This worship of his hero’s for aristocracy is only an incident in this continual theme. It is in essence exactly the same as all his other deceptions. When Gilberte was the beautifully dressed child of his idol, Swann, surrounded by a halo of romance owing to her friendship with the writer Bergotte, and when she appeared to look down on his advances, there was nothing on earth he would not give, nothing he would not do, to obtain her friendship. Yet when once that friendship is attained the interest in her fades away imperceptibly till she plays no more part in his life than a memory of what was once so bitterly wanted. So it is with the _petite bande_ of young girls at Balbec while it presented a united and exclusive front to the world. So it is with the chief of that band, Albertine herself. Desirable while she has held aloof, she becomes through knowledge, through the loss of that mystery which had existed, as it always does, not in her, but only in him who longed for her, almost boring. He is on the point of leaving her, of finishing with the _liaison_ once and for all. Suddenly all is changed. He has reason to doubt her complete faithfulness to him. With the pain of this doubt love is once more awakened, and at the end of the last published volume we leave him on the point of rushing off to Paris to marry her. This, again, is the whole meaning of Swann’s marriage with the vulgar and impossible Odette de Crécy. It is the continual theme of all the pitiable deceptions of M. de Charlus. “Besides,” he says in one place, the mistresses with whom I have been most in love have never coincided with my love for them. True love it must have been, since I subordinated everything else in the world to the chance of seeing them, of keeping them to myself, and would burst into tears if, one evening, I had heard them speak. But they themselves must be regarded rather as endowed with the property of arousing that love, of raising it to its paroxysm, than as being its embodiments.... You would have said that a virtue which had nothing to do with them had been arbitrarily attached to them by Nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-galvanic power, had the effect on me of exciting my love—that is to say, of controlling all my actions and causing all my sorrows. But from this the looks or the brains or the favours shown me by these women were entirely distinct.