 section 21 of Swan's Way this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Dennis Sayers Swan's Way by Marcel Proust translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief section 21 she admits that she heard me ring and then knock that she knew it was myself that she wanted to see me Swan thought to himself but that doesn't correspond with the fact that she did not let me in he did not however draw her attention to this inconsistency for he thought that if left to herself Odette might perhaps produce some false hood which would give him a faint indication of the truth she spoke he did not interrupt her he gathered up with an eager and sorrowful piety the words that fell from her lips feeling and rightly feeling since she was hiding the truth behind them as she spoke that like the veil of a sanctuary they kept a vague imprint traced a faint outline that infinitely precious and alas undiscoverable truth which he had been doing that afternoon at three o'clock when he called a truth of which he would never possess any more than these falsifications illegible and divine traces a truth which would exist henceforward only in the secretive memory of this creature who would contemplate it in utter ignorance of its value but would never yield it up to him it was true that he had now and then a strong suspicion that Odette's daily activities were not themselves passionately interesting and that such relations that she might have with other men did not exhale naturally in a universal sense or for every rational being a spirit of morbid gloom capable of infecting with fever or of inciting to suicide he realized at such moments that that interest that gloom existed in him only as a melody might exist and that once he was cured of the melody the actions of Odette the kisses that she might have bestowed would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women but the consciousness that the painful curiosity with which swan now studied them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make him decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curiosity as important and to take every possible step to satisfy it swan had in fact reached an age the philosophy of which supported in this case by the current philosophy of the day as well as by that of the circle in which he spent most of his life the group that surrounded the process the long in which one's intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's disbelief in everything and nothing real and incontestable was to be discovered except the individual tastes of its members the philosophy of which is no longer that of youth but a positive almost a medical philosophy the philosophy of men who instead of fixing their aspirations upon external objects endeavor to separate from the accumulation of the years already spent a definite residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and with which they will deliberately arrange before anything else that the kind of existence which they choose to adopt shall not prove in harmonious swan deemed it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffering which he derived from not knowing what Odette had done just as he had made allowance for the impetus which a damp climate always gave to his eczema to anticipate in his budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring with regard to the daily occupations of Odette information the lack of which would make him unhappy just as he reserved a margin for the gratification of other tastes from which he knew that the pleasure was to be expected at least before he had fallen in love such as his taste for collecting things or for good cooking when he proposed to take leave of Odette and to return home she begged him to stay a little longer and even detained him forcibly seizing him by the arm as he was opening the door to go but he gave no thought to that for among the crowd of gestures and speeches and other little incidents which go to make up a conversation it is inevitable that we should pass without noticing anything that arouses our interest by those that hide a truth for which our suspicions are blindly searching whereas we stop to examine others beneath which nothing lies concealed she kept on saying what a dreadful pity you never buy any chance come in the afternoon and the one time you do come then I miss you he knew very well that she was not sufficiently in love with him to be so keenly distressed merely at having missed his visit but as she was a good-natured woman anxious to give him pleasure and often felt sorry when she had done anything that annoyed him he found it quite natural that she should be sorry on this occasion that she had deprived him of that pleasure of spending an hour in her company which was so very great a pleasure if not to herself at any rate to him all the same it was a matter of little importance that her air of unreleaved sorrow began at length to bewilder him she reminded him even more than was usual of the faces of some of the women created by the painter of the primavera she had at that moment their downcast heartbroken expression which seems ready to succumb beneath the burden of a grief too heavy to be born when they are merely allowing the infant Jesus to play with the pomegranate or watching Moses pour water into a trough he had seen the same sorrow once before on her face but when he could no longer say then suddenly he remembered it it was when Odette had lied in apologizing to Madame Verdurent on the evening after the dinner from which she had stayed away on a pretext of illness but really so that she might be alone with swan surely even if she had been the most scrupulous of women she could hardly have felt remorse for so innocent a lie but the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends and so when she lied smitten with fear feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defense unconfident of success she was inclined to weep from sheer exhaustion as children weep sometimes when they have not slept she knew also that her lie as a rule was doing a serious injury to the man to whom she was telling it and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly therefore she felt at once humble and culpable in his presence and when she had to tell an insignificant social lie its hazardous associations and the memories which it recalled would leave her weak with the sense of exhaustion and penitent with the consciousness of wrongdoing what depressing lie was she now concocting for swans benefit to give her that pained expression that plaintive voice which seemed to falter beneath the effort that she was forcing herself to make and to plead for pardon he had an idea that it was not merely the truth about what had occurred that afternoon that she was endeavoring 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 doorbell ring Odette never stopped speaking but her words dwindled into an inarticulate moan her regret at not seeing swan that afternoon at not having opened the door to him had melted into a universal despair he could hear the gate being closed and the sound of a carriage as though someone were going away probably the person whom swan must on no account meet after being told that Odette was not at home and then when he reflected that merely by coming at an hour when he was not in the habit of coming he had managed to disturb so many arrangements of which she did not wish him to know he had a feeling of discouragement that amounted almost to distress but since he was in love with Odette since he was in the habit of turning all his thoughts towards her the pity with which he might have been inspired for himself he felt for her only and murmured poor darling when finally he left her she took up several letters which were lying on the table and asked him if he would be so good as to post them for her he walked along to the post office took the letters from his pocket and before dropping each of them into the box scanned its address they were all to tradesmen except the last which was to force feel he kept it in his hand if I saw what was in this he argued I should know what she calls him what she says to him whether there really is anything between them perhaps if I don't look inside I shall be lacking in delicacy towards Odette since in this way alone I can rid myself of a suspicion which is perhaps a calamity on her which must in any case cause her suffering and which can never possibly be said at rest once the letter is posted he left the post office and went home but he had kept the last letter in his pocket he lighted a candle and held up close to its flame the envelope which he had not dared to open at first he could distinguish nothing but the envelope was thin and by pressing it down on the stiff card which it enclosed he was able through the transparent paper to read the concluding words they were a coldly formal signature if in studying of its being himself who was looking at a letter addressed to force field it had been force field who had read a letter addressed to swan he might have found words in it of another a far more tender kind he took a firm hold of the card which was sliding to and fro the envelope being too large for it and then by moving it with his finger and thumb brought one line after