Charles Swann's Bad Marriage
On reputation and the nature of love.
Charles Swann is a character in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time novels. He is a Jewish man, very smart and charming, and best known for his controversial marriage to a woman named Odette de Crecy.
Charles comes from a wealthy family and has friends in high places. He collects art. He is educated, cultured, and in all ways interesting company. But he “squandered his intellectual gifts upon frivolous amusements,” like getting to know all the society ladies and helping them decide what art to buy. And he has a talent for working his connections to make new ones, often with the aim of seducing a new woman. He is no snob when it comes to the ladies, cultivating romances with aristocrats as well as women from the lower classes. For weeks he visited friends regularly but then abruptly stopped when he decided to end his affair with their cook.
Odette is a courtesan known as a woman of “easy virtue.” When she meets Charles through a mutual friend at a theater one night, she is quite taken with him.
That mutual friend had previously mentioned Odette to Charles, telling him that she was beautiful, available for “arrangements,” and harder to get than she turns out to be. At least for Charles. Odette writes to him after their introduction, asking if she could visit him at his house, where she could see his collections.
Charles, though, is not so sure about Odette. He’s not immediately attracted to her. She’s beautiful, but not in the way he usually likes. She isn’t educated or smart enough to truly capture his attention. By this time in his life, he is older and kind of over the whole romance thing. But she persists in her pursuit of him, flattering his intelligence, showing interest in his interests, and eventually inviting him to meet her friends.
Odette’s friends, the Verdurins, are a wealthy bourgeois couple who keep a close circle of friends. They host get-togethers every evening with a casual dinner, salon, and often a performance by their pianist friend. Odette is one of the regular, faithful attendees. The friends expect Charles to be boring because Odette told them he was very smart. But Charles charms them, treating them with respect and interest, even though they are from a lower class than him. And it’s true that Odette’s friends are not like his other friends—they speak in cliches and crude language. Their commentary isn’t enlightening. But while Charles is there that first night, the pianist plays a song that he’s heard somewhere but can’t place. The music, like all great art, stirs something in Charles, and he enjoys himself.
And so Charles likes coming to the Verdurin’s salon as much as they like having him. He never accepts their dinner invitation—joining them later instead—because, “if he could make Odette feel (by consenting to meet her only after dinner) that there were other pleasures which he preferred to that of her company, then the desire that she felt for his would be all the longer in reaching the point of satiety. Besides, as he infinitely preferred to Odette’s style of beauty that of a little working girl, as fresh and plump as a rose, with whom he happened to be simultaneously in love, he preferred to spend the first part of the evening with her, knowing that he was sure to see Odette later on.”
Every evening after the salon, Charles takes Odette home in his carriage. He escorts her to her gate and no further. But eventually, Odette’s affections wear Charles down. He comes to her house for a visit. And even though he still doesn’t give up his working girl, he starts to see Odette differently.
Then one night, he lingers for so long in his carriage with his girlfriend that, by the time he arrives at the Verdurin’s, Odette has already left with another man.
Proust examines all feelings in great detail, rolling each one around until it’s smoothed into words. He writes, “Seeing the room bare of her, Swann felt his heart wrung by sudden anguish; he shook with the sense that he was being deprived of a pleasure whose intensity he began then for the first time to estimate, having always, hitherto, had that certainty of finding it whenever he would, which (as in the case of all our pleasures) reduced, if it did not altogether blind him to its dimensions.”
He leaves the party, and in the short scene that follows, all the friends remaining at the salon make fun of Charles and his shock that Odette has already left. And they speculate on the nature of their relationship. Monsieur Verdurin says, based on the look on Charles’s face, they can assume he’s hooked on Odette. Madame Verdurin insists that, “there’s nothing in it,” and she knows because Odette would have told her. When Monsieur Verdurin argues that she can’t really say there’s nothing in it when they aren’t there to see everything that happens between them, madame suggests that Odette has had some uncertainties about Charles.
“She doesn’t care for him that way, she says,” Madame Verdurin explains. “It’s an ideal love, ‘platonic,’ you know; she’s afraid of rubbing the bloom off—oh, I don’t know half the things she says, how should I? And yet he’s exactly the sort of man she wants.”
Meanwhile, Charles is driven into a jealous fit, searching restaurants for her and ending up under her window in the middle of the night, imagining that she’s keeping company with another man. He is hooked. And so their affair begins.
Love is so tumultuous and even fickle, especially when new. Today we look for flags. We run deep Google searches and spend hours scrolling the social profiles of potential mates, experiencing all the same questions and affections and revulsions that Charles experiences falling for Odette. My favorite part about their story, and my favorite part about love stories in general, is that people are so stupid when they’re in love! It’s fabulous. (I have spent so much time thinking about these two fools that they even become gossip fodder for the characters in the novel I wrote.)
