Page 539 - swanns-way

Odette. For he had no longer, as of old, the impression that
Odette and he were not known to the little phrase. Had it
not often been the witness of their joys? True that, as often,
it had warned him of their frailty. And indeed, whereas, in
that distant time, he had divined an element of suffering in
its smile, in its limpid and disillusioned intonation, to-night
he found there rather the charm of a resignation that was
almost gay. Of those sorrows, of which the little phrase had
spoken to him then, which he had seen it—without his be-
ing touched by them himself—carry past him, smiling, on
its sinuous and rapid course, of those sorrows which were
now become his own, without his having any hope of being,
ever, delivered from them, it seemed to say to him, as once
it had said of his happiness: ‘What does all that matter; it is
all nothing.’ And Swann’s thoughts were borne for the first
time on a wave of pity and tenderness towards that Vinteuil,
towards that unknown, exalted brother who also must have
suffered so greatly; what could his life have been? From the
depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-
like strength, that unlimited power of creation?
When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the
vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a sweetness in that
very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to
him intolerable when he thought that he could read it on the
faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a
digression that was without importance. ‘Twas because the
little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold
on the short duration of these states of the soul, saw in them
something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the

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