another beneath the part of the envelope where the paper was not doubled through which alone it was possible to read in spite of all these maneuvers he could not make it out clearly not that it mattered for he had seen enough to ensure himself that the letter was about some trifling incident of no importance and had nothing at all to do with love it was something to do with the debts uncle swan had read quite plainly at the beginning of the line I was right but did not understand what Odette had been right in doing until suddenly a word which he had not been able at first to decipher came to light and made the whole sentence intelligible I was right to open the door it was my uncle to open the door then force field had been there when swan rang the bell and she had sent him away hence the sound that swan had heard after that he read the whole letter at the end she apologized for having created force field with so little ceremony and reminded him that he had left his cigarette case at her house precisely what she had written to swan after one of his first visits but to swan she had added why did you not forget your heart also I should never have let you have that back to force field nothing of that sort no illusion that could suggest any intrigue between them and really he was obliged to admit that in all the business force field had been worse treated than himself since Odette was writing to make him believe that her visitor had been an uncle from which it followed that he swan was the man to whom she attached importance and for whose sake she had sent the other away and yet if there had been nothing between Odette and force field why not have opened the door at once why have said I was right to open the door it was my uncle right if she was doing nothing wrong at the moment how could force field possibly have accounted for her not opening the door for a time swan stood still there heartbroken bewildered it and yet happy gazing at this envelope which Odette had handed to him without a scruple so absolute was her trust in his honor through its transparent window there had been disclosed to him with the secret history of an incident which he had disparate of ever being able to learn a fragment of the life of Odette seen as through a narrow luminous incision cut into its surface without her knowledge then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery as though that jealousy had had an independent existence fiercely egotistical gluttoness of everything that would feed its vitality even at the expense of swan himself now it had food in store and swan could begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening over the visits that Odette had received about five o'clock and could seek to discover where force field had been at that hour for swan's affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on it from the beginning by his ignorance of the occupations in which she passed her days as well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him from supplementing that ignorance by imagination he was not jealous at first of the whole of Odette's life but at those moments only in which an incident which he had perhaps misinterpreted had led him to suppose that Odette might have played him false his jealousy like an octopus which throws out a first then a second and finally a third tentacle fastened itself irremovably first at that moment five o'clock in the afternoon then to another then to another again but swan was incapable of inventing his sufferings they were only the memory the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without from without however everything brought him fresh suffering he decided to separate Odette from force field by taking her away for a few days to the south but he imagined that she was coveted by every male person in the hotel and that she coveted them in return and so he who in old days when he traveled used always to seek out new people and crowded places might now be seen fleeing savagely from human society as if it had cruelly injured him and how could he not have turned misanthrope when in every man he saw a potential lover for Odette thus his jealousy did even more than the happy passionate desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter swan's character completely changing in the eyes of the world even the outward signs by which that character had been intelligible a month after the evening on which he had intercepted and read Odette's letter to force field swan went to a dinner party which the verdurant were giving in the bois as the party was breaking up he noticed a series of whispered discussions between madame verdurant and several of her guests and thought that he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to a party at chateau now he swan had not been invited to any party the verdurant had spoken only in whispers and in vague terms but the painter perhaps without thinking shouted out there must be no lights of any sort and he must play the moonlight sonata in the dark for us to see by madame verdurant seeing that swan was within earshot assumed that the expression in which the twofold desire to make the speaker be quiet and to preserve oneself and appearance of guilessness in the eyes of the listener is neutralized in an intense vacuity in which the unflinching signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who have made it at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have been made odette seemed suddenly to be in despair as though she had decided not to struggle any longer against the crushing difficulties of life and swan was anxiously counting the minutes that still separated him from the point at which after leaving the restaurant while he drove her home he would be able to ask for an explanation to make her promise either that she would not go to chateau next day or that she would procure an invitation for him also and to lull to rest in her arms the anguish that still tormented him at last the carriages were ordered madame verdores said to swan goodbye then we shall see you soon i hope trying by the friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile to prevent him noticing that she was not saying as she would always have until then tomorrow then at chateau and at my house the day after mishir and madame verdoran made forcheville get into their carriage swan's was drawn up behind it and he waited for theirs to start before helping odette into his own odette will take you said madame verdoran we've kept a little corner especially for you beside mishir de forcheville yes madame verdoran said odette meekly what i thought i was to take you home cried swan flinging discretion to the winds for the carriage door hung open time was precious and he could not in his present state go home without her but madame verdoran has asked me that's all right you can quite well go home alone we've left you like this dozens of times said madame verdoran but i had something important to tell madame de crecy very well you can write it to her instead goodbye said odette holding out her hand he tried to smile but could only succeed in looking utterly dejected what do you think of the airs that swan is pleased to put on with us madame verdoran asked her husband when they had reached home i was afraid he was going to eat me simply because we offered to take odette back it really is too bad that sort of thing why doesn't he say straight out that we keep a disorderly house i can't conceive how odette can stand such manners he positively seems to be saying all the time you belong to me i shall tell odette exactly what i think about it all and i hope she will have the sense to understand me a moment later she added in articulate with rage no but don't you see the filthy creature using unconsciously and perhaps in satisfaction of the same obscure need to justify herself like françois's at combré when the chicken refused to die the very words which the last convulsions of an inoffensive animal in its death agony ring from the peasant who is engaged in taking its life and when madame verdoran's carriage had moved on and swan's took its place his coachman catching sight of his face asked whether he was unwell or had heard bad news swan sent him away he preferred to walk and it was on foot through the bois that he came home he talked to himself aloud and in the same slightly affected tone which he had been used to adopt when describing the charms of the little nucleus and extolling the magnanimity of the verdoran's but just as the conversations the smiles the kisses of odette became as odious to him as he had once found them charming if they were diverted to others than himself so the verdoran's drawing room which not an hour before had still seemed to him amusing inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with a sort of moral aristocracy now that it was another man than himself whom odette was going to meet there to love there without restraint laid bare to him all its absurdities its stupidity its shame he drew a fanciful picture at which he shuddered in disgust of the party next evening at chateau imagine going to chateau of all places like a lot of drapers after closing time upon my word these people are sublime in their smugness they can't really exist they