Swann in Love
The life of Swann’s love, the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object. If he had remained for any length of time without seeing her, those that died would not have been replaced by others. But the presence of Odette continued to sow in Swann’s heart alternate seeds of love and suspicion.
Du Côté de Chez Swann, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu Tome I Marcel Proust 1913; Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.
Seeking solace for his faltering relationship with Odette—a demimondaine with whom he has fallen in love—who now sees other men, Swann returns to high society in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. At a ball he sees his friend, the Princess des Laumes.
"...We are indulging in the most refined form of humour, my dear Charles—but how tiresome it is that I never see you now,” she went on in a coaxing tone, “I do so love talking to you... Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.”
Which was probably not true. But Swann and the Princess had the same way of looking at the little things of life... Since Swann had become so melancholy, and was always in that trembling condition which precedes a flood of tears, he had the same need to speak about his grief that a murderer has to tell some one about his crime. And when he heard the Princess say that life was a dreadful business, he felt as much comforted as if she had spoken to him of Odette.
“Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear friend. What is so nice about you is that you are not cheerful. We could spend a most pleasant evening together.”
Du Côté de Chez Swann Marcel Proust 1913; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922
“I swear to you,” Swann told Odette, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel that I have been tricked and trapped myself, and shall be thoroughly annoyed, if, after all, you tell me that you are not going.
But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also.
A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I passed judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot overcome..."
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. My translation, my emphasis.
Swann catches Odette ineptly lying to him about someone else she's seeing. So in love with her he is; "Poor darling," he pitys her rather than himself.
He had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavouring to hide from him, but something more immediate, something, possibly, which had not yet happened, but might happen now at any time, and, when it did, would throw a light upon that earlier event.
At that moment, he heard the front-door bell ring. Odette never stopped speaking, but her words dwindled into an inarticulate moan.
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1922.
Again,
But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, /with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening,—with which, now, perversely, /she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another—of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, /and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. /And all these voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches, rough plans, /like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, /aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for others. /With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, /every new caress that he invented (and had been so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), /every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, /they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torture-chamber.
Swann's Way Marcel Proust 1913; as delivered to my iPhone by Twitter; translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff 1922.
"One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a ‘kept’ woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the ‘kept’ woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched the passage of the same expressions of pity for a sufferer, resentment of an act of injustice, gratitude for an act of kindness, which he had seen, in earlier days, on his own mother’s face, and on the faces of friends; that Odette, whose conversation had so frequently turned on the things that he himself knew better than anyone, his collections, his room, his old servant, his banker, who kept all his title-deeds and bonds;—the thought of the banker reminded him that he must call on him shortly, to draw some money.
And indeed, if, during the current month, he were to come less liberally to the aid of Odette in her financial difficulties than in the month before, when he had given her five thousand francs, if he refrained from offering her a diamond necklace for which she longed, he would be allowing her admiration for his generosity to decline, that gratitude which had made him so happy, and would even be running the risk of her imagining that his love for her (as she saw its visible manifestations grow fewer) had itself diminished.
And then, suddenly, he asked himself whether that was not precisely what was implied by ‘keeping’ a woman (as if, in fact, that idea of ‘keeping’ could be derived from elements not at all mysterious nor perverse, but belonging to the intimate routine of his daily life, such as that thousand-franc note, a familiar and domestic object, torn in places and mended with gummed paper, which his valet, after paying the household accounts and the rent, had locked up in a drawer of the old writing-desk whence he had extracted it to send it, with four others, to Odette) and whether it was not possible to apply to Odette, since he had known her (for he never imagined for a moment that she could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of ‘kept’ woman."
On Twitter (proustr) I follow Swann in Love 1913, Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. The first of these three sentences, delivered once an hour in approximate 140 character segments, began on May 16th at 0:38; the final sentence concluded on May 16th at 23:38, exactly 24 hours later.
At this pace, I can re-read & think through those woven Proustian sentences (or question the translation) anywhere I am being they're on my constant companion, my iPhone. I don't have to find the book and make the time or find a place on the N train uptown to read.
This time on Twitter @proustr, Swann's Way*, once every hour, 140 characters at a time or "Actually...phrase(s) at a time, where a phrase is a...way to break up a sentence at a logical point."
From chapter three, Swann in Love, the following sentence was delivered in 5 installments; it began with a tweet at 7:38 AM and concluded with a tweet at 11:38 AM.
