his consciousness without undergoing
that refraction which turns a ray of light, at the bottom of a bowl of
water, into another sun; just as, a moment earlier, the sound of
the door-bell, swelling in the depths of his abyss of sleep into the
clangour of an alarum, had engendered the episode of the fire. Meanwhile
the scenery of his dream-stage scattered in dust, he opened his eyes,
heard for the last time the boom of a wave in the sea, grown very
distant. He touched his cheek. It was dry. And yet he could feel the
sting of the cold spray, and the taste of salt on his lips. He rose,
and dressed himself. He had made the barber come early because he had
written, the day before, to my grandfather, to say that he was going,
that afternoon, to Combray, having learned that Mme. de Cambremer--Mlle.
Legrandin that had been--was spending a few days there. The association
in his memory of her young and charming face with a place in the country
which he had not visited for so long, offered him a combined attraction
which had made him decide at last to leave Paris for a while. As the
different changes and chances that bring us into the company of certain
other people in this life do not coincide with the periods in which we
are in love with those people, but, overlapping them, may occur before
love has begun, and may be repeated after love is ended, the earliest
appearances, in our life, of a creature who is destined to afford us
pleasure later on, assume retrospectively in our eyes a certain value as
an indication, a warning, a presage. It was in this fashion that Swann
had often carried back his mind to the image of Odette, encountered in
the theatre, on that first evening when he had no thought of ever
seeing her again--and that he now recalled the party at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de Frober-ville to
Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life that it is
not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness
which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations
of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no doubt, that might
have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's. Who,
indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having gone, that evening,
somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would not have come to
him, which, later, would have appeared to have been inevitable? But what
did seem to him to have been inevitab