Page 486 - swanns-way

the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes
of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but splendid
profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he
would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insig-
nificant details that made up the daily round on the Côte
d’Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to under-
stand something that still baffled him in the smile or in the
eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the aesthete who
ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Flor-
ence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the
Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli. He
would sit, often, without saying a word to her, only gazing at
her and dreaming; and she would comment: ‘You do look
sad!’ It was not very long since, from the idea that she was
an excellent creature, comparable to the best women that he
had known, he had passed to that of her being ‘kept’; and yet
already, by an inverse process, he had returned from the
Odette de Crécy, perhaps too well known to the holiday-
makers, to the ‘ladies’ men’ of Nice and Baden, to this face,
the expression on which was so often gentle, to this nature
so eminently human. He would ask himself: ‘What does it
mean, after all, to say that everyone at Nice knows who
Odette de Crécy is? Reputations of that sort, even when
they’re true, are always based upon other people’s ideas”; he
would reflect that this legend—even if it were authentic—
was something external to Odette, was not inherent in her
like a mischievous and ineradicable personality; that the
creature who might have been led astray was a woman with
frank eyes, a heart full of pity for the sufferings of others, a

486 Swann’s Way