must all have come out of one of la biche's plays the cotars would be there possibly re-show could anything be more grotesque than the lives of these little creatures hanging on to one another like that they'd imagine they were utterly lost upon my soul they would if they didn't all meet again tomorrow at chateau alas there would be the painter there also the painter who enjoyed matchmaking who would invite forchevue to come with odette to his studio he could see odette in a dress far too smart for the country for she is so vulgar in that way and poor little thing she is such a fool he could hear the jokes that madame verdurin would make after dinner jokes which whoever the boar might be at whom they were aimed had always amused him because he could watch odette laughing at them laughing with him her laughter almost a part of his now he felt that it was possibly at him that they would make odette laugh what a fetid form of humor he exclaimed twisting his mouth into an expression of disgust so violent that he could feel the muscles of his throat stiffen against his collar how in god's name can a creature made in his image find anything to laugh at in those nauseating witticisms the least sensitive nose must be driven away in horror from such stale exhalations it is really impossible to believe that any human being is incapable of understanding that in allowing himself merely to smile at the expense of a fellow creature who has loyally held out his hand to her she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible with the best will in the world ever to rescue her i dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and ball their cheap obscenities that i cannot possibly be scattered by the witticisms of a verdurant he cried tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body god knows that i have honestly attempted to pull odette out of that sewer and to teach her to breathe a nobler and to purer air but human patience has its limits and mine is at an end he concluded as though this sacred mission to tear odette away from an atmosphere of sarcasms dated from longer than a few minutes ago as though he had not undertaken it only since it had occurred to him that those sarcasm might perchance be directed at himself and might have the effect of detaching odette from him he could see the pianists sitting down to play the moonlight sonata and the grimaces of madame verdurant in terrified anticipation of the wrecking of her nerves by baithoven's music idiot liar he shouted and a creature like that imagines that she's fond of art she would say to odette after deathly insinuating a few words of praise for forceville as she had done so often for himself you can make room for mr. de forceville there can't you odette in the dark codfish pander pander was the name he applied also to the music which would invite them to sit in silence to dream together to gaze in each other's eyes to feel for each other's hands he felt that there was much to be said after all for a sternly censorous attitude towards the arts such as playtoe adopted and busouet and the old school of education in france in a word the life which they led at the verdurant's which he had so often described as genuine seemed to him now the worst possible form of life and their little nucleus the most degraded class of society it really is he repeated beneath the lowest rung of the social ladder the nethermost circle of dante beyond a doubt the august words of the florentine refer to the verdurant's when one comes to think of it surely people in society and though one may find fault with them now and again still after all they are a very different matter from that gang of blackmailers people in society show a profound sagacity in refusing to know them or even to dirty the tips of their fingers with them what a sound intuition there is in that noli mutanger motto of the faux berg saint german he had long since emerged from the paths and avenues of the bois he had almost reached his own house and still for he had not yet thrown off the intoxication of grief or his whim of insincerity but was ever more and more exhilarated by the false intonation the artificial sonority of his own voice he continued to prevarate aloud in the silence of the night people in society have their failings as no one knows better than i but after all they are people to whom some things at least are impossible so-and-so a fashionable woman whom he had known was far from being perfect but after all one did find in her a fundamental delicacy a loyalty in her conduct which made her whatever happened incapable of a felony which fixes a vast gulf between her and an old hag like verdurant verdurant what a name oh there's something complete about them something almost fine in their trueness to type they're the most perfect specimens of their disgusting class thank god it was high time that i stopped condescending to promiscuous intercourse with such infamy such dung but just as the virtues which he had still attributed an hour or so earlier to the verdurants would not have sufficed even though the verdurants had actually possessed them if they were not also favored and protected his love to excite swan to that state of intoxication in which he waxed tender over their magnanimity an intoxication which even when disseminated through the medium of other persons could have come to him from Odette alone so the immortality had it really existed which he now found in the verdurants would have been powerless if they had not invited Odette with force view and without him to unstop the vials of his wrath and to make him scarify their infamy dotless swan's voice showed a finer perspicacity than his own when it refused to utter those words full of disgust at the verdurants and their circle and of joy at his having shaken himself free of it save in an artificial and rhetorical tone and as though his words have been chosen rather to appease his anger than to express his thoughts the latter in fact while he abandoned himself to invective were probably though he did not know it occupied with a wholly different matter for once he had reached his house no sooner had he closed the front door behind him than he suddenly struck his forehead and making his servant open the door again dashed out into the street shouting in a voice which this time was quite natural i believe i have found a way of getting invited to the dinner at chateau tomorrow but it must have been a bad way for mature swan was not invited doctor cotard who had been summoned to attend a serious case in the country had not seen the verdurants for some days and had been prevented from appearing at chateau and on the evening after this dinner as he sat down to table at their house why aren't we going to see mr swan this evening he is quite what you might call a personal friend i sincerely trust that we shan't cried madame verdurant heaven preserve us from him he's too deadly for words a stupid ill bread bore on hearing these words cotard exhibited an intense astonishment blended with entire submission as though in the face of a scientific truth which contradicted everything that he had previously believed but was supported by an irresistible weight of evidence with temerous emotion he bowed his head over his plate and merely replied oh oh oh oh traversing in an orderly retirement of his forces into the depths of his being along a descending scale the whole compass of his voice after which there was no more talk of swan at the verdurans and so that drawing room which had brought swan and odet together became an obstacle in the way of their meeting she no longer said to him as she had said in the early days of their love we shall meet anyhow tomorrow evening there's a supper party at the verdurans but we can't be able to meet tomorrow evening there's a supper party at the verdurans or else the verdurans were taking her to the opera comique to see unuit du cleopatra and swan could read in her eyes that terror lest he should ask her not to go which but a little time before he could not have refrained from greeting with the kiss as it flitted across the face of his mistress but which now exasperated him yet i'm not really angry he assured himself when i see how she longs to run away and scratch from maggots in that dung hill of cacophony i'm disappointed not for myself but for her disappointed to find that after living for more than six months in daily contact with myself she has not been capable of improving her mind even to the point of spontaneously eradicating from it a taste for victor mass more than that to find that she has not arrived at the stage of understanding that there are evenings on which anyone with the least shade of refinement of feeling should be willing to forego an amusement when she is asked to do so she ought to have the sense to say i shall not go if it were only from policy since it is by what she answers now that the quality of her soul will be determined once and for all and having persuaded himself that it was solely after all in order that he might arrive at a favorable estimate of odette's spiritual worth that he wished her to stay at home with him that evening instead of going to the opera comique he adopted the same line of reasoning with her with the same degree of