st
eminent pair in France, declared that she was an angel; all the more
that they preferred to appear, in marrying her to their son, to have
yielded to the attraction rather of her natural charm than of her
considerable fortune.

"It's easy to see that you're a musician heart and soul, Madame," said
the General, alluding to the incident of the candle.

Meanwhile the concert had begun again, and Swann saw that he could not
now go before the end of the new number. He suffered greatly from being
shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded
him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable,
had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than
smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of
insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective
state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing
external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which
even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to
prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in
which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was
entirely absent.

But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore
him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart. What
had happened was that 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 continue until its arrival, to welcome it before
itself expired, to keep the way open for a moment longer, with all its
remaining strength, 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 in the depths of his being,
deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they
supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken
wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his
present desolation, the forgotten strains of h