le was what had indeed taken place,
and he was not far short of seeing something providential in the fact
that he had at last decided to go to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's that
evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the richness of invention
that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult problem for any
length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had been most to be
wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings through which he
had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time unsuspected,
which were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance between
which was too difficult to establish--were linked by a sort of
concatenation of necessity.

But while, an hour after his awakening, he was giving instructions
to the barber, so that his stiffly brushed hair should not become
disarranged on the journey, he thought once again of his dream; he
saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette's pallid
complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all
the things which--in the course of those successive bursts of affection
which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the
first impression that he had formed of her--he had ceased to observe
after the first few days of their intimacy, days to which, doubtless,
while he slept, his memory had returned to seek the exact sensation of
those things. And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared
in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time,
the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: "To think
that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that
the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did
not please me, who was not in my style!"

PLACE-NAMES: THE NAME

Among the rooms which used most commonly to take shape in my mind during
my long nights of sleeplessness, there was none that differed more
utterly from the rooms at Combray, thickly powdered with the motes of an
atmosphere granular, pollenous, edible and instinct with piety, than
my room in the Grand Hotel de la Plage, at Balbec, the walls of which,
washed with ripolin, contained, like the polished sides of a basin in
which the water glows with a blue, lurking fire, a finer air, pure,
azure-tinted, saline. The Bavarian upholsterer who had been entrusted
with the furnishing of this hotel had varied his scheme of decoration
in different r