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By Root 1426 0

a heavy moustache. He turned round to look at Odette; her cheeks were pale, with little red spots, her features drawn and ringed with shadows; but she looked back at him with eyes welling with affection, ready to detach themselves like tears and to fall upon his face, and he felt that he loved her so much that he would have liked to carry her off with him at once. Suddenly Odette turned her wrist, glanced at a tiny watch, and said: “I must go.” She took leave of everyone in the same formal manner, without taking Swann aside, without telling him where they were to meet that evening, or next day. He dared not ask; he would have liked to follow her, but he was obliged, without turning back in her direction, to answer with a smile some question from Mme Verdurin; but his heart was frantically beating, he felt that he now hated Odette, he would gladly have gouged out those eyes which a moment ago he had loved so much, have crushed those flaccid cheeks. He continued to climb with Mme Verdurin, that is to say to draw further away with each step from Odette, who was going downhill in the other direction. A second passed and it was many hours since she had left them. The painter remarked to Swann that Napoleon III had slipped away immediately after Odette. “They had obviously arranged it between them,” he added. “They must have met at the foot of the cliff, but they didn’t want to say good-bye together because of appearances. She is his mistress.” The strange young man burst into tears. Swann tried to console him. “After all, she’s quite right,” he said to the young man, drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more at ease. “I’ve advised her to do it dozens of times. Why be so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her.” So Swann reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed at first to identify was himself too; like certain novelists, he had distributed his own personality between two characters, the one who was dreaming the dream, and another whom he saw in front of him sporting a fez.

As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association of ideas, then a certain modification of the baron’s usual physiognomy, and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast, had made Swann give that name; in reality, and in everything that the person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images, Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying at the same time, momentarily, such a creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he thought he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of which he was not yet conscious he brought about sudden vicissitudes which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at specific points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; a tocsin sounded, people ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses; he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own heart, which with equal violence was anxiously beating in his breast. Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt an inexplicable pain and nausea. A peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at him as he passed: “Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night with her friend. He used to go about with her in the past, and she tells him everything. It was they who started the fire.” It was his valet, come to awaken him, and saying:

“Sir, it’s eight o’clock, and the barber is here. I’ve told him to call again in an hour.”

But these words, as they plunged through the waves of sleep in which Swann was submerged, did not reach his consciousness without undergoing that refraction which turns a ray of light in the depths of water into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of the door-bell, swelling in the depths