Page 549 - swanns-way

which was still so recent, might well have been true; and he
said to himself: ‘People don’t know when they are happy.
They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.’ But he
reflected that this existence had lasted already for several
years, that all that he could now hope for was that it should
last for ever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures,
his friends, in fact the whole of his life to the daily expec-
tation of a meeting which, when it occurred, would bring
him no happiness; and he asked himself whether he was
not mistaken, whether the circumstances that had favoured
their relations and had prevented a final rupture had not
done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be
desired was not that as to which he rejoiced that it happened
only in dreams—his own departure; and he said to him-
self that people did not know when they were unhappy, that
they were never so happy as they supposed.
Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in
some accident, she who was out of doors in the streets,
crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And
as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the
strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which was
able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that
environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his
own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so al-
lowed its occupant, the soul, to abandon itself, day after day,
and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the
pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very cordial sympathy
with that Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired,
who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of

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