In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [189]
What distress he must have caused her! Certainly he could find valid reasons for his resentment, but they would not have been sufficient to make him feel that resentment if he had not loved her so passionately. Had he not nourished equally serious grievances against other women, to whom he would none the less willingly render a service today, feeling no anger towards them because he no longer loved them? If the day ever came when he found 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 heinous, unpardonable, in this desire of hers (which was after all so natural, springing from a childlike ingenuousness and also from a certain delicacy in her nature) to be able in her turn, since the opportunity had arisen, to repay the Verdurins for their hospitality, and to play the hostess in a house of her own.
He returned to this other point of view, which was the opposite of the one based on his love and jealousy and to which he resorted at times by a sort of intellectual equity and in order to make allowance for the various probabilities, and tried to judge Odette as though he had not been in love with her, as though she were like any other woman, as though her life (as soon as he was no longer present) had not been different, woven secretly behind his back, hatched against him.
Why should he think that she would enjoy out there with Forcheville or with other men intoxicating pleasures which she had never experienced with him, and which his jealousy alone had fabricated out of nothing? At Bayreuth, as in Paris, if it should happen that Forcheville thought of him at all, it would only be as of someone who counted for a great deal in Odette’s life, someone for whom he was obliged to make way when they met at her house. If Forcheville and she gloated at the idea of being there together in spite of him, it was he who would have engineered it by striving in vain to prevent her from going, whereas if he had approved of her plan, which for that matter was quite defensible, she would have had the appearance of being there on his advice, she would have felt that she had been sent there, housed there by him, would have been beholden to him for the pleasure which she derived from entertaining those people who had so often entertained her.
And if—instead of letting her go off on bad terms with him, without having seen him again—he were to send her this money, if he were to encourage her to undertake this journey and go out of his way to make it agreeable for her, she would come running to him, happy and grateful, and he would have the joy of seeing her which he had not known for nearly a week and which nothing else could replace. For once Swann could picture her to himself without revulsion, could see once again the friendliness in her smile, once the desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love became once again, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette’s person gave him, for the pleasure he took in admiring as a spectacle, or in examining as a phenomenon, the dawn of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the emission of a particular vocal cadence. 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 characterised this new period in Swann’s life, when the sereness, the depression