This
simple outline reduced Swann to utter confusion by enabling him suddenly
to perceive that Odette had an existence which was not wholly subordinated
to his own; he burned to know whom she had been seeking to fascinate by
this costume in which he had never seen her; he registered a vow to insist
upon her telling him where she had been going at that intercepted moment,
as though, in all the colourless life--a life almost nonexistent, since
she was then invisible to him--of his mistress, there had been but a
single incident apart from all those smiles directed towards himself;
namely, her walking abroad beneath a Rembrandt hat, with a bunch of
violets in her bosom.
Except when he asked her for Vinteuil's little phrase instead of the
_Valse des Roses_, Swann made no effort to induce her to play the things
that he himself preferred, nor, in literature any more than in music, to
correct the manifold errors of her taste. He fully realised that she was
not intelligent. When she said how much she would like him to tell her
about the great poets, she had imagined that she would suddenly get to
know whole pages of romantic and heroic verse, in the style of the Vicomte
de Borelli, only even more moving.
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