ing sensation that, nowadays,
people who have been used for half a lifetime to electric light derive
from a smoking lamp or a candle that needs to be snuffed. If he were
dining out, he would order his carriage for half-past seven; while he
changed his clothes, he would be wondering, all the time, about Odette,
and in this way was never alone, for the constant thought of Odette
gave to the moments in which he was separated from her the same peculiar
charm as to those in which she was at his side. He would get into his
carriage and drive off, but he knew that this thought had jumped in
after him and had settled down upon his knee, like a pet animal which
he might take everywhere, and would keep with him at the dinner-table,
unobserved by his fellow-guests. He would stroke and fondle it, warm
himself with it, and, as a feeling of languor swept over him, would
give way to a slight shuddering movement which contracted his throat
and nostrils--a new experience, this,--as he fastened the bunch of
columbines in his buttonhole. He had for some time been feeling neither
well nor happy, especially since Odette had brought Forcheville to the
Verdurins', and he would have liked to go away for a while to rest in
the country. But he could never summon up courage to leave Paris, even
for a day, while Odette was there. The weather was warm; it was the
finest part of the spring. And for all that he was driving through a
city of stone to immure himself in a house without grass or garden, what
was incessantly before his eyes was a park which he owned, near Combray,
where, at four in the afternoon, before coming to the asparagus-bed,
thanks to the breeze that was wafted across the fields from Meseglise,
he could enjoy the fragrant coolness of the air as well beneath an
arbour of hornbeams in the garden as by the bank of the pond, fringed
with forget-me-not and iris; and where, when he sat down to dinner,
trained and twined by the gardener's skilful hand, there ran all about
his table currant-bush and rose.

After dinner, if he had an early appointment in the Bois or at
Saint-Cloud, he would rise from table and leave the house so
abruptly--especially if it threatened to rain, and so to scatter the
'faithful' before their normal time--that on one occasion the Princesse
des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left
before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the
Bois) observed:

"Really, if Swan