insincerity as he had used it with himself or even with a degree more for in her case he was yielding also to the desire to capture her by her own self-esteem i swear to you he told her shortly before she was to leave for the theater 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 also of you a day may come when seeing me irrevocably sundered from you you will be entitled to reproach me with not having warned you at the decisive hour in which i felt that i was going to pass judgment on you one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist you see your nuit du clépatre what a title has no bearing on the point what i must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of foregoing a pleasure for if you are such how could anyone love you for you are not even a person a definite imperfect but at least perceptible entity you are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may come upon a fish devoid of memory incapable of thought which all its life long and its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against a wall of glass always mistaking it for water do you realize that your answer will have the effect i do not say of making me cease from that moment to love you that goes without saying but of making you less attractive to my eyes when i realize that you are not a person that you are beneath everything in the world and have not the intelligence to raise yourself one inch higher obviously i should have preferred to ask you as though it had been a matter of little or no importance to give up your nuit du clépatre since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a dame in the hope that you would go to it nonetheless but since i had resolved to weigh you in the balance to make so grave an issue depend upon your answer i considered it more honorable to give you due warning meanwhile odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her she grasped that it was to be included among the scenes of reproach or supplication scenes which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her without paying any heed to the words that were uttered to conclude that men would not make unless they were in love that from the moment when they were in love it was superfluous to obey them since they would only be more in love later on and so she would have heard swan out with the utmost tranquility had she not noticed that it was growing late and that if he went on speaking for any length of time she would never as she told him with the fond smile obstinate but slightly abashed get there in time for the overture on other occasions he had assured himself that the one thing which more than anything else would make him cease to love her would be her refusal to abandon the habit of lying even from the point of view of coquetry pure and simple he had told her can't you see how much of your attraction you throw away when you stoop to lying by a frank admission how many faults you might redeem really you are far less intelligent than i supposed in vain however did swan expound to her thus all the reasons that she had for not lying they might have succeeded in overthrowing any universal system of mendacity but odette had no such system she contented herself merely whenever she wished swan to remain in ignorance of anything that she had done with not telling him of it so that a lie was to her something to be used only as a special expedient and the one thing that could make her decide whether she would avail herself of a lie or not was a reason which too was of a special and contingent order namely the risk of swan's discovering that she had not told him the truth physically she was passing through an unfortunate phase she was growing stouter and the expressive sorrowful charm the surprised wistful expressions which she had formally had seemed to advantage with her first youth with the result that she became most precious to swan at the very moment when he found her distinctly less good-looking he would gaze at her for hours on end trying to recapture the charm which he had once seen in her and could not find again and yet the knowledge that within this new and strange chrysalis it was still odette that lurked still the same volatile temperament artful and evasive was enough to keep swan seeking with as much passion as ever to captivate her then he would look at photographs of her taken two years before and would remember how exquisite she had been and that would console him a little for all the sufferings that he voluntarily endured on her account when the verdurant took her off to Saint-Germain or to Chateau or to Milan as often as not if the weather was fine they would propose to remain there for the night and not go home until next day madame verdurant would endeavor to set at rest the scruples of the pianist whose aunt had remained in Paris she will be only too glad to be rid of you for a day how on earth could she be anxious when she knows you're with us anyhow i'll take you all under my wing she can put the blame on me if this attempt failed monsieur verdurant would set off across country until he came to a telegraph office or some other kind of messenger after first finding out which of the faithful had anyone whom they must warn when Odette would thank him and assure him that she had no message for anyone for she had told swan once and for all that she could not possibly send messages to him before all those people without compromising herself sometimes she would be absent for several days on end when the verdurant took her to see the tombs at droe or to compagne on the painter's advice to watch the sun setting through the forest after which they went on to the chateau of pierre faune to think that she could really visit historic buildings with me who have spent 10 years in the study of architecture who am constantly bombarded by people who really count to take them over bovet or san lutinode and refuse to take anyone but her and instead of that she trundles off with the lowest the most brutally degraded of creatures to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions of louis philippe and violette luduc one hardly needs much knowledge of art i should say to do that though surely even without any particularly refined sense of smell one would not deliberately choose to spend the holiday in the latrines so as to be within range of their fragrant exhalations but when she had set off for drew or pierre faune alas without allowing him to appear there as though by accident at her side for as she said that would create a dreadful impression he would plunge into the most intoxicating romance in the lover's library the railway timetable from which he learned the ways of joining her there in the afternoon in the evening even in the morning the ways more than that the authority the right to join her for after all the timetable and the trains themselves were not meant for dogs if the public were carefully informed by means of printed advertisements that at eight o'clock in the morning a train started for pierre faune which arrived there at ten that could only be because going to pierre faune was a lawful act for which permission from odette would be superfluous an act moreover which might be performed from a motive altogether different from the desire to see odette since persons who had never even heard of her performed it daily and in such numbers as justified the labor and expense of stoking the engines so it came to this that she could not prevent him from going to pierre faune if he chose to do so now that was precisely what he found that he did choose to do and would at that moment be doing were he like the traveling public not acquainted with odette for a long time past he had wanted to form a more definite impression of violette le duque's work as a restorer and the weather being what it was he felt an overwhelming desire to spend the day roaming in the forest of campagne it was indeed a piece of bad luck that she had forbidden him access to the one spot that tempted him today today why if he went down there in defiant of her prohibition he would be able to see her that very day but then whereas if she had met at pierre faune someone who did not met her she would have hailed him with obvious pleasure what you hear and would have invited him to come and see her at the hotel where she was staying with the furtherance if on the other hand it was himself swan that she encountered there she would be annoyed would complain that she was being followed would love him less in consequence might even turn away in anger when she caught sight of him so then i'm not to be allowed to go away for a day anywhere she would reproach him on her return whereas in fact it was he himself who was not allowed to go end of section 21 section 22 of swan's way this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org recording by denis sears swan's way by marcel proust translated by ck scott moncrief section 22 swan had had the sudden idea so as to contrive to visit campagne and pierre faune without letting it be supposed that his object was to meet odette of securing an invitation from one of his friends the marquis de forestel who had a country house in that neighborhood this friend to whom swan suggested the plan without disclosing its ulterior