"She?"--he tried to
ask himself what that meant; for it is something like love, like death
(rather than like those vague conceptions of maladies), a thing which one
repeatedly calls in question, in order to make oneself probe further into
it, in the fear that the question will find no answer, that the substance
will escape our grasp--the mystery of personality. And this malady, which
was Swann's love, had so far multiplied, was so closely interwoven with
all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his
sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so
entirely one with him that it would have been impossible to wrest it away
without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his case was past
operation.
By this love Swann had been so far detached from all other interests that
when by chance he reappeared in the world of fashion, reminding himself
that his social relations, like a beautifully wrought setting (although
she would not have been able to form any very exact estimate of its
worth), might, still, add a little to his own value in Odette's eyes (as
indeed they might have done had they not been cheapened by his love
itself, which for Odette depreciated everything that it touched by seeming
to denounce such things as less precious than itself), he would feel
there, simultaneously with his distress at being in places and among
people that she did not know, the same detached sense of pleasure as he
would have derived from a novel or a painting in which were depicted the
amusements of a leisured class; just as, at home, he used to enjoy the
thought of the smooth efficiency of his household, the smartness of his
own wardrobe and of his servants' liveries, the soundness of his
investments, with the same relish as when he read in Saint-Simon, who was
one of his favourite authors, of the machinery of daily life at
Versailles, what Mme.
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