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By Root 1332 0

for some time been feeling depressed and unwell, especially since Odette had introduced Forcheville to the Verdurins, and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in the country. But he could never summon up the courage to leave Paris, even for a day, while Odette was there. The air was warm; it was beautiful spring weather. And for all that he was driving through a city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned near Combray, where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed, thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Méséglise, one could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air beneath an arbour in the garden as much as by the edge of the pond fringed with forget-me-nots and iris, and where, when he sat down to dinner, the table ran riot with the roses and the flowering currant trained and twined by his gardener’s skilful hand.

After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so abruptly—especially if it threatened to rain, and thus to scatter the “faithful” before their normal time—that on one occasion the Princesse des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left before the coffee was served to join the Verdurins on the Island in the Bois) observed: “Really, if Swann were thirty years older and had bladder trouble, there might be some excuse for his running away like that. I must say it’s pretty cool of him.”

He persuaded himself that the charm of spring which he could not go down to Combray to enjoy might at least be found on the Ile des Cygnes or at Saint-Cloud. But as he could think only of Odette, he did not even know whether he had smelt the fragrance of the young leaves, or if the moon had been shining. He would be greeted by the little phrase from the sonata, played in the garden on the restaurant piano. If there was no piano in the garden, the Verdurins would have taken immense pains to have one brought down either from one of the rooms or from the dining-room. Not that Swann was now restored to favour; far from it. But the idea of arranging an ingenious form of entertainment for someone, even for someone they disliked, would stimulate them, during the time spent in its preparation, to a momentary sense of cordiality and affection. From time to time he would remind himself that another fine spring evening was drawing to a close, and would force himself to notice the trees and the sky. But the state of agitation into which Odette’s presence never failed to throw him, added to a feverish ailment which had persisted for some time now, robbed him of that calm and well-being which are the indispensable background to the impressions we derive from nature.

One evening, when Swann had consented to dine with the Verdurins, and had mentioned during dinner that he had to attend next day the annual banquet of an old comrades’ association, Odette had exclaimed across the table, in front of Forcheville, who was now one of the “faithful,” in front of the painter, in front of Cottard:

“Yes, I know you have your banquet tomorrow; I shan’t see you, then, till I get home; don’t be too late.”

And although Swann had never yet taken serious offence at Odette’s friendship for one or other of the “faithful,” he felt an exquisite pleasure on hearing her thus avow in front of them all, with that calm immodesty, the fact that they saw each other regularly every evening, his privileged position in her house and the preference for him which it implied. It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and there was nothing especially flattering in seeing the supremacy he wielded over someone so inferior to himself proclaimed to all the “faithful”; but since he had observed that to many other men besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the