Page 464 - swanns-way

soothed his troubled heart. Ah! had fate but allowed him
to share a single dwelling with Odette, so that in her house
he should be in his own; if, when asking his servant what
there would be for luncheon, it had been Odette’s bill of fare
that he had learned from the reply; if, when Odette wished
to go for a walk, in the morning, along the Avenue du Bois-
de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him,
though he had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carry-
ing her cloak when she was too warm; and in the evening,
after dinner, if she wished to stay at home, and not to dress,
if he had been forced to stay beside her, to do what she asked;
then how completely would all the trivial details of Swann’s
life, which seemed to him now so gloomy, simply because
they would, at the same time, have formed part of the life
of Odette, have taken on—like that lamp, that orangeade,
that armchair, which had absorbed so much of his dreams,
which materialised so much of his longing,—a sort of su-
perabundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity.
And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which
he so much longed was a calm, a peace, which would not
have created an atmosphere favourable to his love. When
Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regret-
ted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her was no
longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought
in him by the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection
and gratitude, when those normal relations were established
between them which would put an end to his melancholy
madness; then, no doubt, the actions of Odette’s daily life
would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic inter-

464 Swann’s Way