Free In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

been
admitted into society, if only by tradition, and on the strength of so
many precedents, and so as not to have two conflicting standards.)
Perhaps, on the other hand, the artistic, if not the perverse side of
Swann's nature would in any event have derived a certain amount of
pleasure from coupling with himself, in one of those crossings of
species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, a creature
of a different race, archduchess or prostitute, from contracting a
royal alliance or from marrying beneath him. There had been but one
person in all the world whose opinion he took into consideration
whenever he thought of his possible marriage with Odette; that was,
and from no snobbish motive, the Duchesse de Guermantes. With whom
Odette, on the contrary, was but little concerned, thinking only of
those people whose position was immediately above her own, rather than
in so vague an empyrean. But when Swann in his daydreams saw Odette as
already his wife he invariably formed a picture of the moment in which
he would take her—her, and above all her daughter—to call upon the
Princesse des Laumes (who was shortly, on the death of her
father–in–law, to become Duchesse de Guermantes). He had no desire to
introduce them anywhere else, but his heart would soften as he
invented—uttering their actual words to himself—all the things that
the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the
affection that she would shew for Gilberte, spoiling her, making him
proud of his child. He enacted to himself the scene of this
introduction with the same precision in each of its imaginary details
that people shew when they consider how they would spend, supposing
they were to win it, a lottery prize the amount of which they have
arbitrarily determined. In so far as a mental picture which
accompanies one of our resolutions may be said to be its motive, so it
might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to present
her and Gilberte, without anyone's else being present, without, if
need be, anyone's else ever coming to know of it, to the Duchesse de
Guermantes. We shall see how this sole social ambition that he had
entertained for his wife and daughter was precisely that one the
realisation of which proved to be forbidden him by a veto so absolute
that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess would never possibly
come to know them. We shall see also that, on the contrary, the
Duchesse de Guermantes did associate with Odette and Gilberte after
the death of Swann. And doubtless he would have been wiser—seeing
that he could attach so much importance to so small a matter—not to
have formed too dark a picture of tie future, in this connexion, but
to have consoled himself with the hope that the meeting of the ladies
might indeed take place when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The
laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about
every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one had
believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is
rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to
accelerate only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to
fruition only when we have ceased to desire it—have ceased, possibly,
to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, had
there not been already, in his life, as it were a prefiguration of
what was to happen after his death, a posthumous happiness in this
marriage with this Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she
had not been pleasing to him at first sight—whom he had married when
he no longer loved her, when the creature that, in Swann, had so
longed to live, had so despaired of living all its life in company
with Odette, when that creature was extinct?
    I began next to speak of the Comte de Paris, to ask whether he was not
one of Swann's friends, for I was afraid lest the conversation should
drift away from him. "Why, yes!" replied M. de Norpois,