Page 492 - swanns-way

ady which was going to govern his life, to make a plaything
of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at this period,
it often happened that, though without admitting it even to
himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so
much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the mo-
notony of his struggle.
And yet he would have wished to live until the time
came when he no longer loved her, when she would have
no reason for lying to him, when at length he might learn
from her whether, on the day when he had gone to see her
in the afternoon, she had or had not been in the arms of
Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that
she was in love with some one else would distract his mind
from the question of Forcheville, making it almost imma-
terial to him, like those new developments of a continuous
state of ill-health which seem for a little time to have deliv-
ered us from their predecessors. There were even days when
he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he
was cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the
same place the same pain, a sensation which, the day before,
he had, as it were, diluted in the torrent of different impres-
sions. But it had not stirred from its place. Indeed, it was the
sharpness of this pain that had awakened him.
Since Odette never gave him any information as to those
vastly important matters which took up so much of her time
every day (albeit he had lived long enough in the world to
know that such matters are never anything else than plea-
sures) he could not sustain for any length of time the effort
to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he

492 Swann’s Way