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By Root 1449 0

I can’t go to Pierrefonds today. You see, Odette is there.” And Swann was happy in spite of everything to feel that if he, alone among mortals, had not the right to go to Pierrefonds that day, it was because he was in fact, for Odette, someone different from all other mortals, her lover, and because that restriction imposed for him alone on the universal right to freedom of movement was but one of the many forms of the slavery, the love that was so dear to him. Decidedly, it was better not to risk a quarrel with her, to be patient, to wait for her return. He spent his days poring over a map of the forest of Compiègne as though it had been that of the “Pays du Tendre,”13 and surrounded himself with photographs of the Château of Pierrefonds. When the day dawned on which it was possible that she might return, he opened the time-table 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, 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-door bell 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 she, 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 paid any attention before. 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 Verdurins had decided to return early, and Odette had been in Paris since midday. It had not occurred to her to tell him, and not knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was asleep.

As a matter of fact, she had not even given him a thought. And such moments as these, in which she forgot Swann’s very existence, were more useful to Odette, did more to bind him to her, than all her coquetry. For in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had already been powerful enough to cause his love to blossom, on the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins’ and had hunted for her all evening. And he did not have (as I had at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings that would return with the night. For his days were spent without Odette; and there were times when he told himself that 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. Then he would rail against all the passers-by, as though they were so many pickpockets. But their faces—a collective and formless mass—escaped the grasp of his imagination, and failed to feed the flame of his jealousy. The effort exhausted Swann’s brain, until, putting his hand over his eyes, he cried out: “Heaven help me!” as people, after lashing themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavours to master the problem of the reality of the external world or the immortality of the soul, afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning act of faith. But the thought of the absent one was incessantly, indissolubly blended with all the simplest actions of Swann’s daily life—when he took his meals, opened his letters, went for a walk or to bed—by the very sadness he felt at having to perform those actions without her; like those initials of Philibert the Fair which, in the church of Brou, because of her grief and 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 once been attracted by the excellence of its cookery, but to which he now went