For Swann was finding in things once more, since he had fallen in
love, the charm that he had found when, in his adolescence, he had fancied
himself an artist; with this difference, that what charm lay in them now
was conferred by Odette alone. He could feel reawakening in himself the
inspirations of his boyhood, which had been dissipated among the
frivolities of his later life, but they all bore, now, the reflection, the
stamp of a particular being; and during the long hours which he now found
a subtle pleasure in spending at home, alone with his convalescent spirit,
he became gradually himself again, but himself in thraldom to another.
He went to her only in the evenings, and knew nothing of how she spent her
time during the day, any more than he knew of her past; so little, indeed,
that he had not even the tiny, initial clue which, by allowing us to
imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire foreknowledge. And so he
never asked himself what she might be doing, or what her life had been.
Only he smiled sometimes at the thought of how, some years earlier, when
he still did not know her, some one had spoken to him of a woman who, if
he remembered rightly, must certainly have been Odette, as of a 'tart,' a
'kept' woman, one of those women to whom he still attributed (having lived
but little in their company) the entire set of characteristics,
fundamentally perverse, with which they had been, for many years, endowed
by the imagination of certain novelists.
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