Little had he suspected how truly he spoke when, on their third
meeting, as she repeated: "But why don't you let me come to you oftener?"
he had told her, laughing, and in a vein of gallantry, that it was for
fear of forming a hopeless passion. Now, alas, it still happened at times
that she wrote to him from a restaurant or hotel, on paper which bore a
printed address, but printed in letters of fire that seared his heart.
"Written from the Hotel Vouillemont. What on earth can she have gone
there for? With whom? What happened there?" He remembered the gas-jets
that were being extinguished along the Boulevard des Italiens when he had
met her, when all hope was gone among the errant shades upon that night
which had seemed to him almost supernatural and which now (that night of a
period when he had not even to ask himself whether he would be annoying
her by looking for her and by finding her, so certain was he that she knew
no greater happiness than to see him and to let him take her home)
belonged indeed to a mysterious world to which one never may return again
once its doors are closed. And Swann could distinguish, standing,
motionless, before that scene of happiness in which it lived again, a
wretched figure which filled him with such pity, because he did not at
first recognise who it was, that he must lower his head, lest anyone
should observe that his eyes were filled with tears.
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