in her case he was yielding also to the desire to capture her by her own self-esteem.
“I swear to you,” he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theater, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for you to refuse, for
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