ng man burst into tears. Swann endeavoured to
console him. "After all, she is quite right," he said to the young man,
drying his eyes for him and taking off the fez to make him feel more
at ease. "I've advised her to do that, myself, a dozen times. Why be
so distressed? He was obviously the man to understand her." So Swann
reasoned with himself, for the young man whom he had failed, at
first, to identify, was himself also; like certain novelists, he had
distributed his own personality between two characters, him who was the
'first person' in the dream, and another whom he saw before him, capped
with a fez.

As for Napoleon III, it was to Forcheville that some vague association
of ideas, then a certain modification of the Baron's usual physiognomy,
and lastly the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honour across his breast,
had made Swann give that name; but actually, and in everything that the
person who appeared in his dream represented and recalled to him, it was
indeed Forcheville. For, from an incomplete and changing set of images,
Swann in his sleep drew false deductions, enjoying, at the same time,
such creative power that he was able to reproduce himself by a simple
act of division, like certain lower organisms; with the warmth that he
felt in his own palm he modelled the hollow of a strange hand which he
thought that he was clasping, and out of feelings and impressions of
which he was not yet conscious, he brought about sudden vicissitudes
which, by a chain of logical sequences, would produce, at definite
points in his dream, the person required to receive his love or to
startle him awake. In an instant night grew black about him; an alarum
rang, the inhabitants ran past him, escaping from their blazing houses;
he could hear the thunder of the surging waves, and also of his own
heart, which, with equal violence, was anxiously beating in his breast.
Suddenly the speed of these palpitations redoubled, he felt a pain, a
nausea that were inexplicable; a peasant, dreadfully burned, flung at
him as he passed: "Come and ask Charlus where Odette spent the night
with her friend. He used to go about with her, and she tells him
everything. It was they that started the fire." It was his valet, come
to awaken him, and saying:--

"Sir, it is eight o'clock, and the barber is here. I have told him to
call again in an hour."

But these words, as they dived down through the waves of sleep in which
Swann was submerged, did not reach