Page 471 - swanns-way

there, housed there by him, and for the pleasure which she
derived from entertaining those people who had so often
entertained her, it was to him that she would have had to
acknowledge her indebtedness.
And if—instead of letting her go off thus, at cross-pur-
poses with him, without having seen him again—he were to
send her this money, if he were to encourage her to take this
journey, and to go out of his way to make it comfortable and
pleasant for her, she would come running to him, happy,
grateful, and he would have the joy—the sight of her face—
which he had not known for nearly a week, a joy which none
other could replace. For the moment that Swann was able to
form a picture of her without revulsion, that he could see
once again the friendliness in her smile, and that the desire
to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by
his jealousy upon his love, that love once again became, more
than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette’s per-
son gave him, for the pleasure which he found in admiring,
as one might a spectacle, or in questioning, as one might
a phenomenon, the birth of one of her glances, the forma-
tion of one of her smiles, the utterance of an intonation of
her voice. And this pleasure, different from every other, had
in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone, by
her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as dis-
interested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need
which characterised this new period in Swann’s life, when
the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been
followed by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his
knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of

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