incapable of perceiving, in the words that she used. Dazzled by the
virtuosity of the performers, the Comtesse exclaimed to Swann: "It's
astonishing! I have never seen anything to beat it..." But a scrupulous
regard for accuracy making her correct her first assertion, she added
the reservation: "anything to beat it... since the table-turning!"

From that evening, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had
once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would
not be realised now. And the days on which, by a lucky chance, she had
once more shewn herself kind and loving to him, or if she had paid him
any attention, he recorded those apparent and misleading signs of
a slight movement on her part towards him with the same tender and
sceptical solicitude, the desperate joy that people reveal who, when
they are nursing a friend in the last days of an incurable malady,
relate, as significant facts of infinite value: "Yesterday he went
through his accounts himself, and actually corrected a mistake that we
had made in adding them up; he ate an egg to-day and seemed quite to
enjoy it, if he digests it properly we shall try him with a cutlet
to-morrow,"--although they themselves know that these things are
meaningless on the eve of an inevitable death. No doubt Swann was
assured that if he had now been living at a distance from Odette he
would gradually have lost all interest in her, so that he would have
been glad to learn that she was leaving Paris for ever; he would have
had the courage to remain there; but he had not the courage to go.

He had often thought of going. Now that he was once again at work upon
his essay on Vermeer, he wanted to return, for a few days at least, to
The Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was certain that a 'Toilet of
Diana' which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt
sale as a Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have
liked to be able to examine the picture on the spot, so as to strengthen
his conviction. But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when
she was not there--for in strange places where our sensations have not
been numbed by habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain--was for him so
cruel a project that he felt himself to be capable of entertaining it
incessantly in his mind only because he knew himself to be resolute in
his determination never to put it into effect. But it would happen
that, while he was asleep, the intent