Charles and Odette have their disagreements. She thinks he should upgrade his place, but he likes his antiques. Proust writes, “Feeling that, often, he could not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, which all the same he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which even fascinated him, for were they not so many more of those characteristic features, by virtue of which the essential qualities of the woman emerged, and were made visible?” I love this part because who hasn’t bickered with a beloved over their taste in something.
Sadly, theirs is not a great love story. Charles’s jealous tendencies persist throughout the affair. An anonymous letter from a “friend” accuses Odette of numerous infidelities. She keeps other close acquaintances with men, including the Count de Fourcheville. She seemingly admits to having fooled around with women in her past. And her initial affection for him has faded.
Carrying on with Odette damages Charles’s social status to some degree; he loses some friends. People think she’s only after his money and that he could do better. The section of Proust’s novels that tell this story, Swann in Love, ends with him questioning why he got together with her in the first place. She wasn’t even his type. But that’s not the end of the story.
When Odette gets pregnant, Charles marries her, and we meet them again on the pages of later volumes when the narrator develops a relationship with their daughter. They’ve been together for many years by that point, but he’s no longer consumed by his passion for her. His love has changed, and hers for him may have died completely. Still, he wants a good life for his daughter—dreams of one day introducing her to his high society friends. And Swann gives her that, even if he’s not around to see much of it.
Charles dies when his daughter is still young. After his death, Odette marries his rival the Count de Fourcheville. Odette therefore becomes a countess. The count adopts Charles’s daughter, allowing her to drop the Swann from her name. This can be read as a natural part of the adoption process. But it takes place at the same time French society was gripped by the Dreyfus Affair—a military scandal in which a Jewish officer was wrongfully accused of being a German spy. Anti-semitism was rampant. And so changing the kid’s name allowed her to escape claiming her Jewish roots and suffering socially for it. This isn’t much of a way to honor Charles. And when Charles’s childless and rich Jewish relatives start dying, Odette and her daughter don’t hesitate to take the inheritance money. The daughter inherits a fortune. Given this and her titled parents, she is able to make a very good marriage to a marquis.
Charles and Odette’s love story is about the consuming power of love, but it’s means more than feelings. The primary arc of their story is about Odette’s class ascension. Words like “courtesan” and “social climber” are fancy ways of saying “poor.” Roping Charles brought her wealth. The later marriage to the count brings her a title. Her daughter’s marriage to a marquis elevated Odette’s social standing to the upper echelons. Not bad for a woman of questionable virtue.
Their love story is also a metaphor for the times. Possessing a title in France was only powerful socially, not politically, in the way it had been under the monarchy. And culture was no longer limited to the upper classes. Classes were mingling unlike ever before, becoming familiar with each other in the way Charles became familiar with Odette. His feelings grew from that familiarity in the same way the upper classes had to get used to the everyday folks.
Some say Odette de Crecy wrecked Charles Swann’s life. I’ve read far more essays critical of Odette than I have of Charles. Her past is scrutinized harder—not so much in the text as in analysis of it. But my read of the story is more generous toward her and, I think, more realistic about the nature of love.
Back in those days, social climbing was the name of the game. Charles shamelessly worked his social connections in the same way Odette worked hers. He’d been moving among the upper class his whole life, and it eventually lost its glamour. One of the most important revelations in Proust’s work is the realization that society is shallow and false.
And love changes over the years. We go through phases in life, we face the consequences of our decisions, and sometimes we aren’t happy about the way things turn out. All of these conditions can change the relationships we have with people. Love sometimes grows from that all-consuming passionate thing into something even better. Sometimes it goes away. Sometimes it fills us with a simmering rage. But it doesn’t stay the same and, perhaps, always involves some disenchantment.
Charles and Odette’s story happens within the larger work, told from the outside perspective of a narrator—a neighbor boy—closest to Charles. But even though their marriage didn’t end up with a neat and tidy happily ever after, few do. Marriages are expressions of love, but also agreements. Pregnancies and marriages are—ahem—capable of ruining the woman’s life as well as the man’s. Charles wasn’t young or particularly innocent when it came to his relationships with women. And so in fiction, as in any marriage, one never really knows what’s going on off the page or behind closed doors. As Monsieur Verdurin says about the couple in the book: we can’t really say when we’re not there. The thing about love is, unless you’re the person in it, there’s no way to truly understand.
Thank you for reading!
Melinda
P.S. Love and the Downfall of Society releases in one month! Find out more and preorder your copy here: melinda-copp.com/books.