"'I'll tell you who does need a good doctor, and that's our friend Swann,' said Bergotte. And on my asking whether he was ill, 'Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who has married a whore, and has to pocket a dozen insults a day from women who refuse to meet his wife or men who have slept with her. Just look, one day when you're there, at the way he lifts his eyebrows when he comes in, to see who's in the room'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 615
Here we have the harshest comment so far on Odette. There have been whispers and innuendos, but here Bergotte lays it out pretty brutally. Of course, the comment is also a reflection of its culture and period of origin. Was Odette actually a whore? Or was she a courtesan? Are we splitting hairs here? Not to be too feminist or post-feminist, but could it also be that Odette's greatest crime was being a free woman? Certainly Charles Swann had any number of mistresses over the years but at no point did any one discuss his sexual addiction (granted, that's a pretty historically inappropriate comment, but you get the idea). In the end it's a commentary much more on society than it is on Odette herself.
I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of Remembrance of Things Past to read (thankfully), so I don't really know how the story of Odette and Charles plays itself out, but this comment on Swann's reaction to who is coming into the room feels like a foreshadowing of something unpleasant. Just as Odette herself is not free from the society in which she lives, neither is Swann. It almost feels like a society that is engineered to produce acts of insane jealousy, the fin de siecle European equivalent of honor killings.
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