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he went in one direction, he sent in the other his coachman
Rémi (Rizzo’s Doge Loredan) for whom he presently—after
a fruitless search—found himself waiting at the spot where
the carriage was to meet him. It did not appear, and Swann
tantalised himself with alternate pictures of the approach-
ing moment, as one in which Rémi would say to him: ‘Sir,
the lady is there,’ or as one in which Rémi would say to him:
‘Sir, the lady was not in any of the cafés.’ And so he saw
himself faced by the close of his evening—a thing uniform,
and yet bifurcated by the intervening accident which would
either put an end to his agony by discovering Odette, or
would oblige him to abandon any hope of finding her that
night, to accept the necessity of returning home without
having seen her.
The coachman returned; but, as he drew up opposite him,
Swann asked, not ‘Did you find the lady?’ but ‘Remind me,
to-morrow, to order in some more firewood. I am sure we
must be running short.’ Perhaps he had persuaded himself
that, if Rémi had at last found Odette in some café, where
she was waiting for him still, then his night of misery was
already obliterated by the realisation, begun already in his
mind, of a night of joy, and that there was no need for him to
hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already cap-
tured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his
grasp again. But it was also by the force of inertia; there was
in his soul that want of adaptability which can be seen in
the bodies of certain people who, when the moment comes
to avoid a collision, to snatch their clothes out of reach of a
flame, or to perform any other such necessary movement,

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