And, though he seems to have failed to make head or tail of the Sonata at that first hearing, that little phrase stuck in his memory. It so haunted him that, when a year later he was sitting beside Odette on Mme. Verdurin’s Beauvais sofa (which his hostess vowed wasn’t to be matched _anywhere_), and heard a high note held on through two whole bars, he foresaw the approach of his beloved phrase and promptly associated it with the woman at his side. In this way it became the symbol of his passion, developed into a Wagnerian _leit-motif_ of his liaison with Odette, until, when they had inevitably quarrelled, it became for him an exquisite anguish to hear. An anguish which the unhappy man had to dissemble from the ironical scrutiny of all those monocles at Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party, when “the violin had risen to a series of high notes, on which it rested as though expecting something, an expectancy which it prolonged without ceasing to hold on to the notes, in the exaltation with which it already saw the expected object approaching, and with a desperate effort ... to keep the way open a moment longer, so that the stranger might enter in, as one holds a door open that would otherwise automatically close. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think, ‘It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s Sonata. I mustn’t listen!’ all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible ... had risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness.”