ate, worrying
thought, from his head, while from its misty surface, with his
handkerchief, he sought to obliterate his cares.

There are in the music of the violin--if one does not see the instrument
itself, and so cannot relate what one hears to its form, which modifies
the fullness of the sound--accents which are so closely akin to those
of certain contralto voices, that one has the illusion that a singer has
taken her place amid the orchestra. One raises one's eyes; one sees only
the wooden case, magical as a Chinese box; but, at moments, one is
still tricked by the deceiving appeal of the Siren; at times, too, one
believes that one is listening to a captive spirit, struggling in the
darkness of its masterful box, a box quivering with enchantment, like a
devil immersed in a stoup of holy water; sometimes, again, it is in the
air, at large, like a pure and supernatural creature that reveals to the
ear, as it passes, its invisible message.

As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little
phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would
consent to appear, as proceeding to utter the incantations necessary
to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its
apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had
belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something
like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness
with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it
was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so
as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to
speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And
as she passed him, light, soothing, as softly murmured as the perfume
of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which
he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made
involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him,
the harmonious, fleeting form.

He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she, who
addressed herself to him, spoke to him in a whisper of Odette. For he
had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were not
known to the little phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their
joys? True that, as often, it had warned him of their frailty. And
indeed, whereas, in that distant time, he had divined an element of
suffering in its smile, i