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By Root 1404 0

knew no more than this one passage. “Why do you want the rest?” she had asked him. “Our little bit; that’s all we need.” Indeed, agonised by the reflection, as it floated by, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that while it was addressed to them it did not know them, he almost regretted that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, extraneous to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman we love, we find fault with the water of the stone, or with the words of the message, because they are not fashioned exclusively from the essence of a transient liaison and a particular person.

Often it would happen that he had stayed so long with the young seamstress before going to the Verdurins’ that, as soon as the little phrase had been rendered by the pianist, Swann realised that it was almost time for Odette to go home. He used to take her back as far as the door of her little house in the Rue La Pérouse, behind the Arc de Triomphe. And it was perhaps on this account, and so as not to demand the monopoly of her favours, that he sacrificed the pleasure (not so essential to his well-being) of seeing her earlier in the evening, of arriving with her at the Verdurins’, to the exercise of this other privilege which she accorded him of their leaving together; a privilege he valued all the more because it gave him the feeling that no one else would see her, no one would thrust himself between them, no one could prevent him from remaining with her in spirit, after he had left her for the night.

And so, night after night, she would return home in Swann’s carriage. Once, after she had got down, and while he stood at the gate murmuring “Till tomorrow, then,” she turned impulsively from him, plucked a last lingering chrysanthemum from the little garden in front of the house, and gave it to him before he left. He held it pressed to his lips during the drive home, and when in due course the flower withered, he put it away carefully in a drawer of his desk.

But he never went into her house. Twice only, in the daytime, had he done so, to take part in the ceremony—of such vital importance in her life—of “afternoon tea.” The loneliness and emptiness of those short streets (consisting almost entirely of low-roofed houses, self-contained but not detached, their monotony interrupted here and there by the dark intrusion of some sinister workshop, at once an historical witness to and a sordid survival from the days when the district was still one of ill repute), the snow which still clung to the garden-beds and the branches of the trees, the unkemptness of the season, the proximity of nature, had all combined to add an element of mystery to the warmth, the flowers, the luxury which he had found inside.

From the ground floor, somewhat raised above street level, leaving on the left Odette’s bedroom, which looked out to the back over another little street running parallel with her own, he had climbed a staircase that went straight up between dark painted walls hung with Oriental draperies, strings of Turkish beads, and a huge Japanese lantern suspended by a silken cord (which last, however, so that her visitors should not be deprived of the latest comforts of Western civilisation, was lighted by a gas-jet inside), to the two drawing-rooms, large and small. These were entered through a narrow vestibule, the wall of which, chequered with the lozenges of a wooden trellis such as you see on garden walls, only gilded, was lined from end to end by a long rectangular box in which bloomed, as in a hothouse, a row of large chrysanthemums, at that time still uncommon though by no means so large as the mammoth specimens which horticulturists have since succeeded in producing. Swann was irritated, as a rule, by the sight of these flowers, which had then been fashionable in Paris for about a year, but it had pleased him, on this occasion, to see the gloom of the vestibule shot with rays of pink and gold and white by the fragrant petals of these ephemeral stars, which kindle their cold fires