ve pulled forward the same armchair for
Forcheville, would have poured out for him, not any unknown brew, but
precisely that orangeade which she was now offering to them both; that
the world inhabited by Odette was not that other world, fearful and
supernatural, in which he spent his time in placing her--and which
existed, perhaps, only in his imagination, but the real universe,
exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which
he might sit down, presently, and write, and this drink which he was
being permitted, now, to taste; all the objects which he contemplated
with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing
his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves
were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable
realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took
shape and grew solid before-his eyes, and at the same time they soothed
his troubled heart. Ah! had fate but allowed him to share a single
dwelling with Odette, so that in her house he should be in his own; if,
when asking his servant what there would be for luncheon, it had been
Odette's bill of fare that he had learned from the reply; if, when
Odette wished to go for a walk, in the morning, along the Avenue du
Bois-de-Boulogne, his duty as a good husband had obliged him, though he
had no desire to go out, to accompany her, carrying her cloak when she
was too warm; and in the evening, after dinner, if she wished to stay at
home, and not to dress, if he had been forced to stay beside her, to
do what she asked; then how completely would all the trivial details
of Swann's life, which seemed to him now so gloomy, simply because they
would, at the same time, have formed part of the life of Odette, have
taken on--like that lamp, that orangeade, that armchair, which had
absorbed so much of his dreams, which materialised so much of his
longing,--a sort of superabundant sweetness and a mysterious solidity.

And yet he was inclined to suspect that the state for which he so much
longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have created an atmosphere
favourable to his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature
always absent, regretted, imagined; when the feeling that he had for her
was no longer the same mysterious disturbance that was wrought in him by
the phrase from the sonata, but constant affection and gratitude, when
those normal relations were established betw