Page 547 - swanns-way

of infinite value: ‘Yesterday he went through his accounts
himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we had made
in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to
enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cut-
let to-morrow,’—although they themselves know that these
things are meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. No
doubt Swann was assured that if he had now been living at a
distance from Odette he would gradually have lost all inter-
est in her, so that he would have been glad to learn that she
was leaving Paris for ever; he would have had the courage to
remain there; but he had not the courage to go.
He had often thought of going. Now that he was once
again at work upon his essay on Vermeer, he wanted to re-
turn, for a few days at least, to The Hague, to Dresden, to
Brunswick. He was certain that a ‘Toilet of Diana’ which had
been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt sale
as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would
have liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot,
so as to strengthen his conviction. But to leave Paris while
Odette was there, and even when she was not there—for in
strange places where our sensations have not been numbed
by habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain—was for him so
cruel a project that he felt himself to be capable of entertain-
ing it incessantly in his mind only because he knew himself
to be resolute in his determination never to put it into effect.
But it would happen that, while he was asleep, the intention
to travel would reawaken in him (without his remembering
that this particular tour was impossible) and would be rea-
lised. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a

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