an agreeable thrill, as to the sad Parisian, when he has left Venice
behind him and must return to France, a last mosquito proves that
Italy and summer are still not too remote. But, as a rule, with this
particular period of his life from which he was emerging, when he made
an effort, if not to remain in it, at least to obtain, while still he
might, an uninterrupted view of it, he discovered that already it was
too late; he would have looked back to distinguish, as it might be
a landscape that was about to disappear, that love from which he had
departed, but it is so difficult to enter into a state of complete
duality and to present to oneself the lifelike spectacle of a feeling
which one has ceased to possess, that very soon, the clouds gathering
in his brain, he could see nothing, he would abandon the attempt, would
take the glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that
he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough
later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity,
with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over
his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing
him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has
lived for so long, and which he vowed that he would not allow to slip
away from him without looking out to bid it a last farewell. Indeed,
like the same traveller, if he does not awake until he has crossed the
frontier and is again in France, when Swann happened to alight, close
at hand, upon something which proved that Forcheville had been Odette's
lover, he discovered that it caused him no pain, that love was now
utterly remote, and he regretted that he had had no warning of the
moment in which he had emerged from it for ever. And just as, before
kissing Odette for the first time, he had sought to imprint upon his
memory the face that for so long had been familiar, before it was
altered by the additional memory of their kiss, so he could have
wished--in thought at least--to have been in a position to bid farewell,
while she still existed, to that Odette who had inspired love in him and
jealousy, to that Odette who had caused him so to suffer, and whom now
he would never see again. He was mistaken. He was destined to see
her once again, a few weeks later. It was while he was asleep, in the
twilight of a dream. He was walking with Mme. Verdurin, Dr. Cottard,
a young man in a fez whom he fa