But, now that he was in love with Odette, all this was changed; to share her sympathies,
to strive to be one with her in spirit was a task so attractive that he tried to find satisfaction in the things that she liked,
and did find a pleasure, not only in copying her habits but in adopting her opinions, which was all the deeper because,
as those habits and opinions sprang from no roots in her intelligence, they suggested to him nothing except that love,
for the sake of which(,) he had preferred them to his own.
Let Swann's pedantry for beauty, that he subordinates to his love of Odette, be mine for the intriguing Proustian syntax that I savour in this periodic, phrase-by-phrase reading of the novel.
Does anyone beside me think that the translation needs the parenthetical comma I added? Here is the sentence as Proust wrote it.
Mais, au contraire, depuis qu’il aimait Odette, sympathiser avec elle, tâcher de n’avoir qu’une âme à eux deux lui était si doux, qu’il cherchait à se plaire aux choses qu’elle aimait, et il trouvait un plaisir d’autant plus profond non seulement à imiter ses habitudes, mais à adopter ses opinions, que, comme elles n’avaient aucune racine dans sa propre intelligence, elles lui rappelaient seulement son amour, à cause duquel il les avait préférées.
You decide; as Shakespeare wrote, but not about your French, "...but that was in another country and besides the wench is dead."
*Du côté de chez Swann translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
Love's pendulum:
When he came away from Odette, he was happy, he felt calm, he recalled the smile with which, in gentle mockery, she had spoken to him of this man or of that, a smile which was all tenderness for himself; he recalled the gravity of her head which she seemed to have lifted from its axis to let it droop and fall, as though against her will, upon his lips, as she had done on that first evening in the carriage; her languishing gaze at him while she lay nestling in his arms, her bended head seeming to recede between her shoulders, as though shrinking from the cold.
But then, at once, his jealousy, as it had been the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening—with which, now, perversely, she was mocking Swann while she tendered her love to another—of that lowering of her head, but lowered now to fall on other lips, and (but bestowed upon a stranger) of all the marks of affection that she had shewn to him. And all these voluptuous memories which he bore away from her house were, as one might say, but so many sketches, rough plans, like the schemes of decoration which a designer submits to one in outline, enabling Swann to form an idea of the various attitudes, aflame or faint with passion, which she was capable of adopting for others. With the result that he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress that he invented (and had been so imprudent as to point out to her how delightful it was), every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torture-chamber.
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
A forbidden visit:
Even before he saw Odette, even if he did not succeed in seeing her there, what a joy it would be to set foot on that soil where, not knowing the exact spot in which, at any moment, she was to be found, he would feel all around him the thrilling possibility of her suddenly appearing: in the courtyard of the Château, now beautiful in his eyes since it was on her account that he had gone to visit it; in all the streets of the town, which struck him as romantic; down every ride of the forest, roseate with the deep and tender glow of sunset—innumerable and alternative hiding-places, to which would fly simultaneously for refuge, in the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes, his happy, vagabond and divided heart.
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
A good cup of tea:
He would escort her to her gate, but no farther. Twice only had he gone inside to take part in the ceremony—of such vital importance in her life—of ‘afternoon tea.’ The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets (consisting, almost entirely, of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and there by the dark intrusion of some sinister little shop, at once an historical document and a sordid survival from the days when the district was still one of ill repute), the snow which had lain on the garden-beds or clung to the branches of the trees, the careless disarray of the season, the assertion, in this man-made city, of a state of nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside...
Odette had received him in a tea-gown of pink silk, which left her neck and arms bare. She had made him sit down beside her in one of the many mysterious little retreats which had been contrived in the various recesses of the room, sheltered by enormous palmtrees growing out of pots of Chinese porcelain, or by screens upon which were fastened photographs and fans and bows of ribbon. She had said at once, “You’re not comfortable there; wait a minute, I’ll arrange things for you,” and with a titter of laughter, the complacency of which implied that some little invention of her own was being brought into play, she had installed behind his head and beneath his feet great cushions of Japanese silk, which she pummelled and buffeted as though determined to lavish on him all her riches, and regardless of their value...
She poured out Swann’s tea, inquired “Lemon or cream?” and, on his answering “Cream, please,” went on, smiling, “A cloud!” And as he pronounced it excellent, “You see, I know just how you like it.”
This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her, something precious, and love is so far obliged to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of its duration in pleasures which, on the contrary, would have no existence apart from love and must cease with its passing,* that when he left her, at seven o’clock, to go and dress for the evening, all the way home, sitting bolt upright in his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure had filled him, he kept on repeating to himself: “What fun it would be to have a little woman like that in a place where one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.”
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
*À la recherche d'amor perdu, my emphasis.
On a phrase from an imaginary sonata:
With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him (Swann) here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness, noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he was once more at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 1913. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.