desire. Odette's person, indeed,
no longer held any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the
photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he
had difficulty in identifying her face, either in the flesh or on the
pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety which dwelt in his
mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, "It is she!" as
when suddenly some one shews us in a detached, externalised form one
of our own maladies, and we find in it no resemblance to what we are
suffering. "She?"--he tried to ask himself what that meant; for it
is something like love, like death (rather than like those vague
conceptions of maladies), a thing which one repeatedly calls in
question, in order to make oneself probe further into it, in the fear
that the question will find no answer, that the substance will escape
our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which was
Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with all
his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it
away without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case
was past operation.

By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests
that when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding
himself that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting
(although she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate
of its worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's
eyes (as indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his
love itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by
seeming to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would
feel there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and
among people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure
as he would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were
depicted the amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used
to enjoy the thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the
smartness of his own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the
soundness of his investments, with the same relish as when he read in
Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of
daily life at Versailles, what Mme. de Maintenon ate an