He had often thought of going. Now that he was once again at work upon his
essay on Vermeer, he wanted to return, for a few days at least, to The
Hague, to Dresden, to Brunswick. He was certain that a 'Toilet of Diana'
which had been acquired by the Mauritshuis at the Goldschmidt sale as a
Nicholas Maes was in reality a Vermeer. And he would have liked to be able
to examine the picture on the spot, so as to strengthen his conviction.
But to leave Paris while Odette was there, and even when she was not
there--for in strange places where our sensations have not been numbed by
habit, we refresh, we revive an old pain--was for him so cruel a project
that he felt himself to be capable of entertaining it incessantly in his
mind only because he knew himself to be resolute in his determination
never to put it into effect. But it would happen that, while he was
asleep, the intention to travel would reawaken in him (without his
remembering that this particular tour was impossible) and would be
realised. One night he dreamed that he was going away for a year; leaning
from the window of the train towards a young man on the platform who wept
as he bade him farewell, he was seeking to persuade this young man to come
away also.
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