Page 433 - swanns-way

as a malady might exist, and that, once he was cured of the
malady, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might
have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous
as those of countless other women. But the consciousness
that the painful curiosity with which Swann now studied
them had its origin only in himself was not enough to make
him decide that it was unreasonable to regard that curios-
ity as important, and to take every possible step to satisfy
it. Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of
which—supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of
the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent
most of his life, the group that surrounded the Princesse des
Laumes, in which one’s intelligence was understood to in-
crease with the strength of one’s disbelief in everything, and
nothing real and incontestable was to be discovered, except
the individual tastes of each of its members—is no longer
that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy,
the philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspira-
tions upon external objects, endeavour to separate from the
accumulation of the years already spent a definite residue of
habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic
and permanent, and with which they will deliberately ar-
range, before anything else, that the kind of existence which
they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. Swann
deemed it wise to make allowance in his life for the suffer-
ing which he derived from not knowing what Odette had
done, just as he made allowance for the impetus which a
damp climate always gave to his eczema; to anticipate in his
budget the expenditure of a considerable sum on procuring,

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