purpose was beside himself with joy he did not conceal his astonishment at swan's consenting at last after 15 years to come down and visit his property and since he did not he told him wish to stay there promise to spend some days at least and taking him for walks and excursions in the district swan imagined himself down there already with monsieur de forestel 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 chateau 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 rosy it 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 we mustn't on any account he would warn monsieur de forestel run across odette and the verdurant i have just heard that they are at pier phone of all places today one has plenty of time to see them in paris it would hardly be worthwhile coming down here if one couldn't go a yard without meeting them and his host would fail to understand why once they had reached the place swan would change his plans twenty times in an hour inspect the dining rooms of all the hotels in campagne without being able to make up his mind to settle down in any one of them although he had found no trace anywhere of the verdurant seeming to be in search of what he claimed to be most anxious to avoid and would in fact avoid the moment he found it for if he had come upon the little group he would have hastened away at once with studied indifference satisfied that he had seen odette and she him especially that she had seen him when he was not apparently thinking about her but no she would guess at once that it was for her sake that he had come there and when matured forestel came to fetch him and it was time to start he excused himself no i'm afraid not i can't go to pier phone today you see odette is there and swan was happy in spite of everything in feeling that if he alone among mortals had not the right to go to pier phone that day it was because he was in fact for odette someone who differed from all other mortals her lover and because that restriction which for him alone was set upon the universal right to travel freely where one would was but one of the many forms of that slavery that love which was so dear to him decidedly it was better not to risk quarrel with her to be patient to wait for her return he spent his days in pouring over a map of the forest of company as though it had been that of the pays to tondre he surrounded himself with photographs of the chateau of pier phone when the day dawned on which it was possible that she might return he opened the timetable again calculated what train she must have taken and should she have postponed her departure what trains were still left for her to take he did not leave the house for fear of missing a telegram he did not go to bed in case having come by the last train she decided to surprise him with a midnight visit yes the front doorbell rang there seemed some delay in opening the door he wanted to awaken the porter he leaned out of the window to shout to odette if it was odette for in spite of the orders which he had gone downstairs a dozen times to deliver in person they were quite capable of telling her that he was not at home it was only a servant coming in he noticed the incessant rumble of passing carriages to which he had never before paid any attention he could hear them one after another a long way off coming nearer passing his door without stopping and bearing away into the distance a message which was not for him he waited all night to no purpose for the verdurant had returned unexpectedly and odette had been in Paris since midday it had not occurred to her to tell him not knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at the theater had long since gone home to bed and was peacefully asleep as a matter of fact she had never given him a thought and such moments as these in which she forgot swan's very existence were of more value to odette did more to attach him to her than all her infidelities for in this way swan was kept in that state of painful agitation which had once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love on the night when he had failed to find odette at the verdurant and had hunted for her all evening and he did not have as I had afterwards at conbray in my childhood happy days in which to forget the sufferings that would return with the night for his days swan must pass them without odette and as he told himself now and then to allow so pretty a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to leave a case filled with jewels in the middle of the street in this mood he would scowl furiously at the passersby as though they were so many pickpockets but their faces a collective and formless mass escaped the grasp of his imagination and so failed to feed the flame of his jealousy the effort exhausted swan's brain until passing his hand over his eyes he cried out heaven help me as people after lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavors to master the problem of the reality of the external world or that of the immortality of the soul afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning act of faith but the thought of his absent mistress was incessantly indesolably blended with all the simplest actions of swan's daily life when he took his meals opened his letters went for a walk or to bed by the fact of his regret and having to perform those actions without her like those initials of filbert the fair which in the church of brule because of her grief her longing for him margaret of austria intertwined everywhere with her own on some days instead of staying at home he would go for luncheon to a restaurant not far off to which he had been attracted sometime before by the excellence of its cookery but to which he now went only for one of those reasons at once mystical and absurd which people call romantic because this restaurant which by the way still exists bore the same name as the street in which odette lived the la peruse sometimes when she had been away on a short visit somewhere several days with a lapse before she thought of letting him know that she had returned to paris and then she would say quite simply without taking as she once would have taken the precaution of covering herself at all costs with a little fragment borrowed from the truth that she had just at that very moment arrived by the morning train what she said was a falsehood at least for odette it was a falsehood inconsistent lacking what it would have had if true the support of her memory of her actual arrival at the station she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of what she was saying while she said it by the contradictory picture in her mind of whatever quite different thing she had indeed been doing at the moment when she pretended to have been alighting from the train in swan's mind however these words meeting no opposition settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen odette swan would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour since his version did not agree with the words uttered by odette these words had never appeared to him false except when before hearing them he had suspected that they were going to be for him to believe that she was lying and anticipatory suspicion was indispensable it was also however sufficient given that everything that odette might say appeared to him suspect she did mention a name it was obviously that of one of her lovers once this supposition had taken shape he would spend weeks in tormenting himself on one occasion he even approached a firm of inquiry agents to find out the address and the occupation of the unknown rival who would give him no peace until he could be proved to have gone abroad and who he ultimately learned was an uncle of odette and had been dead for 20 years although she would not allow him as a rule to meet her at public gatherings saying that people would talk it happened occasionally that at an evening party to which he and she had been invited at four fields at the painters or at a charity ball given in one of the ministries he found himself in the same room with her he could see her but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures which he tasted in other company pleasures which while he drove home in utter loneliness and went to bed as anxiously as i myself was to go to bed some years later on the evenings when he came to dine with us at conbray seemed limitable to him since he had not been able to see their end and once or twice he derived from such evenings that kind of happiness which one would be inclined did it not originate in so violent a reaction from an anxiety abruptly terminated to call peaceful since it consists in a pacifying of the mind he had looked in for a moment at a revel in the painter's studio and was getting ready to go home he was leaving behind him Odette transformed into a brilliant stranger surrounded by men to whom her glances and her gaiety which were not for him seemed to hint at some voluptuous pleasure to be enjoyed there or elsewhere possibly at the ball day's incoherent to which he trembled to think that she might be going on afterwards which made swan more jealous than the thought of their actual physical union since it was more difficult to imagine he was opening the door to go when he heard himself called back in these