Page 584 - swanns-way

drink orangeade with Forcheville, that Odette with whom
Swann had calculated that he might live in happiness.
In former times, having often thought with terror that
a day must come when he would cease to be in love with
Odette, he had determined to keep a sharp look-out, and
as soon as he felt that love was beginning to escape him, to
cling tightly to it and to hold it back. But now, to the faint-
ness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness
in his desire to remain her lover. For a man cannot change,
that is to say become another person, while he continues to
obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be. Oc-
casionally the name, if it caught his eye in a newspaper, of
one of the men whom he supposed to have been Odette’s
lovers, reawakened his jealousy. But it was very slight, and,
inasmuch as it proved to him that he had not completely
emerged from that period in which he had so keenly suf-
fered—though in it he had also known a way of feeling so
intensely happy—and that the accidents of his course might
still enable him to catch an occasional glimpse, stealthily
and at a distance, of its beauties, this jealousy gave him, if
anything, an agreeable thrill, as to the sad Parisian, when
he has left Venice behind him and must return to France, a
last mosquito proves that Italy and summer are still not too
remote. But, as a rule, with this particular period of his life
from which he was emerging, when he made an effort, if not
to remain in it, at least to obtain, while still he might, an un-
interrupted view of it, he discovered that already it was too
late; he would have looked back to distinguish, as it might
be a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from

584 Swann’s Way