This account left me
indifferent. I was quite indifferent to all that. I loved
Gilberte enough too
much for me not to find a closer relationship with Swann desirable, even
if it did look somewhat shameful. But it was no such thing, such a
relationship seemed to me to be something extravagantly brilliant, not
through the effect of my love but from some bygone impression. Ever since
Combray I could have seen Swann surrounded by street ruffians without him
ever ceasing for me to be a man of elegance, just as Bloch could never
have appeared to me to be one even if he had entertained all the highest
society. And as for the affection which M. de Norpois told us was
displayed by Odette towards her husband, I knew that it was only the
renewal after long storms of that which she had felt for him when he had
stopped loving her. And it must be said that no longer being jealous he
now expressed his affection more considerately and better understood that
of Odette.
His friends had begun one more to receive letters from Swann in which
he asked them to put him in touch some or other person. He no longer
worried himself over Odette’s behaviour. The extreme grief that he had
undergone in days gone by seemed to have completely cauterized that part
of his brain in which he might have thought it about it and which no
longer inculcated him. He retreated from the effort of memory that it
would have taken to reignite his jealousy and he no longer put himself
through such suffering; he was like an artist who no longer produces any
work because of creative lethargy. He sometimes told himself that he
should however have given Odette some guidance, but at the same time he
felt the lassitude, the inability to think that is felt by someone who has
not eaten for several days and after a vague, fruitless desire, felt it
wiser to spare himself unnecessary fatigue in futile convolutions. Just as
his body had become worn out, as his mind had aged, it was not enough as
it had been in the past to rub his eyes and wipe his monocle, now he would
repeat two or three times: “In the end, I don’t really care” as he bowed
his head and shrugged one shoulder. Yet in the pleasure that he was going
to seek on his part, in the company of other women, something was missing.
And when he saw a light in
Odette's bedroom window from below on his return home, if he came back
early [...] And so he was content to see Odette again on his
return home.
Single page corrected proof, from Le Manuscrit Français.
Created 30.07.20