de Saint-Euverte's, at which he had introduced General de
Frober-ville to Mme. de Cambremer. So manifold are our interests in life
that it is not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a
happiness which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with
aggravations of a grief from which we are still suffering. And, no doubt,
that might have occurred to Swann elsewhere than at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's. Who, indeed, can say whether, in the event of his having
gone, that evening, somewhere else, other happinesses, other griefs would
not have come to him, which, later, would have appeared to have been
inevitable? But what did seem to him to have been inevitable was what had
indeed taken place, and he was not far short of seeing something
providential in the fact that he had at last decided to go to Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's that evening, because his mind, anxious to admire the
richness of invention that life shews, and incapable of facing a difficult
problem for any length of time, such as to discover what, actually, had
been most to be wished for, came to the conclusion that the sufferings
through which he had passed that evening, and the pleasures, at that time
unsuspected, which were already being brought to birth,--the exact balance
between which was too difficult to establish--were linked by a sort of
concatenation of necessity.
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