een them which would put an
end to his melancholy madness; then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's
daily life would appear to him as being of but little intrinsic
interest--as he had several times, already, felt that they might be,
on the day, for instance, when he had read, through its envelope, her
letter to Forcheville. Examining his complaint with as much scientific
detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study
its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette
might or might not do would be indifferent to him. But in his morbid
state, to tell the truth, he feared death itself no more than such a
recovery, which would, in fact, amount to the death of all that he then
was.

After these quiet evenings, Swann's suspicions would be temporarily
lulled; he would bless the name of Odette, and next day, in the morning,
would order the most attractive jewels to be sent to her, because her
kindnesses to him overnight had excited either his gratitude, or the
desire to see them repeated, or a paroxysm of love for her which had
need of some such outlet.

But at other times, grief would again take hold of him; he would imagine
that Odette was Forcheville's mistress, and that, when they had both sat
watching him from the depths of the Verdurins' landau, in the Bois, on
the evening before the party at Chatou to which he had not been invited,
while he implored her in vain, with that look of despair on his face
which even his coachman had noticed, to come home with him, and then
turned away, solitary, crushed,--she must have employed, to draw
Forcheville's attention to him, while she murmured: "Do look at him,
storming!" the same glance, brilliant, malicious, sidelong, cunning, as
on the evening when Forcheville had driven Saniette from the Verdurins'.

At such times Swann detested her. "But I've been a fool, too," he would
argue. "I'm paying for other men's pleasures with my money. All the
same, she'd better take care, and not pull the string too often, for
I might very well stop giving her anything at all. At any rate, we'd
better knock off supplementary favours for the time being. To think
that, only yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth
for the season, I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly
little places the King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us. However
she didn't seem particularly keen; she hasn't said yes or no yet. Let's
hope that she'