Page 563 - swanns-way

which had escaped with the words ‘perhaps two or three
times,’ was not armed with that specific cruelty, as differ-
ent from anything that he had known as a new malady by
which one is attacked for the first time. And yet this Odette,
from whom all this evil sprang, was no less dear to him,
was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as
his sufferings increased, there increased at the same time
the price of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman
alone possessed. He wished to pay her more attention, as
one attends to a disease which one discovers, suddenly, to
have grown more serious. He wished that the horrible thing
which, she had told him, she had done ‘two or three times’
might be prevented from occurring again. To ensure that,
he must watch over Odette. People often say that, by point-
ing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only
in strengthening his attachment to her, because he does not
believe you; yet how much more so if he does! But, Swann
asked himself, how could he manage to protect her? He
might perhaps be able to preserve her from the contamina-
tion of any one woman, but there were hundreds of other
women; and he realised how insane had been his ambition
when he had begun (on the evening when he had failed to
find Odette at the Verdurins’) to desire the possession—as
if that were ever possible—of another person. Happily for
Swann, beneath the mass of suffering which had invaded
his soul like a conquering horde of barbarians, there lay a
natural foundation, older, more placid, and silently labo-
rious, like the cells of an injured organ which at once set
to work to repair the damaged tissues, or the muscles of a

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