ther again. But Swann was
incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the
perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He
decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a
few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every
male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so
he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new
people and crowded places, might now be seen fleeing savagely from human
society as if it had cruelly injured him. And how could he not have
turned misanthrope, when in every man he saw a potential lover for
Odette? Thus his jealousy did even more than the happy, passionate
desire which he had originally felt for Odette had done to alter Swann's
character, completely changing, in the eyes of the world, even the
outward signs by which that character had been intelligible.

A month after the evening on which he had intercepted and read Odette's
letter to Forcheville, Swann went to a dinner which the Verdurins were
giving in the Bois. As the party was breaking up he noticed a series of
whispered discussions between Mme. Verdurin and several of her guests,
and thought that he heard the pianist being reminded to come next day to
a party at Chatou; now he, Swann, had not been invited to any party.

The Verdurins had spoken only in whispers, and in vague terms, but the
painter, perhaps without thinking, shouted out: "There must be no lights
of any sort, and he must play the Moonlight Sonata in the dark, for us
to see by."

Mme. Verdurin, seeing that Swann was within earshot, assumed that
expression in which the two-fold desire to make the speaker be quiet and
to preserve, oneself, an appearance of guilelessness in the eyes of the
listener, is neutralised in an intense vacuity; in which the unflinching
signs of intelligent complicity are overlaid by the smiles of innocence,
an expression invariably adopted by anyone who has noticed a blunder,
the enormity of which is thereby at once revealed if not to those who
have made it, at any rate to him in whose hearing it ought not to have
been made. Odette seemed suddenly to be in despair, as though she had
decided not to struggle any longer against the crushing difficulties of
life, and Swann was anxiously counting the minutes that still separated
him from the point at which, after leavi