Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2004-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

So the salon which had brought Swann and Odette together became an obstacle to their meetings. She no longer said to him as she had in the early days of their love: “We’ll see each other tomorrow night anyway, there’s a supper at the Verdurins’,” but: “We won’t be able to see each other tomorrow night, there’s a supper at the Verdurins’.” Or else the Verdurins were to take her to the Opéra-Comique to see Une Nuit de Cléopatre75 and Swann would read in Odette’s eyes a fear that he would ask her not to go, which once upon a time he would not have been able to keep himself from kissing as it passed over his mistress’s face, and which now exasperated him. “It’s not anger, however,” he said to himself, “that I feel when I see that she wants to go and scratch about in that excremental music. It’s sorrow, not for myself certainly, but for her; sorrow at seeing that after more than six months of living in daily contact with me, she has not managed to change enough to eliminate Victor Massé spontaneously! Especially for not having come to understand that there are evenings when a person of any subtlety must know how to give up a pleasure, when one asks it of her. She ought to know how to say ‘I won’t go,’ if only by using her intelligence, since it is on the basis of her answer that one will rate once and for all the quality of her soul.” And having persuaded himself that it really was only in order to be able to pass a more favorable judgment on Odette’s spiritual value that he wanted her to stay with him that evening instead of going to the Opéra-Comique, he presented her with the same reasoning, with the same degree of insincerity as he had presented it to himself, and even with one degree more, for now he was also responding to a desire to capture her through her self-love.

“I swear,” he said to her a few moments before she left for the theater, “that in asking you not to go out, my every wish, if I were selfish, would be for you to refuse me, because I have a thousand things to do this evening and I will find myself trapped and thus quite annoyed if against all expectations you answer me that you won’t go. But my own occupations, my own pleasures, aren’t everything, I have to think of you. There may come a day when, seeing me gone from you forever, you will be justified in reproaching me for not having warned you in the crucial moments when I sensed that I was going to bring down upon you one of those severe judgments against which love cannot resist for long. You see, Une Nuit de Cléopatre (what a title!) doesn’t really matter. What we must find out is whether you are really that creature which ranks lowest in mentality, and even in charm, the contemptible creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasant thing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.