in her house. If Forcheville and she scored a
triumph by being down there together in spite of him, it was he who had
engineered that triumph by striving in vain to prevent her from going
there, whereas if he had approved of her plan, which for that matter was
quite defensible, she would have had the appearance of being there by
his counsel, she would have felt herself sent there, housed there by
him, and for the pleasure which she derived from entertaining those
people who had so often entertained her, it was to him that she would
have had to acknowledge her indebtedness.

And if--instead of letting her go off thus, at cross-purposes with him,
without having seen him again--he were to send her this money, if he
were to encourage her to take this journey, and to go out of his way to
make it comfortable and pleasant for her, she would come running to him,
happy, grateful, and he would have the joy--the sight of her face--which
he had not known for nearly a week, a joy which none other could
replace. For the moment that Swann was able to form a picture of her
without revulsion, that he could see once again the friendliness in
her smile, and that the desire to tear her away from every rival was
no longer imposed by his jealousy upon his love, that love once again
became, more than anything, a taste for the sensations which Odette's
person gave him, for the pleasure which he found in admiring, as one
might a spectacle, or in questioning, as one might a phenomenon, the
birth of one of her glances, the formation of one of her smiles, the
utterance of an intonation of her voice. And this pleasure, different
from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which
she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as
disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which
characterised this new period in Swann's life, when the sereness,
the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of
spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this
unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate
health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and
seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery:--this
other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible,
material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.

And so, by the chemical process of his malady, after he had created
jealo