words which by cutting off from the party that possible ending which had so appalled him made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible but tender and familiar a thing that kept close to his side like a part of his own daily life in his carriage a thing that stripped Odette herself of the excess of brilliance and gaiety in her appearance showed that it was only a disguise which he had assumed for a moment for his sake and not in view of any mysterious pleasures a disguise of which she had already wearied called back in these words which Odette flung out after him as he was crossing the threshold can't you wait a minute for me i'm just going we'll drive back together and you can drop me it was true that on one occasion forceville had asked to be driven home at the same time but when on reaching Odette's gate he had begged to be allowed to come in too she had smiled with the finger pointed at swan ah that depends on this gentleman you must ask him very well you may come in just for a minute if you insist but you mustn't stay long for i warn you he likes to sit and talk quietly with me and he's not at all pleased if i have visitors when he's here oh if you only knew the creature as i know him isn't that so my love there's no one that really knows you is there except me and swan was perhaps even more touched by the spectacle of her dressing and thus in front of forceville not only in these tender words of predilection but also with certain criticisms such as i feel sure you haven't written yet to your friends about dining with them on sunday you needn't go if you don't want to but you might at least be polite or now have you left your essay on vermere here so that you can do a little more to it tomorrow what a lazy bones i'm going to make you work i can tell you which proved that odette kept herself in touch with his social engagements and his literary work that they had a life indeed in common and as she spoke she bestowed on him a smile which he interpreted as meaning that she was entirely his and then while she was making them some orange-ade suddenly just as when the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting all around an object on the wall beyond it huge and fantastic shadows which in time contract and are lost in the shadow of the object itself all the terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of odette melted away and vanished in the charming creature who stood there before his eyes he had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in odette's house in the lamp light was perhaps after all not an artificial hour invented for his special use with the object of concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without his ever being able to form a satisfactory impression of it an hour of odette's real life of her life when he was not there looking on with theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits but was perhaps a genuine hour of odette's life that if he himself had not been there she would have pulled forward the same armchair for foreshadow would have poured out for him not any unknown brew but precisely that orange-ade which she was now offering to them both that the world inhabited by odette was not that other world fearful and supernatural in which he spent his time in placing her in which existed perhaps only in his imagination but the real universe excelling no special atmosphere of gloom comprising that table at which he might sit down presently and right and this drink which he was being permitted now to taste all the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude for if in absorbing his dreams they had delivered him from an obsession they themselves were in turn enriched by the absorption they showed him the palpable realization of his fancies and they interested his mind they took shape and grew solid before his eyes and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart ah had fate but allowed him to share a single dwelling with odette so that in her house he should be in his own if when asking his servant what there would be for luncheon it had been odette's bill of fare that he had learned from the reply if when odette wished to go for a walk in the morning along the avenue du Bois de Boulogne his duty as a good husband had obliged him though he had no desire to go out to accompany her carrying her cloak when she was too warm and in the evening after dinner if she wished to stay at home and not to dress if he had been forced to stay beside her to do what she asked then how completely would all the trivial details of swan's life which seemed to him now so gloomy simply because they would at the same time have formed part of the life of odette have taken on like that lamp that orangeade that armchair which had absorbed so much of his dreams which materialized so much of his longing a sort of super abundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity and yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much longed was a calm a peace which would not have created an atmosphere favorable to his love when odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent regretted imagined when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sanata but constant affection and gratitude when those normal relations were established between them which would put an end to his melancholy madness then no doubt the actions of odette's daily life would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic interest as he had several times already felt that they might be on the day for instance when he had read through its envelope her letter to foreshave examining his complaint with as much scientific detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study its effects he told himself that when he was cured of it what Odette might or might not do would be indifferent to him but in his morbid state to tell the truth he feared death itself no more than such a recovery which would in fact amount to the death of all that he then was after these quiet evenings swan's suspicions would be temporarily lulled he would bless the name of Odette and next day in the morning would order the most attractive jewels to be sent to her because her kindnesses to him overnight had excited either his gratitude or the desire to see them repeated or a paroxysm of love for her which had need of some such outlet but at other times grief would again take hold of him he would imagine that Odette was foreshave's mistress and that when they both sat watching him from the depths of the verdurans landau in the bois on the evening before the party at chateau to which he had not been invited while he implored her in vain with that look of despair on his face which even his coachmen had noticed to come home with him and then turned away solitary crushed she must have employed to draw foreshave's attention to him while she murmured do look at him storming the same glance brilliant malicious side long cunning as on the evening when foreshave had driven sañé from the verdurans at such times swan detested her but i've been a fool too he would argue i'm paying for other men's pleasures with my money all the same she better take care and not pull the string too often for i might very well stop giving her anything at all at any rate we'd better knock off supplementary favors for the time being to think that only yesterday when she said she would like to go to be Ruth for the season i was such an ass has to offer to take one of those jolly little places the king of Bavaria has there for the two of us however she didn't seem particularly keen she hasn't said yes or no yet let's hope that she'll refuse good god i think of listening to Wagner for a fortnight on end with her who takes about as much interest in music as a fish does in little apples it will be fun and his hatred like his love needing to manifest itself in action he amused himself with urging his evil imaginings further and further because thanks to the perfidies with which he charged Odette he detested her still more and would be able if turned out as he tried to convince himself that she was indeed guilty of them to take the opportunity of punishing her emptying upon her the overflowing vials of his wrath in this way he went so far as to suppose that he was going to receive a letter from her in which she would ask him for money to take the house at bay ruth but with the warning that he was not to come there himself as she had promised for chville and the verdurans to invite them oh how he would have loved it had it been conceivable that she would have that audacity what joy he would have in refusing in drawing up that vindictive reply the terms of which he amused himself by selecting and declaiming aloud as though he had actually received her letter the very next day her letter came she wrote that the verdura and their friends had expressed a desire to be present at these performances of Wagner and that if he would be so good as to send her the money she would be able at last after going so often to their house to have the pleasure of entertaining the verdurans in hers of him she had not said a word it was to be taken for granted that their presence at bay ruth would be a bar to his then that annihilating answer every word of which he had