Page 590 - swanns-way

ried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in
the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought
of ever seeing her again—and that he now recalled the par-
ty at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s, at which he had introduced
General de Frober-ville to Mme. de Cambremer. So mani-
fold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon that,
on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness which
does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggra-
vations of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no
doubt, that might have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at
Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s. Who, indeed, can say whether, in
the event of his having gone, that evening, somewhere else,
other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to him,
which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable?
But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what
had indeed taken place, and he was not far short of seeing
something providential in the fact that he had at last decid-
ed to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s that evening, because
his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention that
life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for
any length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had
been most to be wished for, came to the conclusion that the
sufferings through which he had passed that evening, and
the pleasures, at that time unsuspected, which were already
being brought to birth,—the exact balance between which
was too difficult to establish—were linked by a sort of con-
catenation of necessity.
But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving
instructions to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair

590 Swann’s Way