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And yet he would have liked to live until the time came when he no longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone to see her in the afternoon, she had or had not been in bed with Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was in love with someone else would distract his mind from the question of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new developments in a continuous state of ill-health which seem momentarily to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place the same pain, the sensation of which, the day before, he had as it were diluted in the stream of different daytime impressions. But it had not stirred from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had awakened him.

Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important matters which took up so much of her time every day (although he had lived long enough to know that such matters are never anything else than pleasures), he could not sustain for any length of time the effort of imagining them; his brain would become a void; then he would draw a finger over his tired eyelids as he might have wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There emerged, however, from this terra incognita, certain landmarks which reappeared from time to time, vaguely connected by Odette with some obligation towards distant relatives or old friends who, inasmuch as they were the only people whom she was in the habit of mentioning as preventing her from seeing him, seemed to Swann to compose the necessary, unalterable setting of her life. Because of the tone in which she referred from time to time to “the day when I go with my friend to the races,” if, having suddenly felt unwell and thought, “Perhaps Odette would be kind enough to come and see me,” he remembered that it was one of those very days, he would say to himself: “Oh, no! There’s no point in asking her to come. I should have thought of it before, this is the day when she goes with her friend to the races. We must confine ourselves to what’s possible; no use wasting time proposing things that are ipso facto unacceptable.” And the duty incumbent upon Odette of going to the races, to which Swann thus gave way, seemed to him to be not merely ineluctable in itself, but the mark of necessity with which it was stamped seemed to make plausible and legitimate everything that was even remotely connected with it. If, having acknowledged a greeting from a passer-by in the street which had aroused Swann’s jealousy, Odette replied to his questions by associating the stranger with one of the two or three paramount duties of which she had often spoken to him—if, for instance, she said: “That’s a gentleman who was in my friend’s box at the races the other day”—this explanation would set Swann’s suspicions at rest; it was, after all, inevitable that this friend should have other guests than Odette in her box at the races, though he had never sought to form or succeeded in forming any coherent impression of them. Ah, how he would have loved to know her, the friend who went to the races! If only she would invite him there with Odette. How readily he would have sacrificed all his grand connexions for no matter what person who was in the habit of seeing Odette, even if she were a manicurist or a shop assistant! He would have put himself out for her, taken more trouble than he would have done for a queen. Would they not have supplied him, from their store of knowledge of the life of Odette, with the one effective anodyne for his pain? With what joy would he have hastened to spend his days with one or other of those humble folk with whom Odette kept up friendly relations, either with some ulterior motive or from genuine simplicity of nature!