carefully rehearsed overnight without venturing to hope that it could ever be used he had the satisfaction of having it conveyed to her alas he felt only too certain that with the money which she had or could easily procure she would be able all the same to take a house at bay ruth since she wished to do so she who was incapable of distinguishing between Bach and clappison let her take it then she would have to live in it more frugally that was all no means as there would have been if he had replied by sending her several thousand frank notes of organizing each evening in her hired castle those exquisite little suppers after which she might perhaps be seized by the whim which it was possible had never yet seized her a falling into the arms of force wheel at any rate this loathsome expedition it would not be swan who had to pay for it ah if he could only manage to prevent it if she could sprain her ankle before starting if the driver of the carriage which was to take her to the station would consent no matter how great the bribe to smuggle her to some place where she could be kept for a time in seclusion that perfidious woman her eyes tensiled with a smile of complicity for force field which was what Odette had become for swan in the last 48 hours but she was never that for very long after a few days the shining crafty eyes lost their brightness and their duplicity that picture of an executable Odette saying to force wheel look at him storming began to grow pale and to dissolve then gradually reappeared and rose before him softly radiant the face of the other Odette of that Odette who also turned with a smile to force wheel but with the smile in which there was nothing but affection for swan when she said you mustn't stay long for this gentleman doesn't much like my having visitors when he's here oh if you only knew the creature as I know him that same smile with which he used to thank swan for some instance of his courtesy which she prized so highly for some advice for which he had asked him in one of those grave crises in her life when she would turn to him alone then to this other Odette he would ask himself what could have induced him to write that outrageous letter of which probably until then she had never supposed him capable a letter which must have lowered him from the high from the supreme place which by his generosity by his loyalty he had won for himself in her esteem he would become less dear to her since it was for those qualities which she found neither in four she viewed nor in any other that she loved him it was for them that Odette so often showed him a reciprocal kindness which counted for less than nothing in his moments of jealousy because it was not a sign of reciprocal desire was indeed a proof rather of affection than of love but the importance of which he began once more to feel in proportion as the spontaneous relaxation of his suspicions often accelerated by the distraction brought to him by reading about art or by the conversation of a friend rendered his passion less exacting of reciprocities now that after this swing of the pendulum Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swan's jealousy had for the moment driven her in the angle in which he found her charming he pictured her to himself as full of tenderness with a look of consent in her eyes and so beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards her as though she had actually been in the room for him to kiss and he preserved a sense of gratitude to her for that bewitching kindly glance as strong as though she had really looked thus at him and it had not been merely his imagination that had portrayed it in order to satisfy his desire what distress he must have caused her certainly he found adequate reasons for his resentment but they would not have been sufficient to make him feel that resentment if he had not so passionately loved her had he not nourished grievances just as serious against other women to whom he would nonetheless render willing service today feeling no anger towards them because he no longer loved them if the day ever came when he would find himself in the same state of indifference with regard to Odette he would then understand that it was his jealousy alone which had led him to find something atrocious unpardonable in this desire after all so natural a desire springing from a childlike ingenuousness and also from a certain delicacy in her nature to be able in her turn when an occasion offered to repay the verdurant for their hospitality and to play the hostess in a house of her own he returned to that other point of view opposite to that of his love and of his jealousy to which he resorted at times by a sort of mental equity and in order to make allowance for different eventualities from which he tried to form a fresh judgment of Odette based on the supposition that he had never been in love with her that she was to him just a woman like other women that her life had not been whenever he himself was not present different a texture woven in secret apart from him and worked against him wherefore believe that she would enjoy down there with four shville or with other men intoxicating pleasures which she had never known with him and which his jealousy alone had fabricated in all their elements at Beiruth as in Paris if it should happen that four shville thought of him at all it would only be as someone who counted for a great deal and the life of Odette someone for whom he was obliged to make way when they met in her house if four shville and she scored a triumph by being down there together in spite of him it was he who had engineered that triumph by striving in vain to prevent her from going there whereas if he had approved of her plan which for that matter was quite defensible she would have had the appearance of being there by his counsel she would have felt herself sent there housed there by him and for the pleasure which she derived from entertaining those people who had so often entertained her it was to him that she would have had to acknowledge her indebtedness and if instead of letting her go off thus at crossed purposes with him without having seen him again he were to send her this money if he were to encourage her to take this journey and to go out of his way to make it comfortable and pleasant for her she would come running to him happy grateful and he would have the joy the sight of her face which he had not known for nearly a week a joy which none other could replace for the moment that swan was able to form a picture of her without revulsion that he could see once again the friendliness in her smile and that the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love that love once again became more than anything a taste for the sensations which odette's person gave him for the pleasure which he found in admiring as one might a spectacle or in questioning as one might a phenomenon the birth of one of her glances the formation of one of her smiles the utterance of an intonation of her voice and this pleasure different from every other had in the end created in him a need of her which she alone by her presence or by her letters could assuage almost as disinterested almost as artistic as perverse as another need which characterized this new period in swan's life when the searness the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual super abundance without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked for enrichment of his life any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger puts on flesh and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery this other need which too developed in him independently of the visible material world was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it and so by the chemical process of his malady after he had created jealousy out of his love he began again to generate tenderness pity for Odette she had become once more the old Odette charming and kind he was full of remorse for having treated her harshly he wished her to come to him and before she came he wished to have already procured for her some pleasure so as to watch her gratitude taking shape in her face and molding her smile so to Odette certain of seeing him come to her in a few days as tender and submissive as before and plead with her for a reconciliation became endured was no longer afraid of displeasing him or even of making him angry and refused him whenever it suited her the favors by which he set most store perhaps she did not realize how sincere he had been with her during their quarrel when he had told her that he would not send her any money but would do what he could to hurt her perhaps she did not realize either how sincere he still was if not with her at any rate with himself on other occasions when for the sake of their future relations to show Odette that he was capable of doing without her that a rupture was still possible between them he decided to wait some time before going to see her again sometimes several days had elapsed during which she had caused him no fresh anxiety and as from the next few visits which he would pay her he knew that he was likely to derive not any great pleasure but more probably some annoyance which would put an end to the state of calm in which he found himself