zen times to
deliver in person, they were quite capable of telling her that he was
not at home. It was only a servant coming in. He noticed the incessant
rumble of passing carriages, to which he had never before paid any
attention. He could hear them, one after another, a long way off, coming
nearer, passing his door without stopping, and bearing away into the
distance a message which was not for him. He waited all night, to no
purpose, for the Verdurins had returned unexpectedly, and Odette had
been in Paris since midday; it had not occurred to her to tell him; not
knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a
theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was peacefully asleep.

As a matter of fact, she had never given him a thought. And such moments
as these, in which she forgot Swann's very existence, were of more value
to Odette, did more to attach him to her, than all her infidelities. For
in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had
once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love, on
the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins' and had
hunted for her all evening. And he did not have (as I had, afterwards,
at Combray in my childhood) happy days in which to forget the sufferings
that would return with the night. For his days, Swann must pass them
without Odette; and as he told himself, now and then, to allow so pretty
a woman to go out by herself in Paris was just as rash as to leave a
case filled with jewels in the middle of the street. In this mood he
would scowl furiously at the passers-by, as though they were so many
pickpockets. But their faces--a collective and formless mass--escaped
the grasp of his imagination, and so failed to feed the flame of his
jealousy. The effort exhausted Swann's brain, until, passing his hand
over his eyes, he cried out: "Heaven help me!" as people, after lashing
themselves into an intellectual frenzy in their endeavours to master the
problem of the reality of the external world, or that of the immortality
of the soul, afford relief to their weary brains by an unreasoning
act of faith. But the thought of his absent mistress was incessantly,
indissolubly blended with all the simplest actions of Swann's daily
life--when he took his meals, opened his letters, went for a walk or
to bed--by the fact of his regret at having to perform those actions
without her; like those initials of Philibert the Fair w