Page 453 - swanns-way

country until he came to a telegraph office or some other
kind of messenger, after first finding out which of the ‘faith-
ful’ had anyone whom they must warn. But Odette would
thank him, and assure him that she had no message for any-
one, for she had told Swann, once and for all, that she could
not possibly send messages to him, before all those people,
without compromising herself. Sometimes she would be ab-
sent for several days on end, when the Verdurins took her to
see the tombs at Dreux, or to Compiègne, on the painter’s
advice, to watch the sun setting through the forest—after
which they went on to the Château of Pierrefonds.
‘To think that she could visit really historic buildings
with me, who have spent ten years in the study of architec-
ture, who am constantly bombarded, by people who really
count, to take them over Beauvais or Saint-Loup-de-Naud,
and refuse to take anyone but her; and instead of that she
trundles off with the lowest, the most brutally degraded of
creatures, to go into ecstasies over the petrified excretions
of Louis-Philippe and Viollet-le-Duc! One hardly needs
much knowledge of art, I should say, to do that; though,
surely, even without any particularly refined sense of smell,
one would not deliberately choose to spend a holiday in the
latrines, so as to be within range of their fragrant exhala-
tions.’
But when she had set off for Dreux or Pierrefonds—alas,
without allowing him to appear there, as though by acci-
dent, at her side, for, as she said, that would ‘create a dreadful
impression,’—he would plunge into the most intoxicating
romance in the lover’s library, the railway timetable, from

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