he wrote to her that he was very busy and would not be able to see her on any of the days that he had suggested meanwhile a letter from her crossing his asked him to postpone one of those very meetings he asked himself why his suspicions his grief again took hold of him he could no longer abide in the new state of agitation into which he found himself plunged by the arrangements which he had made in his preceding state of comparative calm he would run to find her and would insist upon seeing her on each of the following days and even if she had not written first if she merely acknowledged his letter it was enough to make him unable to rest without seeing her for upsetting all swans calculations Odette's acceptance had entirely changed his attitude like everyone who possesses something precious so as to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it he had detached the precious object from his mind leaving as he thought everything else in the same state as when it was there but the absence of one part from a whole is not only that it is not simply a partial omission it is a disturbance of all the other parts a new state which it was impossible to foresee from the old but at other times when Odette was on the point of going away for a holiday it was after some trifling quarrel for which he had chosen the pretext that he decided not to write to her and not to see her until her return giving the appearance and expecting the reward of a serious rupture which she would perhaps regard as final to a separation the greater part of which was inevitable since she was going away which in fact he was merely allowing to start a little sooner than it must at once he could imagine Odette puzzled anxious distressed at having received neither visit nor letter from him and this picture of her by calming his jealousy made it easy for him to break himself of the habit of seeing her at odd moments no doubt in the furthest recesses of his brain where his determination had thrust it away and thanks to the length of the interval the three-week separation to which he had agreed it was with pleasure that he would consider the idea that he would see Odette again on her return but it was also with so little impatience that he began to ask himself whether he would not readily consent to the doubling of the period of so easy and abstinence it had lasted so far but three days a much shorter time than he had often before passed without seeing Odette and without having as on this occasion he had premeditated a separation and yet there and then some tiny trace of contrarity in his mind or of weakness in his body by inciting him to regard the present as an exceptional moment one not to be governed by the rules one in which prudence itself would allow him to take advantage of the soothing effects of a pleasure and to give his will until the time should come when its efforts might serve any purpose a holiday suspended the action of his will which ceased to exert its inhibitive control or without that even the thought of some information for which he had forgotten to ask Odette such as if she had decided in what color she would have her carriage repainted or with regard to some investment whether they were ordinary or preference shares that she wished him to buy for it was all very well to show her that he could live without her but if after that the carriage had to be painted over again if the shares produced no dividend a fine lot of good he would have done and suddenly like a stretched piece of elastic which is let go or the air in a pneumatic machine which is ripped open the idea of seeing her again from the remote point in time to which it had been attached sprang back into the field of the present and of immediate possibilities it sprang back thus without meeting any further resistance so irresistible in fact that swan had been far less unhappy in watching the end gradually approaching day by day of the fortnight which he must spend apart from Odette then he was when kept waiting ten minutes while his coachman brought round the carriage which was to take him to her minutes which he passed in transports of impatience and joy in which he recaptured a thousand times over to lavish on it all the wealth of his affection that idea of his meeting with Odette which by so abrupt a repercussion at a moment when he supposed it so remote was once more present and on the very surface of his consciousness the fact was that this idea no longer found as an obstacle in its course the desire to contrive without further delay to resist its coming which had ceased to have any place since one's mind since having proved to himself or so at least he believed that he was so easily capable of resisting it he no longer saw any inconvenience in postponing a plan of separation which he was now certain of being able to put into operation whenever he would furthermore this idea of seeing her again came back to him adorned with a novelty a seductiveness armed with a virulence all of which long habit had enfeebled but which had acquired new vigor during this privation not of three days but of a fortnight for a period of abstinence may be calculated by anticipation as having lasted already until the final date assigned to it and had converted what had been until then a pleasure in store which could easily be sacrificed into an unlooked for happiness which he was powerless to resist finally the idea returned to him with its beauty enhanced by his own ignorance of what Odette might have thought might perhaps have done on finding that he showed no sign of life with the result that he was going now to meet with the entrancing revelation of an Odette almost unknown but she just as she had supposed that his refusal to send her money was only a faint saw nothing but a pretext in the question which he came now to ask her about repainting of her carriage or the purchase of stock for she could not reconstruct the several phases of these crises through which he passed and in the general idea which she formed of them she made no attempt to understand their mechanism looking only to what she knew beforehand they're necessary never failing and always identical termination an imperfect idea though possibly all the more profound in consequence if one were to judge it from the point of view of swan who would doubtless have considered that Odette failed to understand him just as a morphinomaniac or a consumptive each persuaded that he has been thrown back one by some outside event at the moment when he was just going to shake himself free from his inveterate habit the other by an accidental in disposition at the moment when he was just going to be finally cured feels himself to be misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance to these pretended contingencies mere disguises according to him assumed so as to be perceptible by his patients by the vice of one and the morbid state of the other which in reality have never ceased to weigh heavily and incurably upon them while they were nursing their dreams of normality and health and as a matter of fact swan's love had reached that stage at which the physician and in the case of certain affections the boldest of surgeons asked themselves whether to deprive a patient of his vice or to rid him of his malady is still reasonable or indeed possible certainly of the extent of this love swan had no direct knowledge when he sought to measure it it happened sometimes that he found it diminished shrunk and almost to nothing for instance the very moderate liking amounting almost to dislike which in the days before he was in love with odette he had felt for her expressive features her faded complexion returned on certain days really i am making distinct headway he would tell himself on the morrow when i come to think it over carefully i find out that i got hardly any pleasure last night out of being in bed with her it's an odd thing but i actually thought her ugly and certainly he was sincere but his love extended a long way beyond the province of physical desire odette's person indeed no longer held any great place in it when his eyes fell upon the photograph of odette on his table or when she came to see him he had difficulty in identifying her face either in the flesh or on the pace board with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind he would say to himself almost with astonishment it is she as when suddenly someone shows us in a detached externalized form one of our own maladies and we find in it no resemblance to what we are suffering she he tried to ask himself what that meant for it is something like love like death rather than like those vague conceptions of maladies a thing which one repeatedly calls in question in order to make oneself probe further into it in the fear that the question will find no answer that the substance will escape our grasp the mystery of personality and this malady which was swan's love had so far multiplied was so closely interwoven with all his habits with all his actions with his thoughts his health his sleep his life even with what he hoped for after his death was so entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to rest it away without almost entirely destroying him as surgeons say his case was past operation end of section 22