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Updated: June 19, 2025
Lane was driving out the state highway, mile after mile. He calculated that in less than ten minutes Swann had taken a girl from a bustling corner of Middleville out into the open country. In pleasant weather, when the roads were good, cars like Swann's swerved off into the bypaths, into the edge of woods. In bad weather they parked along the highway, darkened their lights and pulled their blinds.
In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette.
Swann's enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavoured to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground. Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars driven each by a moustached mechanic, with a tall footman towering by his side.
A step in the hall made Margaret pause like a listening deer; a tap sounded lightly on her door; a voice awoke her at last to life and to torture. "Margaret, may I come in?" It was Swann's voice, a little softer than usual, with a subtle eagerness. "No" answered Margaret, involuntarily. "I beg your pardon. I'll wait." Swann's footsteps died away in the direction of the library.
Moreover, where Odette's affection might seem ever so little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would come to supplement it, to amalgamate with it its own mysterious essence. Watching Swann's face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic which allowed him to breathe more deeply.
"I've been spending a hour or two at Mr. Swann's," said Mr. Smith. "And 'ow is 'e?" inquired his hostess, with an appearance of amiable interest. The boarding-master shook his head. "'E's slipping 'is cable," he said, slowly. "'E's been making 'is will, and I was one o' the witnesses." Something in Mr. Smith's manner as he uttered this simple statement made his listeners anxious to hear more. Mr.
And when Mme. Verdurin's carriage had moved on, and Swann's took its place, his coachman, catching sight of his face, asked whether he was unwell, or had heard bad news. Swann sent him away; he preferred to walk, and it was on foot, through the Bois, that he came home.
These older, these autochthonous in-dwellers in his soul absorbed all Swann's strength, for a while, in that obscure task of reparation which gives one an illusory sense of repose during convalescence, or after an operation. This time it was not so much as it ordinarily was in Swann's brain that the slackening of tension due to exhaustion took effect, it was rather in his heart.
Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.
But, catching sight of Swann's face, she changed her tone, and: "You are a fiend!" she flung at him, "you enjoy tormenting me, making me tell you lies, just so that you'll leave me in peace." This second blow struck at Swann was even more excruciating than the first.
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