ing darkness.
Now and then the ghost of a woman glided up to Swann, murmured a few
words in his ear, asked him to take her home, and left him shuddering.
Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though
among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been
searching for a lost Eurydice.

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the
agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious
as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the
human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking
amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided,
that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not
necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or
even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her
should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as--in
the moment when she has failed to meet us--for the pleasure which
we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly
substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature
herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised
society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage--the
insensate, agonising desire to possess her.

Swann made Remi drive him to such restaurants as were still open; it was
the sole hypothesis, now, of that happiness which he had contemplated
so calmly; he no longer concealed his agitation, the price he set upon
their meeting, and promised, in case of success, to reward his coachman,
as though, by inspiring in him a will to triumph which would reinforce
his own, he could bring it to pass, by a miracle, that Odette--assuming
that she had long since gone home to bed,--might yet be found seated in
some restaurant on the boulevards. He pursued the quest as far as the
Maison Doree, burst twice into Tortoni's and, still without catching
sight of her, was emerging from the Cafe Anglais, striding with haggard
gaze towards his carriage, which was waiting for him at the corner of
the Boulevard des Italiens, when he collided with a person coming in the
opposite direction; it was Odette; she explained, later, that there had
been no room at Prevost's, that she had gone, instead, to sup at the
Maison Doree, and had been sitting there in an alcove where he must have
overlooked her, and that she was now looking for