Bildungsromans; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Villages -- France -- Fiction
traditional and collective phantasm of the "woman who made him jealous",
in which he had arbitrarily incarnated his new love. Often, however,
Swann would charge his jealousy with the offence of making him believe
in imaginary infidelities; but then he would remember that he had given
Odette the benefit of the same argument and had in that been wrong. And
so everything that the young woman whom he loved did in those hours when
he was not with her appeared spoiled of its innocence in his eyes. But
whereas at that other time he had made a vow that if ever he ceased to
love her whom he did not then imagine to be his future wife, he would
implacably exhibit to her an indifference that would at length be
sincere, so as to avenge his pride that had so long been trampled upon
by her--of those reprisals which he might now enforce without risk to
himself (for what harm could it do him to be taken at his word and
deprived of those intimate moments with Odette that had been so
necessary to him once), of those reprisals he took no more thought; with
his love had vanished the desire to shew that he was in love no longer.
And he who, when he was suffering at the hands of Odette, would have
looked forward so keenly to letting her see one day that he had fallen
to a rival, now that he was in a position to do so took infinite
precautions lest his wife should suspect the existence of this new love.
*
* *
It was not only in those tea-parties, on account of which I had formerly
had the sorrow of seeing Gilberte leave me and go home earlier than
usual, that I was henceforth to take part, but the engagements that she
had with her mother, to go for a walk or to some afternoon party, which
by preventing her from coming to the Champs-Elysées had deprived me of
her, on those days when I loitered alone upon the lawn or stood before
the wooden horses,--to these outings M. and Mme. Swann henceforth
admitted me, I had a seat in their landau, and indeed it was me that
they asked if I would rather go to the theatre, to a dancing lesson at
the house of one of Gilberte's friends, to some social gathering given
by friends of her parents (what Odette called "a little meeting") or to
visit the tombs at Saint-Denis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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