Swann in Love: Epilogue

Odette’s life has appeared to me a trajectory from forced childhood prostitution to more and more upscale liasons, culminating in her marriage to Swann, who does his best to get her accepted in society and to populate her salon with the best people. That is all true enough, though there are indications that she remains a courtesan at heart. Foremost of these is the “lady in pink” episode, preceded by the false lead at Combray, where she is seen at Tansonville with a mysterious man (Charlus). And there is the suggestion by Norpois that her home is a popular destination for men. Bloch claims to have had her three times on a train ride. But the bulk of the narrative shows Odette demurely hosting her salon and walking in the Bois.

In Time Regained, the narrator resolves all ambiguity. She’s a tramp all the way down. Odette is now the mistress of the Duc de Guermantes. The narrator misses no opportunity to call her the lady in pink.

…Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself but people would have gone there…(VI,52)

…Mme Swann in a pink dress in my great-uncles study.. (VI,413)

…just as, beginning with the lady in pink, there had existed several Mme Swanns, separated by the colorless ether of the years…(VI,442)

…and the other with the lady in pink because a well-informed man within me assured me that this was so…(VI,443)

…she was tending under pressure of new circumstances to become once more, the lady in pink (VI,481)

…this Second Empire courtesan swathed in one of the wraps which he liked, the lady in pink would interrupt him with a sprightly sally… So for a moment the Duke glared at the audacious lady in pink. (VI,486)

The morals of Swann while married to Odette, by the way, were apparently no better.

…Swann, when he was no longer in love with Mme Swann but with a waitress at the same Colombin’s where at one time Mme Swann had though it smart to go and drink tea…(VI,403)

The narrator finally has had enough of her:

It must be added that Odette was unfaithful to M. de Guermantes in the same fashion that she looked after him, that to say without charm and without dignity. She was commonplace in this role as she had been in all her others. Not that life had not frequently given her good parts; it had, but she not known how to play them. (VI,488) 

The Lady in Pink

The Lady in Pink presents a problem to the reader. She is a courtesan that Marcel meets when visiting his uncle Adolphe.  She is evidently Odette de Crecy, given the references back to this scene later in the novel. Yet she cannot be Mme de Crecy but must be, instead, Mme Swann. But Mme Swann is at this point in the novel intent on building her salon and gaining acceptability in Swann’s circles. Further, Odette and uncle Adolphe had ruptured their relationship prior to this scene taking place. How can these contradictions be explained?

Our first knowledge of Madame Swannis near the beginning of the goodnight kiss episode and anticipates Odette’s questionable reputation: “For many years, during the course of which–especially before his marriage–M. Swann came often to see them at Combray…” (I,18). Soon after, Marcel’s mother resolves to talk to Swann about his daughter: “My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the distress which my family had contrived to cause Swann since his marriage….’Now, M. Swann,’ she said, ‘do tell me about your daughter….;’” (I,30). So we know that by this point in the very young Marcel’s life Swann is married to the woman we will later know is Odette and that he is the father of their daughter.

Marcel in his younger years would visit his uncle Adolph’s sitting room in Combray. “But for some years now I had not gone into my uncle Adolphe’s sanctum, for he no longer came to Combray on account of a quarrel which had arisen between him and my family, through my fault, in the following circumstances…” (I,99).  In Paris Marcel would, once or twice a month, walk to his uncle’s apartment for a visit. Once, not on the usual visiting day, he arrived to discover his uncle with a visitor. Adolphe reluctantly allows Marcel to enter, at the entreaty of his female guest, where he sees “opposite him, in pink silk dress with a great necklace of pearls about her throat…” (I,104). Nothing in this passage explicitly identifies the lady as Odette, but the connection is made explicit later. In the final volume, Marcel attends a dinner party where he discovers that Odette has become the mistress of Duc de Guermantes. “…in spite of all that she had accomplished in building up a social position, she was tending under pressure of new circumstances to become once more, as she had first appeared to me in my earliest childhood, the lady in pink.” (VI,481).

The relationship of the lady in pink to Marcel’s uncle Adolphe is curious in another respect. We are re-introduced to Odette and Adolphe in Swann in Love.

My uncle advised Swann not to see Odette for some days, after which she would love him all the more, and advised Odette to let Swann meet her whenever and as often as he pleased. A few days later Odette told Swannthat she had just had a rude awakening, on discovering that my uncle was the same as other men: he had tried to take her by force. She calmed Swann down when he wanted to rush out to challenge my uncle to a duel… (I,444)

So we are left with two jarring incongruities. The Lady in Pink scene follows, chronologically, a break between Odette and Adolphe. And the Lady in Pink must already be Mme Swann, who is horrified of revelations of her courtesan past and quite unlikely to continue to have been one.

The break between Odette and Adolphe could conceivably be repaired, although we are not made aware of this. The Mme de Crecy vs Mme Swann is a harder conflict to resolve. Proust is known to have been occasionally sloppy in composition,notably in Time Regained where several discrepancies are found in the concluding soiree scene. These were most likely due to rushed editing near the end of his life. My own suspicion is that Proust wanted the protagonist to have seen Odette as a courtesan so that he can complete the circle of her as a courtesan in the final volume. This formal point of construction was simply so uppermost in his mind that he was probably not aware of the contradiction he had created.