Page 459 - swanns-way

of Swann’s daily life—when he took his meals, opened his
letters, went for a walk or to bed—by the fact of his regret
at having to perform those actions without her; like those
initials of Philibert the Fair which, in the church of Brou,
because of her grief, her longing for him, Margaret of Aus-
tria intertwined everywhere with her own. On some days,
instead of staying at home, he would go for luncheon to a
restaurant not far off, to which he had been attracted, some
time before, by the excellence of its cookery, but to which
he now went only for one of those reasons, at once mystical
and absurd, which people call ‘romantic’; because this res-
taurant (which, by the way, still exists) bore the same name
as the street in which Odette lived: the Lapérouse. Some-
times, when she had been away on a short visit somewhere,
several days would elapse before she thought of letting him
know that she had returned to Paris. And then she would
say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have
taken) the precaution of covering herself, at all costs, with a
little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had just,
at that very moment, arrived by the morning train. What
she said was a falsehood; at least for Odette it was a false-
hood, inconsistent, lacking (what it would have had, if true)
the support of her memory of her actual arrival at the sta-
tion; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture
of what she was saying, while she said it, by the contradic-
tory picture, in her mind, of whatever quite different thing
she had indeed been doing at the moment when she pre-
tended to have been alighting from the train. In Swann’s
mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled

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