But at other times, grief would again take hold of him; he would imagine
that Odette was Forcheville's mistress, and that, when they had both sat
watching him from the depths of the Verdurins' landau, in the Bois, on the
evening before the party at Chatou to which he had not been invited, while
he implored her in vain, with that look of despair on his face which even
his coachman had noticed, to come home with him, and then turned away,
solitary, crushed,--she must have employed, to draw Forcheville's
attention to him, while she murmured: "Do look at him, storming!" the same
glance, brilliant, malicious, sidelong, cunning, as on the evening when
Forcheville had driven Saniette from the Verdurins'.
At such times Swann detested her. "But I've been a fool, too," he would
argue. "I'm paying for other men's pleasures with my money. All the same,
she'd better take care, and not pull the string too often, for I might
very well stop giving her anything at all. At any rate, we'd better knock
off supplementary favours for the time being. To think that, only
yesterday, when she said she would like to go to Bayreuth for the season,
I was such an ass as to offer to take one of those jolly little places the
King of Bavaria has there, for the two of us.
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