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By Root 1364 0

their necessary, never-failing and always identical termination. An incomplete notion (though possibly all the more profound in consequence), if one were to judge it from the point of view of Swann, who would doubtless have considered himself misunderstood by Odette, just as a drug-addict or a consumptive, each persuaded that he has been held back, one by some outside event at the moment when he was about to shake himself free of his inveterate habit, the other by an accidental indisposition at the moment when he was about to be finally cured, feels himself to be misunderstood by the doctor who does not attach the same importance to these alleged contingencies, mere disguises, according to him, assumed, so as to make themselves felt once more, by the vice of the one and the morbid state of the other, which in reality have never ceased to weigh heavily and incurably upon the patients while they were nursing their dreams of reformation or health. And, as a matter of fact, Swann’s love had reached the stage at which the boldest of physicians or (in the case of certain affections) of surgeons ask 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 Swann had no direct awareness. When he sought to measure, it, it happened sometimes that he found it diminished, shrunk almost to nothing; for instance, the lack of enthusiasm, amounting almost to distaste, 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’m making distinct headway,” he would tell himself next day. “Looking at things quite honestly, I can’t say I got much pleasure last night from 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 pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, “It’s she!” as though suddenly we were to be shown in a detached, externalised form one of our own maladies, and we found it bore no resemblance to what we are suffering. “She”—he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it is a point of resemblance between love and death, far more striking than those which are usually pointed out, that they make us probe deeper, in the fear that its reality may elude us, into the mystery of personality. And this malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, 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 utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.

By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that when by chance he reappeared in society, reminding himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting (although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate of its worth), might restore something of his own prestige in Odette’s eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming to proclaim such things less precious), he would feel there, side by side with his distress at being in places and among people she did not know, the same detached pleasure as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the elegance of his wardrobe and of his servants’ liveries, the soundness