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By Root 1184 0

to be in despair, as though she had given up the struggle against the crushing difficulties of life, and. Swann anxiously counted the minutes that still separated him from the point at which, after leaving the restaurant, while he drove her home, he would be able to ask her for an explanation, make her promise either that she would not go to Chatou next day or that she would procure an invitation for him also, and to lull to rest in her arms the anguish that tormented him. At last the carriages were ordered. Mme Verdurin said to Swann: “Good-bye, then. We shall see you soon, I hope,” trying, by the friendliness of her manner and the constraint of her smile, to prevent him from noticing that she was not saying, as she would always have said hitherto: “Tomorrow, then, at Chatou, and at my house the day after.”

M. and Mme Verdurin invited Forcheville into their carriage. Swann’s was drawn up behind it, and he waited for theirs to start before helping Odette into his.

“Odette, we’ll take you,” said Mme Verdurin, “we’ve kept a little corner for you, beside M. de Forcheville.”

“Yes, Madame,” said Odette meekly.

“What! I thought I was to take you home,” cried Swann, flinging discretion to the wind, for the carriage-door hung open, the seconds were running out, and he could not, in his present state, go home without her.

“But Mme Verdurin has asked me …”

“Come, you can quite well go home alone; we’ve left her with you quite often enough,” said Mme Verdurin.

“But I had something important to say to Mme de Crécy.”

“Very well, you can write it to her instead.”

“Good-bye,” said Odette, holding out her hand.

He tried hard to smile, but looked utterly dejected.

“Did you see the airs Swann is pleased to put on with us?” Mme Verdurin asked her husband when they had reached home. “I was afraid he was going to eat me, simply because we offered to take Odette back. It’s positively indecent! Why doesn’t he say straight out that we keep a bawdy-house? I can’t conceive how Odette can stand such manners. He literally seems to be saying, ‘You belong to me!’ I shall tell Odette exactly what I think about it all, and I hope she’ll have the sense to understand me.”

A moment later she added, inarticulate with rage: “No, but, don’t you agree, the filthy creature …” unwittingly using, perhaps in obedience to the same obscure need to justify herself—like Françoise at Combray, when the chicken refused to die—the very words which the last convulsions of an inoffensive animal in its death throes wring from the peasant who is engaged in taking its life.

And when Mme Verdurin’s carriage had moved on and Swann’s took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard some bad news.

Swann dismissed him; he wanted to walk, and returned home on foot through the Bois, talking to himself, aloud, in the same slightly artificial tone he used to adopt when enumerating the charms of the “little nucleus” and extolling the magnanimity of the Verdurins. But just as the conversation, the smiles, the kisses of Odette became as odious to him as he had once found them pleasing, if they were addressed to others, so the Verdurins’ salon, which, not an hour before, had still seemed to him amusing, inspired with a genuine feeling for art and even with a sort of moral nobility, exhibited to him all its absurdities, its foolishness, its ignominy, now that it was another than himself whom Odette was going to meet there, to love there without restraint.

He pictured to himself with disgust the party next evening at Chatou. “Imagine going to Chatou! Like a lot of drapers after shutting up shop! Upon my word, these people are really sublime in their bourgeois mediocrity, they can’t be real, they must all have come out of a Labiche comedy!”

The Cottards would be there; possibly Brichot. “Could anything be more grotesque than the lives of these nonentities, hanging on to one another like that. They’d imagine they were utterly lost, upon my soul they would, if they didn’t all meet again tomorrow at Chatou!” Alas! there would also