Then, though he may
not consciously have taken this into consideration, the certainty that she
was waiting for him, that she was not anywhere or with anyone else, that
he would see her before he went home, drew the sting from that anguish,
forgotten, it is true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which
he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins' before his
arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which was so agreeable that it
might even be called a state of happiness. Perhaps it was to that hour of
anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had
since assumed in his life. Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to
us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so
much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to
belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our
lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and
ourselves are ever more or less in contact. Swann could not without
anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him in the years that were
to come. Sometimes, as he looked up from his victoria on those fine and
frosty nights of early spring, and saw the dazzling moonbeams fall between
his eyes and the deserted streets, he would think of that other face,
gleaming and faintly roseate like the moon's, which had, one day, risen on
the horizon of his mind and since then had shed upon the world that
mysterious light in which he saw it bathed.
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