Page 478 - swanns-way

that I got hardly any pleasure, last night, out of being in
bed with her; it’s an odd thing, but I actually thought her
ugly.’ And certainly he was sincere, but his love extended
a long way beyond the province of physical desire. Odette’s
person, indeed, no longer held any great place in it. When
his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or
when she came to see him, he had difficulty in identifying
her face, either in the flesh or on the pasteboard, with the
painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his mind.
He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, ‘It is
she!’ as when suddenly some one shews us in a detached,
externalised form one of our own maladies, and we find
in it no resemblance to what we are suffering. ‘She?’—he
tried to ask himself what that meant; for it is something like
love, like death (rather than like those vague conceptions of
maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in question,
in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
that the question will find no answer, that the substance
will escape our grasp—the mystery of personality. And this
malady, which was Swann’s love, had so far multiplied, was
so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his ac-
tions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even
with what he hoped for after his death, was so entirely one
with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it away
without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his
case was past operation.
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all
other interests that when by chance he reappeared in the
world of fashion, reminding himself that his social relations,

478 Swann’s Way