Free In Search of Lost Time, Volume II by Marcel Proust Page A

Swann’s nature would in any event have derived a certain pleasure from coupling himself, in one of those crossings of species such as Mendelians practise and mythology records, with a creature of a different race, archduchess or prostitute—from contracting a royal alliance or 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; this 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 day-dreams saw Odette as already his wife he invariably pictured to himself the moment when he would take her—her, and above all his 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 imagined—articulating to himself their actual words—all the things that the Duchess would say of him to Odette, and Odette to the Duchess, the affection that she would show 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 show 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 motivate it, so it might be said that if Swann married Odette it was in order to introduce her, together with Gilberte, without anyone else being present, without, if need be, anyone 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 the one whose realisation proved to be forbidden him, by a veto so absolute that Swann died in the belief that the Duchess could never come to know them. We shall see too that, on the contrary, the Duchesse de Guermantes did strike up a friendship with Odette and Gilberte after Swann’s death. And doubtless he would have been wiser—in so far as he could attach such importance to so small a matter—not to have formed too dark a picture of the future in this connexion, but to have consoled himself with the hope that the desired meeting 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 least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live. Was not Swann conscious of this from his own experience, and was there not already in his lifetime—as it were a prefiguration of what was to happen after his death—a posthumous happiness in this marriage with Odette whom he had passionately loved—even if she had not attracted him at first sight—whom he had married when he no longer loved her, when the person who, in Swann, had so longed to live and so despaired of living all his life with Odette, when that person was dead?
    I began to talk about 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, turning towards me and fixing upon my modest person the azure gaze in which there floated, as in their vital element, his immense capacity for work and his power of assimilation. “And upon my word,” he added, once more addressing my father, “I do not think that I shall be over-stepping