For
the moment that Swann was able to form a picture of her without revulsion,
that he could see once again the friendliness in her smile, and that the
desire to tear her away from every rival was no longer imposed by his
jealousy upon his love, that love once again became, more than anything, a
taste for the sensations which Odette's person gave him, for the pleasure
which he found in admiring, as one might a spectacle, or in questioning,
as one might a phenomenon, the birth of one of her glances, the formation
of one of her smiles, the utterance of an intonation of her voice. And
this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a
need of her, which she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could
assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as
another need which characterised this new period in Swann's life, when the
sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a
sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this
unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate
health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems
for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery:--this other need,
which, too, developed in him independently of the visible, material world,
was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it.
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