Or else she would look
at him sulkily, and he would see once again a face worthy to figure in
Botticelli's 'Life of Moses,' he would place it there, giving to Odette's
neck the necessary inclination; and when he had finished her portrait in
distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sixtine, the idea
that she was, none the less, in the room with him still, by the piano, at
that very moment, ready to be kissed and won, the idea of her material
existence, of her being alive, would sweep over him with so violent an
intoxication that, with eyes starting from his head and jaws that parted
as though to devour her, he would fling himself upon this Botticelli
maiden and kiss and bite her cheeks. And then, as soon as he had left the
house, not without returning to kiss her once again, because he had
forgotten to take away with him, in memory, some detail of her fragrance
or of her features, while he drove home in his victoria, blessing the name
of Odette who allowed him to pay her these daily visits, which, although
they could not, he felt, bring any great happiness to her, still, by
keeping him immune from the fever of jealousy--by removing from him every
possibility of a fresh outbreak of the heart-sickness which had manifested
itself in him that evening, when he had failed to find her at the
Verdurins'--might help him to arrive, without any recurrence of those
crises, of which the first had been so distressing that it must also be
the last, at the termination of this strange series of hours in his life,
hours almost enchanted, in the same manner as these other, following
hours, in which he drove through a deserted Paris by the light of the
moon: noticing as he drove home that the satellite had now changed its
position, relatively to his own, and was almost touching the horizon;
feeling that his love, also, was obedient to these immutable laws of
nature, he asked himself whether this period, upon which he had entered,
was to last much longer, whether presently his mind's eye would cease to
behold that dear countenance, save as occupying a distant and diminished
position, and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its
charm.
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