Page 490 - swanns-way

That is very odd! You don’t know how amusing you are, my
dear Mémé. But what an odd idea of hers to go on to the
Chat Noir afterwards; it was her idea, I suppose? No? Yours?
That’s strange. After all, it wasn’t a bad idea; she must have
known dozens of people there? No? She never spoke to a
soul? How extraordinary! Then you sat there like that, just
you and she, all by yourselves? I can picture you, sitting
there! You are a worthy fellow, my dear Mémé; I’m exceed-
ingly fond of you.’
Swann was now quite at ease. To him, who had so of-
ten happened, when talking to friends who knew nothing of
his love, friends to whom he hardly listened, to hear certain
detached sentences (as, for instance, ‘I saw Mme. de Crécy
yesterday; she was with a man I didn’t know.’), sentences
which dropped into his heart and passed at once into a sol-
id state, grew hard as stalagmites, and seared and tore him
as they lay there irremovable,—how charming, by way of
contrast, were the words: ‘She didn’t know a soul; she nev-
er spoke to a soul.’ How freely they coursed through him,
how fluid they were, how vaporous, how easy to breathe!
And yet, a moment later, he was telling himself that Odette
must find him very dull if those were the pleasures that she
preferred to his company. And their very insignificance,
though it reassured him, pained him as if her enjoyment of
them had been an act of treachery.
Even when he could not discover where she had gone,
it would have sufficed to alleviate the anguish that he then
felt, for which Odette’s presence, the charm of her compa-
ny, was the sole specific (a specific which in the long run

490 Swann’s Way