Page 546 - swanns-way

know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above
the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the at-
tention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on
which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest al-
tars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed.
It followed that, when the phrase at last was finished, and
only its fragmentary echoes floated among the subsequent
themes which had already taken its place, if Swann at first
was annoyed to see the Comtesse de Monteriender, famed
for her imbecilities, lean over towards him to confide in him
her impressions, before even the sonata had come to an end;
he could not refrain from smiling, and perhaps also found
an underlying sense, which she was incapable of perceiv-
ing, in the words that she used. Dazzled by the virtuosity
of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: ‘It’s
astonishing! I have never seen anything to beat it...’ But a
scrupulous regard for accuracy making her correct her first
assertion, she added the reservation: ‘anything to beat it...
since the table-turning!’
>From that evening, Swann understood that the feel-
ing which Odette had once had for him would never revive,
that his hopes of happiness would not be realised now. And
the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had once more
shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him
any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading
signs of a slight movement on her part towards him with the
same tender and sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that
people reveal who, when they are nursing a friend in the
last days of an incurable malady, relate, as significant facts

546 Swann’s Way