Page 585 - swanns-way

which he had departed, but it is so difficult to enter into a
state of complete duality and to present to oneself the life-
like spectacle of a feeling which one has ceased to possess,
that very soon, the clouds gathering in his brain, he could
see nothing, he would abandon the attempt, would take the
glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself
that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be
time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with
as little curiosity, with as much torpor as the drowsy travel-
ler who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to get some
sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels,
faster and faster, out of the country in which he has lived for
so long, and which he vowed that he would not allow to slip
away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell.
Indeed, like the same traveller, if he does not awake until he
has crossed the frontier and is again in France, when Swann
happened to alight, close at hand, upon something which
proved that Forcheville had been Odette’s lover, he discov-
ered that it caused him no pain, that love was now utterly
remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the
moment in which he had emerged from it for ever. And just
as, before kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to
imprint upon his memory the face that for so long had been
familiar, before it was altered by the additional memory of
their kiss, so he could have wished—in thought at least—
to have been in a position to bid farewell, while she still
existed, to that Odette who had inspired love in him and
jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to suffer,
and whom now he would never see again. He was mistaken.

585