her, that custom of
their seeing each other daily, for which she had longed at a time when
to him it had seemed only a tiresome distraction, for which, since that
time, she had conceived a distaste and had definitely broken herself
of it, while it had become for him so insatiable, so dolorous a need.
Little had he suspected how truly he spoke when, on their third meeting,
as she repeated: "But why don't you let me come to you oftener?" he had
told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for fear of
forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times that
she wrote to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a
printed address, but printed in letters of fire that seared his heart.
"Written from the Hotel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone
there for? With whom? What happened there?" He remembered the gas-jets
that were being extinguished along the Boulevard des Italiens when he
had met her, when all hope was gone among the errant shades upon that
night which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which now (that
night of a period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would
be annoying her by looking for her and by finding her, so certain was he
that she knew no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take
her home) belonged indeed to a mysterious world to which one never may
return again once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish,
standing, motionless, before that scene of happiness in which it lived
again, a wretched figure which filled him with such pity, because he
did not at first recognise who it was, that he must lower his head,
lest anyone should observe that his eyes were filled with tears. It was
himself.

When he had realised this, his pity ceased; he was jealous, now, of that
other self whom she had loved, he was jealous of those men of whom he
had so often said, without much suffering: "Perhaps she's in love with
them," now that he had exchanged the vague idea of loving, in
which there is no love, for the petals of the chrysanthemum and the
'letter-heading' of the Maison d'Or; for they were full of love.
And then, his anguish becoming too keen, he passed his hand over his
forehead, let the monocle drop from his eye, and wiped its glass. And
doubtless, if he had caught sight of himself at that moment, he would
have added to the collection of the monocles which he had already
identified, this one which he removed, like an importun