evented a final rupture had
not done a disservice to his career, whether the outcome to be
desired was not that as to which he rejoiced that it happened only in
dreams--his own departure; and he said to himself that people did not
know when they were unhappy, that they were never so happy as they
supposed.

Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she
who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares,
from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he
marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which
was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that
environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret
desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the
soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its
career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. And Swann felt a very
cordial sympathy with that Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he
admired, who, on finding that he had fallen madly in love with one of
his wives, stabbed her, in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly
relates, to recover his spiritual freedom. Then he would be ashamed
of thinking thus only of himself, and his own sufferings would seem to
deserve no pity now that he himself was disposing so cheaply of Odette's
very life.

Since he was unable to separate himself from her without a subsequent
return, if at least he had seen her continuously and without separations
his grief would ultimately have been assuaged, and his love would,
perhaps, have died. And from the moment when she did not wish to leave
Paris for ever he had hoped that she would never go. As he knew that her
one prolonged absence, every year, was in August and September, he had
abundant opportunity, several months in advance, to dissociate from it
the grim picture of her absence throughout Eternity which was lodged in
him by anticipation, and which, consisting of days closely akin to the
days through which he was then passing, floated in a cold transparency
in his mind, which it saddened and depressed, though without causing him
any intolerable pain. But that conception of the future, that flowing
stream, colourless and unconfined, a single word from Odette sufficed
to penetrate through all Swann's defences, and like a block of ice
immobilised it, congealed its fluidity, made it freeze altogether; and
Swann felt himself suddenly